READING two books by two Indian authors recently led me to two or more completely different narratives about a possible Indian angle to the spat between Gen Pervez Musharraf and then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, which led to the military coup of Oct 1999.

Dateline Islamabad by journalist Amit Barua, an account of his days in Pakistan as the resident correspondent for The Hindu, represents an apparently even-handed treatment of whatever happened during his tenure — the nuclear tests, the Lahore summit, the Kargil war and the coup. On the Musharraf-Sharif spat Barua suggests that the Vajpayee government may have succeeded in driving a wedge between Musharraf and Sharif by wooing the former prime minister to check the army chief still seen by Delhi as the villain of Pakistan’s Kargil incursions.

The other book is written by a former operative of RAW, India’s external intelligence agency. The title of the book is intriguing because it actually conveys the impression of being a secret dossier from the archives of the ISI rather than the work of an Indian sleuth.

India’s External Intelligence: Secrets of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) by Maj Gen V.K. Singh has drawn flak from his former colleagues. A CBI raid on his house on the outskirts of Delhi last week only added to the puzzle surrounding the otherwise shabbily written book.

The two books, particularly their conclusions about a Kargil incident, are so different that they remind me of Akira Kurosawa’s jigsaw tale of Rashomon. The 1950s classic was based on two short stories though their author was one — Ryunosuke Akutagawa. “Rashomon” provided the setting, while “In a Grove” gave the movie its plot and characters.

The film reflected on the impossibility of obtaining the truth about an event when there are conflicting witness accounts. In English and other languages, “‘Rashomon” has become synonymous with situations in which the truth of an event is difficult to verify.

Let’s look at Barua’s narrative from the time of the discovery of a back channel between Vajpayee and Sharif right in the middle of the war in June 1999. Leading the Indian side was R.K. Mishra, editor of the Ambani-owned newspaper, The Observer of Business and Politics.

Sharif’s conduit was former foreign secretary Niaz Naik. Mishra landed in Islamabad along with a joint secretary in the Indian foreign ministry with a taped conversation between General Musharraf and Lt General Aziz Khan.

“In a bid to drive a wedge between Musharraf and Sharif, New Delhi decided that the Pakistani prime minister, Vajpayee’s new friend, should be a given a chance to listen to the Musharraf-Aziz Khan tape about Kargil,” claims Barua in the chapter, From Lahore to Kargil. “By playing the tape to Sharif the Indian side wanted to show the prime minister that he had been stabbed in the back by General Musharraf. Also that, since he was not really a party to the Kargil intrusion, he should make efforts to rein in the army chief and order a pull-out of troops.”

Maj Gen Singh’s account of purported RAW secrets is too much of a wheels within wheels kind of thesis to be read and digested in one go. Such books are tedious and their novelty is that they were written at all. Personally the only spy book that has ever enthused me was Phillip Knightley’s account of Kim Philby, the Soviet spymaster who poked the system in the eye by becoming the head of the anti-Soviet cell of Britain’s counter-intelligence group, the SIS.

Here was a truly brazen fellow, one who, in my view, made every aspiring spy after him look like mediocre spooks of the Pink Panther variety.

In fact, in around October last year, I found a book on RAW lying in a flea market in Islamabad.

Leafing through the book, it came across as an unpublishable ISI-type propaganda stuff fit to be put back on the heap of unsold books at the flea market. I would have ignored Singh’s book too, but the raid on his house made me pick it up for a quick read anyway.

The dustcover makes the book’s intentions clear. The subjects listed would annoy anyone’s former masters, not to speak of spy bosses. Singh claims that the prime minister’s security was compromised because the agency bought faulty communications devices that could be tuned into by the ISI. The tragic death of Vipin Handa, a bright RAW officer, who had returned from duty in Islamabad when he was crushed to death in a faulty elevator in the RAW headquarters in Delhi, is discussed briefly.

The flight to the United States of a rogue RAW official, the bitter rivalry between RAW and IB as also ‘the modus operandi of foreign intelligence agencies in recruiting moles in India’ make up some of the scurrilous claims.

About the Kargil tapes, Singh is furious they were ever played to Sharif. Singh berates India’s intra-agency rivalry, which he holds responsible for interference with seamless intelligence gathering. He then turns to the psychological point about competitive tom-tomming of unusual finds.

A glaring example of this trend, he says, was the famous telephone conversation between Musharraf and Aziz. ‘It was broadcast on radio and TV before the whole world to prove Pakistan’s complicity in the Kargil war. It is not known how many brownie points India earned with the United States or the United Nations. What is certain is that Pakistan came to know that the particular satellite link between Beijing and Islamabad was being intercepted by RAW, leading to its immediate closure. It is impossible to estimate the value of intelligence that would have been obtained, if the link had continued to be used.’

In his evaluation of Pakistan’s current political turbulence, India’s former foreign minister Yashwant Sinha wrote that Nawaz Sharif is virtually the only hope for saving democracy in Pakistan. If Barua is right, and he quotes no sources to assure us that he is absolutely spot on right, then Yashwant Sinha’s article is of a piece with the thinking in the Vajpayee era, in which Sharif was India’s friend and Musharraf its enemy. But in this Rashomon-like saga it is difficult to say anything with any degree of certainty.

Email: jawednaqvi@gmail.com