Authors: R. SREERAM
It was my first time being part of an operation. I was the junior-most guy in the team, by age as well as in experience, but I was a great shot, the top of the class in sharp-shooting – so I guess that earned me my slot. We had received intel that a group of Maoists who had kidnapped a local tahsildar was holed up in a part of the forest; negotiations were going on for his release, but there were murmurs that the governments – state and central – were not very serious because he was not from an important family and he had also been a pain in the ass for the local MLA. Or MP, I forget which.
Anyway, we were waiting for them in a place we had scoped out pretty well. But something went wrong – we underestimated their speed, and it was a fire-fight when it should have been us taking them down without having to fire a single shot. We lost three from our team, but the Maoists were wiped out. By that time, because he was more a liability to them than a bargaining chip, Nelson had been starved to the point of exhaustion. If we had waited one more day, he might not have made it.
He was weak and I and another guy had to carry him. We were loading him onto a make-shift stretcher when he pushed me away. And took the bullet meant for me. One of the guys we had shot was still alive and Nelson had seen him aiming for me. That bullet went through his arm and out the other side, but not by design. He saved my life.
So that’s the reason you believe in him? I had asked.
No. The way I saw it, we’d rescued him, and he’d repaid that debt by saving us.
But the shit hit the ceiling when we came back to camp. We were taken into custody for participating in an unauthorized mission, the commanding officer was dismissed and the benefits denied to the families of the three guys who had died, because it was an illegal mission. And all because some jackass in IB had forgotten to copy the home secretary on the message that was sent to us.
I don’t know how, but Nelson found out. He sold off his house and property and used it to set up a trust for the three families. He knew a guy in the Army, used him to get the CO reinstated with full privileges and rank. And then he convinced a couple of NGOs to adopt the village the Maoists hailed from – it wasn’t the Stockholm syndrome or anything, he just wanted to ensure that other youth from the village didn’t have the same reasons to kill. If I’m not wrong, Jagannath used to work with one of the NGOs – that’s how they met. There was some legal issue, something to do with funds and jurisdiction, and they managed to beat it.
Nelson kept saying that life had taken a different meaning for him during those days in captivity. Like, he knew now how it felt to be dispossessed, to be stripped of every connection you had to the world, to feel hopeless and just want to die. And not just if you are a hostage, but – like the guys who’d kidnapped him – driven to violence because there was nothing else in their lives, or because nothing else seems like it will help.
In the initial days, it was just a routine get-together, you know, like it was his way of telling us we were not forgotten. Then I realized he was still helping out members of the unit in one way or another – and not just the guys who were part of our op. Loans, schooling, relocation . . . post-trauma care and recovery. I don’t know where he found the money or the energy, but he took care of us.
I didn’t even have to think twice when he asked me to transfer to Army Intelligence a few years later, and then to INSAF when it was formed. I’d trust the guy to the ends of the earth, and I’d then walk off it if he asked me to.
‘Raghav – was he with Army Intelligence?’
She couldn’t mask her surprise in time. ‘How did you find out? It took me a lot of digging and even then, his brother officers only said it was
possible
he had been in ArmInt!’
I tried to pull off a look of modest cool.
I remembered Jagannath remarking that Richa was nobody’s fool and wondered if word had gotten back to him of her background checks. Most likely. If Raghav was as important to INSAF as he seemed to be, Jagannath would be certain to have his ears to the ground where he was concerned. Despite my reservations about the coup, I had none such where INSAF’s ability to operate secretly or omnipotently was concerned.
‘What about Jagannath?’
‘Ex-lawyer. Did you know that he was once a junior to the current chief justice when she was practising in the high court?’ I shook my head, the familiarity between them now explained. So that’s why the CJI reached me through him. Which also raised a rather disturbing possibility that she could have lied to me, that she had been in on the coup from the start. The enormity of such a conspiracy was staggering.
‘So what’s an ex-lawyer doing in INSAF?’
She shrugged. ‘Search me. All I’ve been able to find out is that there was some scandal with a case of his, after which he vanished for years. He was defending a serial criminal and managed to get him off, but the client was murdered anyway soon after. The crime was never solved but there were rumours he had done it himself. He dropped off the grid after that. The next time he surfaced, he was already attached to Nelson and was acting as a legal advisor to the Intelligence agencies, particularly where domestic operations were concerned. Again, a lot of it is hearsay. It seems like a lot of people know him, but no one’s ever been sure what he’s been doing in New Delhi all these years.’
‘How come I didn’t find anything?’
‘He changed his name. He wasn’t Jagannath Mitra then.’
‘Then how did you find out?’
She looked pleased with herself as she explained. ‘There was nothing to explain his transition from being a defence lawyer to an advisor for RAW and the IB. But someone must have known him in the interim, a trail the transition must have left. And I got lucky. One of the major-general’s contacts in Military Intelligence remembered him, knew his past because he had vetted him for clearance. Clearance that was granted because Nelson vouched for him.’ She dropped her voice a touch. ‘Apparently, Jagannath lived up to expectations. To quote my contact, he was scarily amoral. The ends justified the means every single time. He was a great asset for them, but none of them were comfortable around him.’
I tried to reconcile this picture with the one I had of him. The emotional appeal he had made to me yesterday. The way he had spoken to Gyandeep, led me around inside the Rashtrapati Bhavan as if he owned it. The absolute faith in Kalyug that he exuded. He was a man with convictions. Dangerous convictions. Did that make him just as dangerous?
‘What about Nelson then?’ I asked. ‘I read he was once an IAS officer.’
