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The ISI bugbear

When we were kids growing up in the pink sixties, we heard the most frightening stories about the CIA. The CIA was not just an agency, we were told, that looked after America's security needs. It was this huge, shadowy superpower that actually ran America and bullied the rest of the world. If you ever went against it, you were dead.

Funny as it may now look in retrospect, every horrible thing that happened in India was (in those days) blamed on the CIA. Indira Gandhi was the architect of The Great Conspiracy Theory. It suited her kind of politics. The Communists and the Socialists found it convenient to exploit her myth-making skills and convince us that the CIA was but a natural arm of the capitalist system. That America was using it to isolate and punish India because we were an independent nation that refused to take its side in the Cold War. In those days, we described it as being non-aligned.

We loved the argument. Being pink in the sixties was fashionable and our heroes were Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. Mao would have also been a hero for us but for the Indo-China war in 1962 which made it embarrassing to sing paeans to the leader of a nation that had attempted to over-run us. There were, however, underground parties who did precisely that. One of them, in fact, openly declared that the Chairman of China was also their Chairman!

In such an environment, it was not surprising that the CIA was the nation's pet hate. If riots broke out, it was the CIA. If rains were inadequate and the harvests failed, it was the CIA. Floods, droughts, famines: everything but everything had a CIA connection. When our socialist economy refused to take off because of the stupid and errant policies of the Government, the needle of suspicion swung towards the CIA. It was the Mogambo of our time.

What finally changed the picture was when Jayaprakash Narayan, sick of Indira Gandhi's repressive and retrograde politics, decided to throw the gauntlet at her and joined the students movement in Bihar. The Congress promptly called him a CIA agent. That was when we realised to what ludicrous levels we had taken this CIA business.

That was when the CIA became a joke. The foreign hand was no longer seen as sinister. It was recognised for what it always was: just another weapon in the armoury of our cunning netas to explain away political murders, inconvenient riots, looted treasuries and assorted acts of God and man.

It was not just our fault. The Americans were too arrogant and too vainglorious in those days to even remotely consider the possibility of being friends with a pink India. We, on the other hand, were naive and did not understood the compulsions of realpolitik. Our foreign policy was wavering sand unrealistic. Our attitude was churlish and we never succeeded in making any friends. The Russians loved us simply because we always painted ourselves into a corner and then reached out to them for help. This suited their own political imperatives, and, within a short while, even as we preached the virtues of non-alignment, the whole world saw us as just another chamcha of the Soviets.

Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, time alone will tell. But I would like to believe that our obsession with socialism and the Soviets delayed India from discovering its true potential. We became free in 1947 but not till Narasimha Rao came to power and installed Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister did India begin to see the first stirrings of economic independence. Every other finance minister before that had actually driven India more into the red. Metaphorically as well as politically. Even Rajiv, who spoke so much of freedom, kept us actually enslaved because the licence raj suited him and his cronies like Ottavio Quattrochhi who saw in it the perfect opportunity to loot India.

It is to the credit of Atal Bihari Vajpayee that he quickened the pace of economic reforms and the fact that India is today emerging as a strong, free, independent economy that can face the world as an equal is largely due to his personal vision and courage. He has pushed hard, sometimes very hard and risked political backlash within his own party in his efforts to unchain our true potential. If he were not around, the BJP would have still been mouthing swadeshi clichés and blocking economic reforms to protect the Indian business community from facing international competition.

One feels sad, therefore, to see a new demonology creeping into Vajpayee's political rhetoric. The CIA is gone but, to fill its gap, we have now found the ISI. Everything that we cannot explain is today attributed to the ISI. Whether it is the hijacking of a plane or a bomb blast in Chennai or the sudden appearance of fake currency notes, it is all blamed on the ISI. So are gang wars, communal riots, extortions, bank hold-ups, political murders. Anything the police cannot explain or the Government finds politically inconvenient is laid at the door of the ISI. Since India is going through a huge, nationalistic fervour this ISI-mania is feeding on itself and becoming larger and larger.

If we are not careful, this may go the way of the CIA and become just another joke. This would be extremely dangerous for India. Far more dangerous than the people we have arrested as ISI agents. A 84-year old man caught at the border with some Rs 90,000 on him is not capable of subverting the Indian economy even if he wanted to. He may have been running a tiny hawala racket of his own or simply trying to run away from a nation that has fed him nothing but fundamentalist slogans for the past 53 years. To see him (and people like him) as ISI agents out to flood our economy with fake notes is, if you pardon me, much too theatrical. Just as it is much too theatrical to believe that every underworld crime can be traced back to the ISI.

The ISI is bad, yes. The ISI is wicked, true. But by giving it too much undue importance, by making it look larger than it really is, we are actually exacerbating our problems and making Pakistan look far stronger than it is. It may be a convenient political ploy for the time being, it might even help us to score brownie points off Pakistan in international forums but it eventually makes us look silly and childish in the end. A nation as strong and big as India does not need to build up a scare over the intelligence wing of a puny neighbour like Pakistan. We cannot afford to tell the world that the ISI, however smart and clever it may be, is capable of making such a huge nuisance of itself that we are actually worried. We should either hit them hard or kill them with neglect. It does not befit a nation of our size and stature to keep whining.

As for talking about war, that is an even worse idea. A nation like Pakistan, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and no longer important as an ally to anyone, will soon write itself off from the global economic scene. Whereas India is just on the threshold of becoming an economic superpower in the information era. We cannot afford to be seen as squabbling with a neighbour sick in the mind. Pakistan has long ceased to be our equal in either economic potential or military might. Why waste time on even acknowledging its existence? It makes far more sense for us to simply ignore them and carry on with the great reforms process. For, as time goes by, the gap between a fundamentalist economy living on borrowed time and borrowed money will show up starkly against a modern, knowledge economy committed to democracy and geared to harness the future.

Pakistan has not realised this. We have. That is why we have already won the war, ISI or no ISI.

Pritish Nandy

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