The Samba stain

Captain R.S. Rathaur, one of the Samba victims, points out with justifiable bitterness 8212; considering his years of imprisonment, social ostracism and penury 8212; that the army has still not offered an explanation for its behaviour, let alone expressed regret and punished those guilty for this foul travesty of justice. The ugly truth is that the responsibility extended all the way up to the top, with the then Chief of Army Staff, General O.P. Malhotra, also culpable for playing havoc with so many innocent lives.

The web of deception is always tangled. The original motivation of those involved from Military Intelligence appears simply to save their professional reputations since they were caught napping by the Intelligence Bureau which had detected that two gunners posted near the Samba border, Aya Singh and Sarwandas, were in fact working for Pakistan. To make up for its lapse, MI subjected the two men to brutal torture so that they would falsely implicate many others in their unit, including their battery commander. The MI officers involved in this bizarre exercise, Major S.C. Jolly, Captain Sudhir Talwar, Colonel V.P. Gupta and Brigadier T.S. Grewal, even got the two gunners to implicate some officers from MI 8212; Captain R.S. Rathaur and Captain A.S. Rana.

In the court martials which ensued, eerily reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts, anyone who had the moral courage to question the kangaroo courts or the men investigating the so-called Samba spy case was himself arrested and charged with spying. For instance, Major Ajwani was a judge advocate who protested that the oral confession of a badly tortured sepoy was inadmissible and refused to go along with what he termed 8220;bloody nonsense8221;. He was subsequently arrested on charges of spying and discharged from the army without any reason offered. In contrast, the perpetrators of the crimes were decorated with medals such as VSM and AVSM and promoted.

As a result of torture, one of the havaldars, Ram Saroop, died within three days of being taken into custody by Military Intelligence. In view of the 39 fresh injuries on his body, his superior, Major R.K. Midha, refused to allow MI to bury him quietly and insisted on an FIR being lodged with the Delhi Police. A murder case was registered, despite threats. He too was subsequently arrested and thrown out of service.

In a bid to protect the image of MI, Army Chief Malhotra falsely briefed the then prime minister, Morarji Desai, that Ram Saroop was a Pakistani spy and was subjected to third degree for the sake of national security. Because of the army chief8217;s personal intervention, the murder case was closed and the postmortem documents disappeared. The Indian army took shelter in the plea that it was acting in the interests of national security, which has unfortunately become a convenient mantra for our armed forces to avoid any sort of accountability. The whitewash by the Kargil inquiry panel and the refusal to make public the Henderson Brooks report outlining the grave lapses by the armed forces during the 1962 China war are other glaring instances where the army8217;s failures and misdeeds have been covered up in the name of national security.

The silver lining in one of the darkest chapters of the Indian army is that on the basis of the Samba case the courts, which till then had shied away from interfering in military justice, finally ruled that in the name of national security the army cannot arbitrarily ride rough shod over the fundamental rights of those in its service and that no authority is above the law. Section 18 of the Army Act read with Article 310 of the Constitution invoking the doctrine of presidential pleasure is subject to judicial review to ascertain whether the act is exercised lawfully and is not vitiated for mala fide or based on extraneous grounds.

This path-breaking judgement was the last to be delivered by Justice Sunanda Bhandare, who headed the division bench of the Delhi High Court in the Samba case, before her untimely death. Bhandare was dying of cancer and she was too weak to even climb the dais to her chair, but she insisted on delivering the judgement in her chamber, hours before she flew abroad for chemotherapy. The High Court judgement was upheld by the Supreme Court.

It is, in fact, thanks to the conscience of the courts and the integrity and courage of a few individuals that the Samba case has been exposed for being the lie that it was. The roll of honour includes the chief investigator of the Samba case for the Intelligence Bureau, V.K. Kaul, who was the first to state categorically on the basis of his investigations that the story was a hoax. Even after retirement, Kaul continued his efforts behind the scenes to secure justice for the accused. His superior, former director of the Intelligence Bureau, T.V. Rajeshwar, similarly kept petitioning the government to review the case long after he had left service.

The present law minister, Arun Jaitley, and other lawyers volunteered their services to fight the cases of the victims. The late Atilde;sup2;f40Atilde;sup3;Indian Express correspondent B.M. Sinha cared to investigate the truth rather than accept unquestioningly the army8217;s version, as most in the media did in the late 70s when the story first broke. Sinha, who himself was under suspicion simply because he was an Anand Margi, had the courage nevertheless to write a book exposing the Samba spy hoax.

Unfortunately, the institution which has made no amends for is shameful conduct is the army itself. Successive military administrations prevented the cases from being reviewed or re-opened. Even when Mrs Gandhi ordered the case to be looked into afresh, the army did nothing, claiming it would hurt the morale and discipline of the force. Until it accepts its guilt and punishes the perpetrators of these crimes, one of whom is still in service, this stain on the honour of the Indian Army will never be washed away.

Anyone who had the moral courage to question the kangaroo courts or the men investigating the Samba spy case was himself arrested and charged with spying