By its very nature, the dealings in the corridors of power between government functionaries, big businesses and middlemen, are Byzantine. In ’80s India, Coomar Narain, a man who worked for the Maneklal group, a Mumbai-based trading company, was identified as the face of an espionage scandal—it was the first time an Indian spy was placed before the public, on colour television.
Coomar had built a network of stenographers and clerks who worked at the PMO, people traditionally thought to be without access, and passed information on India’s defence purchases, its nuclear energy programme and military strategies to foreign governments.
In his book A Singular Spy: The Untold Story of Coomar Narain (Bloomsbury), Kallol Bhattacherjee, says Coomar’s motivation was non-ideological. Bhattacherjee, a journalist focused on foreign affairs for two decades, identifies this to be the tipping point that started “surveillance governance in post-1947 India; something that would become more creative as government agencies perfected techniques” for tracking its own officials and citizens.
Excerpts from a conversation:
Coomar Narain spied and got documents out of which PMOs?
It appears that he was active in the business of information exchange since the late Nehru years and that of Lal Bahadur Shastri. Indeed, it was in the 1960s that his employer began to take giant strides in collaboration with major foreign tech companies from Poland, Germany, France and so on. The Rajiv Gandhi era ended his career as it was then that an internal security crackdown took place after the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
According to you, is Coomar a corporate lobbyist or a spy?
For me, he was a human being who was a corporate lobbyist, who nurtured insecure government officials who looked up to him as a father figure while he sold information to foreign powers on the side. He was also a troubled husband whose wife had a complicated past, a step father to a crime-prone teenager and ultimately a man dealing with his own delusions and paranoia.
Who gave you the most important leads for the book?
The biggest challenge was that Coomar was never interviewed by anyone in the media and, therefore, there was very little material available about him. To reconstruct his character, I found great help from Rajendra Sethia, who was the prime accused in one of the biggest banking frauds at that time and was imprisoned with Coomar in Tihar jail. Delhi Police officials who dealt with the case shared details, including the long list of properties that the Narains had purchased since the 1950s.
These details gave a hint of who all they came in contact with and their social universe. However, I would say that the biggest breakthrough in this direction came when I started paying more attention to the corporate advertisements in the newspapers of that time, and it was in the newspaper advertisements and in the ‘announcement’ sections of the leading dailies that the entire history of the Maneklal group, Coomar’s employers, was recorded, going all the way back to the early 1940s.
The find of the book is the aggressive pursuit of France to replace the Soviet Union in defence hardware. France and India still have a close defence sector partnership. In a small way, did Coomar Narain and his network pave the way for that?
The Coomar Narain spy scandal was a major domestic drama and often got greater newspaper space in comparison to other major developments such as the Tamil Nadu law and order situation or Punjab in the ’80s. Such scandals are minor hiccups in the larger strategic games; the India-France relation recovered quickly.
But as we now know, thanks to the work of certain French journalists, the French plans to take on the Soviet Union dated back to the tenure of Alexandre De Marenches, the legendary spy chief of SDECE, the French intelligence agency, who was a friend of the first chief of R&AW Rameshwar Nath Kao. India-France defence cooperation progressed, partly because the French political-bureaucratic elite were determined to sell their weapons to India and also because of the fact that the Soviet Union declined and disintegrated five years after the Coomar Narain scandal erupted. So, the dynamics of India-France defence cooperation was also helped by historic developments.