How Morarji Desai revealed details of RAW network to Zia-ul-Haq

sob

Mod
Joined
May 4, 2009
Messages
6,425
Likes
3,805
Country flag
This revelations that Morarji Desai as the PM of India leaked details of RAW network in Pakistan to then Dictator Zia ul Haq, is shocking to say the least. That this was done as a part of vendetta against the former PM Indira Gandhi who Desai believed had used RAW during emergency. Not only this he cut down the funding of RAW drastically.

http://www.dailyo.in/politics/morar...-raw-kahuta-nuclear-warfare/story/1/3802.html

Can you imagine an Indian prime minister sitting in South Block calling the Pakistan president and sharing with him India’s intelligence network in Pakistan? It happened in 1978 and the chief actor in that episode was the then prime minister Morarji Desai.

Burning with hatred for the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), skilfully floated by his predecessor Indira Gandhi on the lines of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to keep an eye on foreign countries, organise counter security operations and secure Indian interests, and under the mistaken notion that she had used the RAW along with Central Intelligence Bureau against the opposition during the Emergency, Desai brought down the RAW budget by 30 per cent and caused its chief, the great RN Kao, who helped to found the RAW and earned praise from even world leaders for his excellent investigative skills, to go on leave. Next, he virtually shunted out Kao’s successor K Sankaran Nair who was replaced by NF Suntook.

But what Desai did after this was simply shocking. In a telephonic conversation, he revealed details of the RAW network in Pakistan to Zia-ul-Haq, the neighbouring country's then martial law administrator, and told him that the Indian government also knew about its secret nuclear bomb-making facility at Kahuta. Experts are divided over how Desai did it. RAW expert B Raman, who died last year, believed that Desai inadvertently gave in to Zia’s diplomatic kowtowing that the Pakistani leader thought necessary, not merely because former Pakistan prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was still in jail and Zia wanted world support and that he used to call Desai often and take instructions from him on Desai’s famous urine therapy ostensibly for improving his health, but actually to keep Desai in good humour. The other person Zia used to keep in good humour as part of his dilomatic strategy was Shatrughan Sinha. Zia’s daughter still keeps in touch with him.

The other view is that Desai, as a firm Gandhian, believed that truthfulness with neighbours was a must in keeping with the Gandhian philosophy. In any case, the results were disastrous as the fox-like Zia uprooted the entire RAW network in Pakistan soon after Desai’s revelation, got several RAW men killed and assets obliterated including the ones connected with Kahuta. This happened just before a mole in Kahuta had agreed to give the blueprint of the Kahuta nuclear plan to a RAW agent.

Surprisingly in this great Indian blunder, the nationalist members of the former Bharatiya Jana Sangh were also unwitting partners as Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the foreign minister in the Janata Party government at that time and Lal Krishna Advani the information and broadcasting minister. They could have stopped Desai from hitting at the RAW as soon as he took over. The worse part in that murky episode is that Desai showed magnanimity to a man like Zia, an orthodox Deobandi Muslim who laid the foundation of the later day Deobandi terror organisations like the Taliban, using the Russian invasion of Afghanistan as a platform, and who floated Operation Topaz to take revenge on India for its 1971 Bangladesh victory, by getting the ISI and Wahhabi groups to destabilise Jammu and Kashmir and later organise low intensity terror attacks to keep India bleeding from inside.

This sad Indian story began just before Indira Gandhi lost the 1977 polls to the Janata Party, when a RAW agent was given the task of finding out if Kahuta was the place where Pakistan's nuclear bomb was being developed, as reports suggested. The skilful agent sent a contact to a hair-cutting saloon next to the Kahuta facility. He picked up some hair samples from the place which the Kahuta scientists used to frequent. The scientific testing of the samples revealed the presence of high radiation and bomb-grade uranium, thus confirming the RAW’s worst fears. Next, the agent found a mole in the Kahuta plant who was willing to obtain a blueprint of the Pakistani nuclear project in exchange for a bribe.

