Ever wondered why we, in India, continue to harbour a peculiar form of McCarthyism that is usually the hallmark of paranoic, no-hope-in-hell dictatorships? It has nothing to do with the fear of communism or any other ideology but of your own shadow. There is a constant fear of having traitors in our midst. As if every other Indian is a potential spy, only waiting for someone to offer him a few hundred dollars to sell out Bharat Mata. Instead of acquiring the confidence of a growing world power which should presume that its citizens, by and large, are patriotic - they'd have to be for the country to have come this far - we still find it too easy to succumb to the idea of there being a spy behind every wall, a traitor behind every desk. Here is a peculiar psychology that might be justified in Saddam's Baghdad which uses extermination of ``traitors'' as an instrument of population control, or in Musharraf's Pakistan where NGOs are literally branded as foreign spies, but why in India? And if you need evidence of what serious problems such a mindset creates and how it undermines our system and society, please read last week's Delhi High Court judgement on the so-called Samba spy case. There is no point, nor any need, to recount what happened in a case that was, 22 years ago, sensationalised by the media as the most ``serious spy scandal to hit the army''. More than 50 officers and men of an army brigade posted at what is known as the Samba brigade, were called spies, tortured, incarcerated and sacked, their children reduced to a life of humiliation, until the court threw out the case last week. The case, it is now evident, was entirely fabricated by military intelligence which made some initial blunders in picking up a couple of officers for spying and then got so nervous it picked almost anyone who failed to toe its espionage line. What is worse, despite serious doubts having been raised about the allegations, not only in some sections of the media but also by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and RAW, nobody had the courage to reopen the case. Even today, no one has had the moral courage to apologise to the men and families who have been mocked at, stoned, and spat upon as Pakistani spieswhen they were no more than ordinary, honourable soldiers. What a contrast this is from the Dreyfus case! Two things happen the moment someone mentions the world `spy' or `traitor'. First, we presume the charge must be true. It is, somehow, so easy and tempting to unquestioningly believe that a fellow Indian could be a traitor. Second, we immediately decide to distance ourselves from the ``traitor''. So, in the Samba case, colleagues and neighbours ostracised the families, successive chiefs refused to meet them even when, as one of the wives so poignantly reminded us, she and her more or less destitute daughters sat for hours on the pavement outside their house. Samba is not an isolated case. There is the case of Subba Row, a distinguished naval scientist who was arrested at the airport, allegedly trying to smuggle secrets on the Indian submarine project out to the West, who was made to suffer exactly the same way as the Samba victims. Later, the courts cleared him as well, in the most emphatic terms. The ``secret'' documents he was allegedly trying to smuggle was actually his PhD thesis. Then there is the most ridiculous and most sensational case of all, theso-called ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) Spy case. In a remarkable coincidence, the case saw the coming together of the largest collection of Keystone Cops in the real world in the form of the then top brass of the IB and Kerala Police. They fabricated a plot that even the most ardent followers of Tintin comics would have found laughable. The story, briefly, was that two Maldivian women (Maldives is an archipelago state of 7 lakh people where all security forces, including the police, fire brigade, the ceremonial band and the intelligence, number less than 3,000) spied on India's space secrets on behalf of the ISI and a whole bunch of Indian scientists, police and defence officials were merrily selling out for the money and the charms they offered. This case too was thrown out by the Supreme Court. The court also ordered financial compensation to the victims, the ISRO scientists. But will a few lakh rupees now compensate them for the years they have lost, for all the humiliation and hardship their families have had to suffer, and for all the damage so many crucial aspects of India's space programme suffered? All this, only because of the fertile and morbid imagination of people then at the highest levels in the Kerala Police and the IB? Two points emerge. One, how come the moment allegations of spying are thrown at somebody, the entire system, the media, even the families, tend to buy them unquestioningly? Only some journalists were willing to stick their necks out and question the yellow pulp fiction of Samba and ISRO (in this case, this writer) and they were immediately told to get their heads examined. The publication (India Today) where I wrote the expose on the entirely trumped up ISRO case, was boycotted, its copies even burnt in Kerala. Nobody was willing to believe the scientists couldn't be spies. How could they not be? All fellow Indians are traitors, unless proven otherwise. So the moment one is charged with being one, your immune system tells you to distance yourself lest you be accused of treason as well. Why else would successive army chiefs over the past 22 years fail to find the courage to junk the Samba case? And why else would no one higher up in ISRO call the prime minister of the day (ISRO chiefs have alwaysenjoyed direct access) and ask him to stop the nonsense?Second, even if the courts and the media finally bring justice at least in some of these cases, is it complete justice if the perpetrators of the crimes, those who wrote fictional FIRs and chargesheets, planted tendentious stories in the press, tortured and thrashed their victims, are not called to account? Nambinarayana, the eminent ISRO scientist accused of spying, was kept naked in custody and routinely tortured. Is a few lakhs in compensation and judicial vindication adequate redressal for him? Ditto for Captain Rathore, Rana and others in the Samba case. Nothing can bring back their lost time and self-respect, but at least if their tormentors were also brought to book it will be a lesson for others to behave more responsibly in future. Why has not one of them been called to account even in terms of departmental action? Fire them for incompetence if you don't have the courage to prosecute them for downright skulduggery and perfidy in the name of national interest. Nobody would do it, at least partly also because we would still, in some corner of our small, insecure minds, worry about getting involved with people who were accused of treason. This is a dangerous state of mind, also unfair for a country which actually has some of the most secure military and nuclear establishments. It has, after all, defeated all the world's spies, spy satellites, traitors and the fifth columns to conduct two nuclear tests at different points of time, a quarter century apart, without anybody picking up a whiff. To reverse that undeserved paranoia, a good beginning will be by holding the fiction-writers of Samba and ISRO accountable for their crimes. Even today, no one has had the moral courage to apologise to the men and families accused in the Samba case, who have been mocked at, stoned, and spat upon as Pakistani spiesAll fellow Indians are traitors, unless proven otherwise. So the moment one is charged with being one, your immune system tells you to distance yourself lest you be accused of treason as well
