It's a game all governments play. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India, "During the last quarter of a century or more, I have not written a single letter, which has been posted in India, either to an Indian or a foreign address, without realising that it would have been seen, and possibly copied, by some secret service censor. Nor have I spoken on the phone without remembering that my conversation was likely to be tapped." Nehru's India improved on British Indian mechanisms. According to Calder Walton's Empire of Secrets, relations between the MI5 and Indian intelligence "remained remarkably close" even when political relations between New Delhi and London were chilly. B N Mullick, the head of intelligence, asked MI5 to send him a training officer. Sir Roger Hollis, MI5's director-general, "remarked that Mullick's views on Communism were actually closer to those of MI5 than those of his own government."
My one brush with official snooping was during the takeover of Sikkim. Since newspapermen enjoy nothing better than a colleague's misfortune, a gloating caller informed me one morning that the external affairs ministry was mightily annoyed with me. It had sternly rebutted a report in London's Observer newspaper claiming I "was prevented from leaving the country and from filing" on the legislative machinations to annex Sikkim. I, at once, telephoned K S Bajpai, India's political officer in Gangtok, a charming and urbane diplomat who was always personally extremely well disposed to me. "Ask your friend Karma!" Bajpai replied. He meant Karma Topden, the Chogyal of Sikkim's former deputy secretary, intelligence chief and chief of protocol, who then represented Sikkim in Calcutta. Karma later became a member of the Rajya Sabha and India's ambassador to Mongolia.
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I did call Karma but must first explain the Observer's confusion. A supposedly broken-down truck across a tunnel prevented me from reaching Gangtok on April 9, 1975 when, to quote Nar Bahadur Khatiawada, leader of Sikkim's anti-monarchy revolutionaries, "all the Assembly members were rounded up and under threat were escorted to the Assembly and made to sign on the dotted line…" Some ventured to murmur that Sikkim's Indian chief judge, Tarachand Hariomal, had forbidden legislators to discuss the constitution. "We were told to 'shut up' and 'not to be too clever' by the president of the Assembly, Shri B B Lal," Khatiawada wrote. The dead truck sprang to life and revved away as soon as the Assembly had done its job. I drove on to Gangtok.
Karma was a close friend and didn't need any persuasion to tell me that the Gyalmo, the Chogyal's American second wife, the former Hope Cooke, had called to tell him of the legislative coup and how I was prevented from reporting it. Karma dutifully telephoned the Chogyal's son, Crown Prince Tenzing, at Cambridge. Tenzing passed on the news to the Observer in London. Unfamiliar with Himalayan geography, the paper thought the blocked tunnel had prevented me from leaving India. As explained in my introduction to the revised edition of Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim, "It was an innocent mistake in this Gangtok-Calcutta-Cambridge-London game of Chinese whispers. The interesting discovery for me was that telephone lines - of the palace in Gangtok, Karma's in Calcutta, and possibly mine too - were tapped."
Where does spying end? Giving me a lift once in his official car, an Indian high commissioner in Singapore began talking loudly and slightly critically about local politics. Amazed at his tactlessness, I pointed to our local Chinese driver. "That's why" His Excellency told me in Hindi. "He might report back." The fifth Earl of Carnarvon records that while seconded to the British embassy in Constantinople during World War I, he was ordered to spy on "a certain high-profile critic of the British position in the Middle East." When the target turned out to be his father's younger brother, an authority on Balkan and Turkish affairs and favourite of the sultan's, Carnarvon and his uncle "resolved to formulate some amusing stories" for his superiors.
Not that the British are so gullible. They long ago anticipated High Commissioner Jaimini Bhagwati's ploy of stepping out of doors to dodge eavesdroppers by placing rock-shaped listening devices in Moscow gardens. The Soviets were smarter. They bulldozed the gardens.