The RAW rule book, since the time Indira Gandhi floated it, stipulated that any underhand money to be given by the RAW in a foreign currency was to have the consent of the prime minister as it involved foreign exchange regulations.

Accordingly, when Suntook went to Desai for permission, he refused it on the plea that it was wrong to meddle in the internal affairs of a neighbouring state. Reportedly, Suntook, a Gujarati speaking Parsi, tried to explain to Desai the importance of the operation purely in terms of national security. But Desai remained unmoved.

Around the same time and on the same plea, Desai also foiled the plan of Israel to destroy the Kahuta facility in an air attack when in a secret meeting with the one-eyed Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan in Mumbai, he refused to provide refuelling facility to the attacking plane in India which was the only thing Dayan demanded. Both the episodes are well documented in intelligence records.
 

Mad Indian

Proud Bigot
Senior Member
Joined
Jan 27, 2012
Messages
12,835
Likes
7,762
Country flag
What the fuck????? Is it in the msm yet?

And some people were saying how good Morarji Desai rule was :facepalm:

Anyway most communist scum in india hate RAW. I will allow you all to work out the reason why
 

TejasMK3

Regular Member
Joined
May 13, 2015
Messages
610
Likes
3,454
Country flag
What the fuck????? Is it in the msm yet?

And some people were saying how good Morarji Desai rule was :facepalm:

Anyway most communist scum in india hate RAW. I will allow you all to work out the reason why
This is actually fairly well known, was recently back in the news during terror boat incident

Here is more:

Of India’s intelligence and un-intelligent men

Two Indian prime ministers must take the blame for contributing enormously to a thorough dismantling of RAW’s assets in Pakistan. The first one, Morarji Desai, the only Indian to receive NishanePakistan, Pakistan’s highest civilian award.Coinciding with his assumption to power in 1977, a detailed list of Indian intelligence assets in Pakistan fell in the hands of the ZiaulHaq regime. The Pakistani dictator, who kept regular touch with Desai over phone to discuss ‘the effectiveness of urine as a medicine’, took little time to ensure that the assets are neutralised through a clinical process of ruthless killing, torture and also by turning them into highly effective double agents. By 1979, Desai had changed his position on Pakistan, telling the then US ambassador that India would smash its neighbour should it test a nuclear bomb. But the damage had already been done. As the CIA took the ISI under the wings to counter the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, thereby augmenting the capacities of the agency enormously, RAW struggled to maintain a decent network in Pakistan.

The second landmark was reached in 1997, with Inder Kumar Gujral becoming India’s 12th prime minister.Gujral, credited with formulating India’s Look East policy, was also the initiator of a benign strategy that took a conscious decision to close RAW’s covert action unit. This policy, which mistakenly interpreted intelligence to be an offensive wing of the government, resulted not only in the downgrading of RAW’s abilities in Pakistan, but also prohibited it from cultivating new assets.

Gujral appeared to conform with the popular Pakistani notion that India’s external outlook is determined by a troika of the MEA, Indian army and RAW. For a pacifist policy to succeed, the stranglehold of this ‘evil’ nexus had to be broken and RAW was found to be the easiest among the three to be weakened. Under Gujral, who believed that “both India and Pakistan should jointly fight the forces of colonialism”, the agency lost its entire ability to seek information, let alone be the source of subversive activities inside Pakistan. Gujral’s initiative, however, didn’t stop Islamabad from blaming RAW for having engineered a blast on a crosscountry passenger train in the Sindh province that killed 26 people and an explosion in a theatre that killed three people in June 1998. Gujral’s tenure came to an end in November 1997.

However, his legacy lived on. Prior to the 1999 peace journey to Lahore by prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, informal pressure was put on RAW to refrain from projections indicating threats from Pakistan. Under the UPA government, at least till 2009, months after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, RAW did not have a single covert action specialist at the senior level. Undoubtedly, RAW’s operations have suffered tremendously due to political myopia as much as due to the appointment of some of the most undeserving chiefs in the recent past.
 

