Can't tell, won't tell

Jaswant Singh must be wishing dearly that he had let sleeping dogs lie. He is not a man given to either acting or speaking in haste, and his style is to communicate through generalities and avoid specifics. So it was out of character and bad enough that, after mulling the matter for over a decade, he should make a serious and specific allegation about an individual, relying on an unauthenticated copy of a purported document. That he should have done so without being sure of his facts showed a clear error of judgement. But the manner in which he has then handled the public hullabaloo has only made matters worse for him.

A man who has been finance minister, external affairs minister, defence minister and deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, first said in support of the assertion made in his book, A Call to Honour, that not only was the Prime Minister's office spied upon in 1995, it is still being spied upon. Challenged by an incensed Manmohan Singh in uncharacteristically angry tones, the BJP leader disclosed that the person concerned was alive and living abroad""suggesting strongly that he knew who he was talking about. He then said he would reveal the name to the Prime Minister, and in perhaps the worst mistake of all, even claimed that he had done so. When that turned out to be hopelessly untrue, the spy mystery began to look like a bad joke. Mr Jaswant Singh began backtracking but it was too late to salvage anything, and he finally admitted in the Rajya Sabha that he had no name with him. The whole thing got reduced to farce when the evidence began to suggest that the original "letter" may never have existed in the first place, and was a piece of fraudulence that someone planted on the unsuspecting author. Rarely has an Indian politician plastered his own face with so much egg.

There is more to the issue than what has been put between the covers of a book. For, it is incomprehensible why Jaswant Singh thought it was correct behaviour to believe that there existed a high-level security risk for the country, and not warn anyone about it. The obvious thing to do, when he got the "letter" at a time when he was deputy leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, would have been to alert the Prime Minister of the day, and leave it to him to handle. The second-best thing would have been to alert the Prime Minister of his own government, three years down the road. Having done neither, and to then go public on the subject in a book of memoirs defies all logic. Was it done to boost sales of the book? One hopes not, though sales shot up in the wake of the controversy, only to subside now. Was it done to hit at and embarrass the Congress? Perhaps, but if so it has backfired on the BJP, which cannot be very pleased with Mr Singh. Does it mean that the US has no spies or unauthorised sources in the government? No one can assert that, given past and recent history. Indeed, S Gurumurthy of Bofors fame has asserted nuclear leaks, and named names in the New Indian Express, without being challenged. The ultimate irony is that one of the people named was on the discussion panel at Jaswant Singh's book release function at a New Delhi hotel.