She nodded. ‘From Odisha. There’s a rumour he was once kidnapped by Naxalites and was let go after his family paid the ransom. The government kept it silent, for obvious reasons. Later, he fell foul with the higher-ups when he was in Karnataka. Took on the local mafia and discovered that they had ties to everyone who mattered in the government. The state government tried to arrest him on some trumped-up corruption charges – that would have been the last you got on him online. Someone saved him, because instead of being dismissed, he was sent to Mussoorie as an instructor for the next batch of IAS and IPS officers.’
‘That would have definitely helped him build his network of contacts in important offices across the country.’
‘It did, there’s no doubt about that. He’s so well-informed about what’s happening across the country – right down to the district level – that I am sure his network is more active than ever.’
‘And to top it all, he knows whom he can trust. And which ones will sell out.’ I tried to get the timeframes in perspective. Almost fourteen years, five of which he had spent setting up INSAF. He must have learnt his lessons after all those unsuccessful confrontations.
‘I don’t think he’d use someone who would sell out. Too much risk. At least, not a mercenary, not someone who would turn around and sell his secrets to anyone with the money.’
I nodded, for that made sense. I was confident I had almost cracked the genesis of Kalyug, the parallels with
India, 2012
helping me immensely in the unravelling. As Richa had mentioned, Nelson would not have risked the secrecy around Kalyug by depending on anyone who wasn’t committed – at an almost-spiritual level – to the cause. The slightest whisper, and their enemies, or targets, would have known the rest.
In
India, 2012
, despite the spontaneity of the masses’ revolution against the government, there were hidden, more sophisticated forces that nudged public anger along. Organizations with their subsurface agendas, men and women with their own reasons, their own
mot juste
for breaking down the system. And what worked for them must have worked for Nelson and Jagannath as well.
The simmering resentment on the ground, aided and abetted by a million injustices, real and perceived, providing a fertile ground for aimless intellects looking for a worthwhile cause to invest in. With the intelligence apparatus in their control, the Nelson-Jagannath combine must have had ready access to this list of involuntary volunteers and sufficient background knowledge to know what would work with each one. I did not know if they had even started INSAF with the long-term intention of bringing about such a coup, but it was a scary thought that if they had, our wisest of the wise in the country had not been able to divine their intentions.
Like the corruptors in
India, 2012
, approaches would have been made. Superficial probes, at first, to determine if the attempt to reach out would be worthwhile, validating the suitability of a conspirator; later on, once acceptability was granted, more attempts, increasing their intimacy with the subject, with agent provocateurs like Raghav stepping in to escalate and finally, with a message powerful enough to elicit an inviolable commitment, recruit the next line of agents.
And as Raghav had told me on our way to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, it was not rocket science. It needed dedication and access to information, but it wasn’t much more complicated than putting together an über-governmental organization that had to stay under the radar until it chose not to.
And they didn’t need too many people to know every aspect of the operation. A few trusted ones to co-ordinate everything, probably from within a HQ that was connected to every limb of the operation; officers high enough to put together the mission at the convention centre – and perhaps cover the centres of power in NCR if needed – would be at levels that were rarefied enough to begin with, but would have the discipline, experience and networks that would have accompanied their progress to their current ranks.
Not everyone would have needed to know that the heart of Kalyug was the suspension of democracy. Most – and certainly the foot soldiers – would have been satisfied with explanations of drills and exercises. Written orders, necessary for some, would have been couched in anonymity and obfuscation. The right people would have been ensured at the right place at the right time, but never knowing the right reasons.
Which made it all the more important for me to keep fighting the reality of the coup, to pretend to be as incredulous as I’d been since the beginning. By the time the smoke cleared, in a few days’ time, most people who were part of the inner circles – deliberately or otherwise – would be so firmly enmeshed in today’s events that they would not dare stand up against the coup that they had, even unwittingly, propped up.
As far as I could see, I had the least to lose. Whatever I had was lost in the aftermath of my book’s release; every allegation that could have been made against me had been made then, and nothing deeper or darker could stick to me now. But by continuing to question, by weakening the inevitability or the invincibility of Kalyug, I could still have a small victory of my own if more people joined me. I may have written a book about it, but that didn’t mean I’d stopped believing in the importance of democracy to India, in the right to choose between villains even if villains were all we had to choose from.
We sat in companionable silence, caught in our own ruminations. After a while, Richa tapped the post-mortem report and looked at me questioningly. I nodded, giving her permission. I had already browsed through it on the way back. Nothing had jumped out at me, as expected – my knowledge of medicine borders on the negligible, and the report was full of lengthy descriptions of unfamiliar organs and their states at the time of the examination. ‘Be warned, though. The pictures are quite gory.’
It took Richa a little over half an hour to finish reading it, at the end of which she put it down. I raised an eyebrow, asking if she wanted to talk about it, and she shook her head.
It was a little while later that she let out a sigh. Her eyes were misting over as she finally said, ‘It’s pretty conclusive, isn’t it?’
17th September, 2012. New Delhi.
Tick.
Llong could not remember when the first tick had replaced the clicks that kept playing inside his head, and he wasn’t too sure that the change was much better. Every second, the clock on the wall on the other side of the corridor ticked over, marking the slow passage of time.
Tick.
‘Irritating, isn’t it?’ said the woman. She was in the cell
opposite his, just as evidently imprisoned as he was but more cheerful and upbeat about the situation. Over the past few hours, he had heard her whistle different tunes; he did not know what he found more irritating, the clock’s ticking or her cheer. Dressed in a business suit that should have been treated better, she now stood near the door to her cell, smiling at him through two sets of bars that locked them in off the corridor between them.
Tick.
‘I think they’ve deliberately amplified the clock’s ticks to drive people like us crazy.’
Llong did not respond. He continued to stare impassively at her, not ready to believe that she was not a plant. It was one of the most basic lessons from his CIA training – expect the cops to put you in with a jailhouse snitch.