Mad Indian

Proud Bigot
Senior Member
Joined
Jan 27, 2012
Messages
12,835
Likes
7,762
Country flag
This is actually fairly well known, was recently back in the news during terror boat incident

Here is more:

Of India’s intelligence and un-intelligent men

Two Indian prime ministers must take the blame for contributing enormously to a thorough dismantling of RAW’s assets in Pakistan. The first one, Morarji Desai, the only Indian to receive NishanePakistan, Pakistan’s highest civilian award.Coinciding with his assumption to power in 1977, a detailed list of Indian intelligence assets in Pakistan fell in the hands of the ZiaulHaq regime. The Pakistani dictator, who kept regular touch with Desai over phone to discuss ‘the effectiveness of urine as a medicine’, took little time to ensure that the assets are neutralised through a clinical process of ruthless killing, torture and also by turning them into highly effective double agents. By 1979, Desai had changed his position on Pakistan, telling the then US ambassador that India would smash its neighbour should it test a nuclear bomb. But the damage had already been done. As the CIA took the ISI under the wings to counter the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, thereby augmenting the capacities of the agency enormously, RAW struggled to maintain a decent network in Pakistan.

The second landmark was reached in 1997, with Inder Kumar Gujral becoming India’s 12th prime minister.Gujral, credited with formulating India’s Look East policy, was also the initiator of a benign strategy that took a conscious decision to close RAW’s covert action unit. This policy, which mistakenly interpreted intelligence to be an offensive wing of the government, resulted not only in the downgrading of RAW’s abilities in Pakistan, but also prohibited it from cultivating new assets.

Gujral appeared to conform with the popular Pakistani notion that India’s external outlook is determined by a troika of the MEA, Indian army and RAW. For a pacifist policy to succeed, the stranglehold of this ‘evil’ nexus had to be broken and RAW was found to be the easiest among the three to be weakened. Under Gujral, who believed that “both India and Pakistan should jointly fight the forces of colonialism”, the agency lost its entire ability to seek information, let alone be the source of subversive activities inside Pakistan. Gujral’s initiative, however, didn’t stop Islamabad from blaming RAW for having engineered a blast on a crosscountry passenger train in the Sindh province that killed 26 people and an explosion in a theatre that killed three people in June 1998. Gujral’s tenure came to an end in November 1997.

However, his legacy lived on. Prior to the 1999 peace journey to Lahore by prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, informal pressure was put on RAW to refrain from projections indicating threats from Pakistan. Under the UPA government, at least till 2009, months after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, RAW did not have a single covert action specialist at the senior level. Undoubtedly, RAW’s operations have suffered tremendously due to political myopia as much as due to the appointment of some of the most undeserving chiefs in the recent past.
I honestly dint know that. Even the most ardent anti congressis like that moron for being the only non congressi PM before gujral. But I knew gujral was a moron
 

Illusive

Senior Member
Joined
Jun 20, 2010
Messages
3,674
Likes
7,310
Country flag
RAW could have sabotaged pakistans nuclear programme, but this guys action has changed history for worse. Political Terrorist should be an apt title for this guy with IK gujral coming close too. I wonder what Arwind Kejriwal would do if he becomes PM.
 

Bhadra

Professional
Joined
Jul 11, 2011
Messages
11,991
Likes
23,758
Country flag
Is there a theory that all those who attained a position in the government out of the " Nehru family" were traitors, useless and sold the interests of the country ?
 

Yusuf

GUARDIAN
Super Mod
Joined
Mar 24, 2009
Messages
24,324
Likes
11,757
Country flag
Yup Morarji gave up on RAW. Kulhadi se pair pe marna is old problem
 

avknight1408

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 16, 2015
Messages
1,099
Likes
5,014
Country flag
Immediately after becoming defence minister the first thing parrikar did was to criticize ik gujral for closing down RAW assets.
 

sob

Mod
Joined
May 4, 2009
Messages
6,425
Likes
3,805
Country flag
These Janta Parivar types are the worst sort of politicians you will see. Absolutely without any moral, very corrupt and have used the religion and caste card to remain relevant even today.
 

Latest Replies

Global Defence

New threads

Articles

Top