I don’t think Edward Snowden has revealed anything startlingly new by saying that our embassy in Washington is a target of the US National Security Agency’s sweeping intelligence collection programme, along with its other friends and even allies. It is like this: if you drive by the various foreign embassies that are in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi’s diplomatic enclave, you will be struck by the skyline, bristling with antennaes of various sizes and shapes, all of which have been okayed by our foreign ministry as a legitimate means of communication. Between the embassies and their parent countries. It is conventional intelligence logic that everything that goes up into the air or cyberspace from the embassies, or for that matter any other place that can be so covered, is fair game. If it is out there, it is up for grabs.
Sure, we may not feel the need to snoop or listen in on the Finnish mission in Delhi, for example, because our government does not wake up every morning with a question of strategic import like: What are we going to do about Finland? But what about other legitimate intelligence targets? It would be difficult to imagine that we do not snoop on the Pakistani mission, the Chinese, the Sri Lankan mission, or those of other countries in our neighbourhood where we do a targeted surveillance whether it is e-mail, faxes or phones. Soon after Kargil, our external intelligence outfit, the RAW, which routinely records and listens to thousands of conversations, zeroed in on Pervez Musharraf, in a Beijing hotel (room no. 83315) talking to General Aziz, his chief of staff, on how to finesse deniability of the intrusions that the Pakistan army had undertaken. It was only when the transcripts were made public a day before then Pakistan foreign minister Sartaj Aziz was to visit India, that our eavesdropping capabilities came out of the closet. True, intelligence collection is a dirty business, done through foul means, but without it we’d be babes in the woods.
Is it a repugnant idea that we voyeuristically watch even our friends? That India and the US are “natural allies” goes down well during the big photo-ops but does not go, really, too far beyond being a broad-brush feel-good near-empty sound bite. In this dirty business there is no love lost, no quarter given. Let us not forget that the very same natural ally US in 2004 facilitated the escape of American mole Major Rabinder Singh from RAW from where he had for years passed on our secrets to the US via Internet. The US now shelters him. I am sure that there are many other Rabinders. Did it matter that George Bush was then president and Manmohan Singh called him a “great friend” who helped end India’s nuclear isolation?
It is interests that are permanent, not friendships. Every country uses all possible means to enhance its strategic agenda. Israel routinely spies on its closest ally, the US. It is the way of the world. It should come as no surprise that Japan, Turkey, European Union and others are surveilled by their friend and partner, the US. Just as it should not surprise us if EU countries are in turn spying on the US.
Which is why our esteemed foreign minister Salman Khurshid mucked it up by sounding as though he were a US State Department spokesman when he said what US is doing is not actually snooping. If it is not snooping, what is it?
sudarshan@newindianexpress.com