Indira Gandhi’s foreign hand was KGB. The two worked successfully against CIA influence in India.
‘If anything, The Mitrokhin Archive II tells us this: “The KGB was more successful than the CIA partly because of its skill in exploiting the corruption which became endemic under Indira Gandhi’s regime.”
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_16090516,0008.htm
What the KGB files have to say about its activities in India during the hoary Cold War years looks only slightly more sinister than Russian Matryoshka dolls — or for that matter the mink coat that Kruschev gifted Indira Gandhi in 1955 to “cultivate” her so as to influence her father. With the publication of the second part of the material culled from the files of former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin — first made available for a public gaze in 1999 — one can now safely guess who the foreign hand behind Mrs Gandhi’s ‘foreign hand’ was: the KGB.
In two chapters of The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB And The World, the authors, Mitrokhin and intelligence scholar Christopher Andrew, unveil not so much the Soviet Union’s success as the puppet-master of India and the Congress Party between the Fifties and Eighties, but of the secret service’s role in influencing Mrs Gandhi growing belief that became a full-blown paranoia about the CIA being behind everything going awry in the country and posing a threat to her very life.
The KGB’s activities in India are seen to be pretty much restricted in the field of subsidising election campaigns and forging documents (to play up the ‘involvement’ of the CIA in matters ranging from fomenting unrest in Assam and the Northeast to encouraging Sikh separatism). The only name that crops up as being a direct recepient of KGB money is that of the Congress principal fundraiser, Lalit Narayan Mishra, whose death the KGB successfully convinced Mrs Gandhi to have been a CIA hit-job.
What the archives unveil is a lot of KGB bragging. “We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government — in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the Defence and Foreign Ministries and the Police,” the former Soviet head of counter-intelligence Oleg Kalugin is quoted as saying.
There are colourful nuggets about how Indira Gandhi, on her first trip to the Soviet Union in 1953, was kept “under continuous surveillance” and surrounded by “handsome, attentive male admirers”. But no real evidence of Indian leaders being in KGB pockets.
The book does confirm Soviet money subsidising many election campaigns (nine — unnamed — Congress candidates in the January 1977 polls were supposedly KGB agents).
In 1975, 10.6 million rubles were said to have been spent to firm up Mrs Gandhi’s support and to undermine her opponents.
The book also mentions Leonid Shebarshin, who served in the Indian ‘residency’ in the mid-Seventies, claiming credit for using “agents of influence” to persuade Mrs Gandhi to declare Emergency. This, the authors believe, like most of the other claims, are greatly exaggerated.
Less fanciful are the claims of the KGB’s success in penetrating the Indian media. According to KGB files, by 1973, ten Indian newspapers were on its payroll (not identified by the authors for legal reasons) “as well as a press agency under its control”.
While most of them were standard America-bashing, CIA-is-everywhere articles, there were some more fanciful ones — like the one that first appeared in the Patriot in 1984 and picked up by the rest of the world about the Aids virus having been “manufactured” during genetic engineering experiments in a military camp in Maryland.
If anything, The Mitrokhin Archive II tells us this: “The KGB was more successful than the CIA partly because of its skill in exploiting the corruption which became endemic under Indira Gandhi’s regime.”
Clearly something that we need not worry about any more considering that the days of the Cold War — if not of corruption — are over.