Author: Editorial
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: September 19, 2005
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=78404
The 'Mitrokhin' disclosures merit an inquiry
into the Indian Left's shameful Cold War secrets
Despite the brave denials, the sullen nervousness
of CPI leaders on television screens through Sunday betrayed their instincts
about the 'The Mitrokhin Archive II'. The book makes fairly well-documented
allegations that, from the '50s to the '80s, left-leaning Congressmen and
members of the CPI were paid stipends and electorally funded by the KGB. Indian
diplomats in Moscow were subjected to honey traps, the book says, sections
of the intelligentsia and media were on Soviet secret service retainers.
There are two ways in which to react to the
book. First is the route the Congress has taken - dismiss the statements as
"vague" and cite the party's history of patriotism. There is more
realistic approach. During the Cold War, it was clear that an influential
section of the political and foreign policy establishment was Left-aligned.
It saw India as a Soviet fellow traveller. This led India into a quixotic
and self-defeating non-alignment that, ultimately, it had to abandon. As the
book says, NAM was "regarded as an important vehicle for KGB active measures".
The key issue raised by 'The Mitrokhin Archive
II' is that India's Kremlin tilt was not merely the product of principled
minds, but also of compromised souls. It is an open secret in the Indian Foreign
Service as to which officers, posted in Moscow in the '50s, came back as lifelong
votaries of Indo-Soviet friendship, which CPI intellectuals travelled to Black
Sea resorts for annual holidays, which party newspapers carried special Soviet
advertorials and which individuals made their fortunes from the sham rupee-rouble
trade. It is time to face up to this shameful aspect of India's past. When
apartheid ended in South Africa, that country set up a Truth Commission to
bring a sad chapter to closure. India's KGB connections deserve nothing less.
This is not a le Carre novel; it's a matter of India's honour.
