I don’t turn on the television to watch too many of the exclusive newsbreaks. I find some of them bordering on gibberish or worse. But I did watch the disclosures on the Purulia arms drop. It was fascinating, the way villains were being projected as being anything but villainous. Here was this Kim Davy guy, whose real name I doubt even Peter Bleach knew when the arms drop was made. When the investigation was done it turned out that the name Kim Davy came off a tombstone in New Zealand of a two- year-old boy who had died in 1962, a year after the fake Kim Davy was born. Nobody had a clue who Kim Davy really was till much later. Now he has surfaced ahead of his extradition to make claims that are patently laughable and a television channel very seriously debates on it and gives him great play and airtime.
Many years ago when the clemency for the Latvian crew of the AN-26 aircraft that dropped the arms over Purulia on December 15-16, 1995, came up, I was assigned to do a story to explain Purulia arms drop. As part of the legwork I had to talk to people who were intimately familiar with the way the incident occurred. I found the narrative better plotted and slightly more hilarious than the Dave Barry novel that I am currently reading ( Big Trouble ), something like Borat meets Keystone Cops and Inspector Cleausau in a movie written by Connan O’Brien.
The RAW had disseminated information that an AN-26 would land in an unused airfield in the Dhanbad area and a consignment of arms would be unloaded. The co-ordinates went to the then IB director (DIB) D C Pathak who asked his deputy in Patna to follow up. The airfield was narrowed down to two or three unused fields and an alert was sounded and IB joint director P Guha was asked to monitor the case.
On December 17, the IB was informed of the Purulia airdrop where villagers were surprised by arms that fell from the night sky. That afternoon RAW passed to IB an input saying that an AN-26 had been modified in Karachi for airdrops, an idea, which the then RAW chief apparently found bizarre and very improbable.
Guha found that the plane had been at Varanasi on Decmber 16 night and had been in touch with Calcutta en route to Rangoon. An alert was sent out, but very strangely confined to North India.
On December 22, the air intelligence told DIB that an aircraft with the same numbering had landed in Madras. By the time IB contacted immigration in Madras the plane had taken off for Bombay and had sought permission to refuel. Immigration had managed to take down the names of the crew. DIB called Bombay and ordered the aircraft to be detained. The aircraft landed at Sahar and was made to taxi to a designated area at Santa Cruz where a fuel tanker promptly trundled up and began to refuel the aircraft. Then the Airports Authority folks came up and demanded payment for landing charges and the rest. A charming gentleman emerged from the aircraft with a briefcase and said he would pay the money at the terminal, which was quite a distance away. He was given a lift on the Airports Authority jeep. As this was underway the immigration arrived and found concealed in a cavity of the plane firearms as well as various packing cases with various ordnance factory markings.
By this time Madras had established contact with Bombay and asked for a situation report. Bombay said “six” had been detained. Madras asked “what happened to the seventh?” The only remaining trace of the seventh was a briefcase with a New Zealand passport made out in the name of Kim Palgrave Davy, some documents and maps with Ananda Marg locations.
CBI director Vijaya Rama Rao accepted responsibility to investigate the case. The IB’s scandalously consistent knack of letting the suspect get away both in Madras and Bombay came in for some scrutiny as did the co-ordination from Delhi. Kim Davy managed to cross the border subsequently into Nepal and the immigration authorities informed Delhi after the event. I was told the CBI prepared a document that blamed the then IB director who was subsequently shifted to the Joint Intelligence Committee, an established dumping ground. Much of the 77 wooden cases of arms purchased and loaded at Burgas, Bulgaria, on December 10, 1995, have not been found to this day. The cases were marked “technical equipment” and “central ordnance depot, Rajendrapur Cantonment, Bangladesh”.
The Latvian crew spent many desultory years in prison and was released when the Russians put pressure on New Delhi. A then senior diplomat posted in Moscow confirmed as much to this reporter. The Latvians had been hired for $1000 a month to work out of Dhaka — so were there more drops planned? The Hong Kong-based “company” that was set up to purchase the aircraft as well as the arms referred to one Altaf Hussain Chaudhury, a former Bangladeshi air chief. There was also evidence of some involvement of the Bangladeshi intelligence agency DGFI. So who were the intended end-users?
In Karachi, the Shaheen International, believed to be linked to the ISI, handled the aircraft. The pallets that were made to enable the drop were made of plywood. Investigators believed that over the actual drop zone some of the rollers snagged, and subsequently the drop was made after the aircraft crossed the co-ordinates fed into the Global Positioning System. The CBI thought that the arms were meant for the shadowy Ananda Marg cult. Who was “Kim Davy” working for? How strong is the Ananda Marg angle? What would they do with sophisticated anti-tank weapons? These questions might never be answered. Certainly, it appears that the weapons that disappeared into thin air have not been used so far. But there is no denying that the so called Kim Davy, in collaboration with Peter Bleach, dumped hundreds of lethal weapons in West Bengal. Should the fog of kangaroo court type television debate cloud that fact?
(V Sudarshan is executive editor, The New Indian Express and is based in Chennai. E-mail: sudarshan@newindianexpress.com)