A pointless epitaph: Clumsy retelling mars Coomar Narain scandal revisit

Kallol Bhattacherjee's 'A Singular Spy' attempts to tell an espionage tale but leaves many key questions unanswered

A Singular Spy: The Untold Story of Coomar Narain

Author: Kallol Bhattacherjee

Publisher:  Bloomsbury

Pages: xiv+186

Price: Rs 499

“...It cannot be claimed that A Singular Spy will answer all the questions related to the Coomar Narain spy scandal, but it is an attempt to provide a complete picture and give honest answers to some of the lingering questions,” says Kallol Bhattacherjee, the author of the book under review in an afterword to the volume.  But he does not even attempt to raise a more important question: Why tell a tale of an affair 40 years after it came to light and 60-plus years after the events leading to it started to take shape?

Espionage being the world’s second oldest profession, a well-told spycraft story could potentially enthral any reader. Unfortunately, Mr Bhattacherjee’s writing is clumsy (and that is putting it kindly) and worse, extremely poorly edited.  That comes as a surprise, because Mr Bhattacherjee is a senior editor in a leading newspaper, long held up as a model of exemplary, if not necessarily exciting, prose.  The reader has to go over the book many times to keep up with the author’s back-and-forth narration with contextual references that are either overdone or inadequate, never just right.

For those who came in late, Coomar Narain (not his birth name; Mr Bhattacherjee would have us believe that Coomar was a master of aliases, but he himself says that Coomar chose it on a numerologist’s advice) was a Tamilian with no family.  He served briefly in the Army up to 1949, and upon his discharge, went to Delhi in search of a job.  He became a government stenographer.  He was rather good at it and aspired to a better station in life, which was not possible within the government.  He married an equally ambitious Gerty Walder from Mangalore.  She became Geeta.  Together, they bought a house in Nizamuddin in a colony that had writers and artists in residence. Coomar collected and nurtured an extensive network of fellow junior government employees.

Coomar became a Delhi representative of an emerging machinery manufacturer, T Maneklal and Co, of Mumbai and Ahmedabad.  He managed numerous foreign collaborations and representations for his employers given his network of contacts, the most important resource in that licence-permit raj.  He was well-rewarded by his employers and their foreign principals.  He managed to keep his contacts happy with gifts and liquor, the most basic instruments of entrapment barring one.  Soon after this phase of his career started, Coomar became a willing instrument of the commercial attaches of some of the Delhi missions — read chief espionage agents — of the countries with which Maneklal had ties and began supplying them information beyond that required for commercial transactions.  The French were among his chief patrons.  They managed to position themselves advantageously as defence suppliers.

Coomar had to use photocopy shops for reproducing documents.  By a pure coincidence, a junior Delhi police officer, then attached to the Central Bureau of Investigation, who habitually visited the shop most frequented by Coomar for a drink with its owner, happened to notice that the documents were marked Intelligence Bureau and had originated in the Prime Minister’s Office.  This was immediately after Rajiv Gandhi had won a landslide and the entire intelligence machinery was under a cloud because of its failure in Indira Gandhi’s assassination.  A concerted operation led to Coomar’s arrest, along with his key associates, including Yogesh Maneklal and one T N Kher, who was the personal secretary to P C Alexander, the principal secretary to Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.

An uproar followed, with long legal battles, during which some key accused died, including Coomar himself in 2002, and the case was finally closed in that year, with long sentences ranging from 10 to 14 years for most of the accused.  Geeta was found murdered in her farm house in Mehrauli in 2002.

I have put together this with considerable effort.  Mr Bhattacherjee never sticks to any one thread.  He meanders between politics, corporate affairs, espionage and, for long periods, goes completely silent about his main character.  He begins, for example, to discuss the Emergency and quickly relapses into the Bandung Conference two decades earlier.  And each time, he feels compelled to offer back references, repeating himself over and over again.  Some people are referred to by their last names alone, others are addressed by their full name and titles.  Jaykrishna Harivallabhdas was an illustrious Gujarati businessman, the pioneer chairman of the Gujarat State Fertiliser Company, the first joint-sector enterprise in India.  His son Mrugesh Jaykrishna was affected by the Coomar scandal.  Mr Bhattacherjee refers to Mrugesh as Jayakrishna and his father as Harivallabhdas, showing an unpardonable ignorance of both business history and local naming practice of using the father’s name as one’s middle name.

He talks of the Maneklal business with a turnover of around Rs 3 crore and says, without any trace of irony, that they were not in the same category as the Tatas and Birlas.  He refers on p 118 to “how calm Coomar Narain appeared” after his arrest; immediately in the next two paragraphs, he says “his paranoia grew …[and was seen] weeping endlessly.”

At the end, what does this book achieve by recalling this hoary chestnut of a case, as the ways of espionage and the entire geopolitical dynamics have undergone a sea change?  Massacre of more trees, as did the one on the Nagarwala scandal, which this unfortunate reviewer’s lot was to dissect earlier?

The reviewer is a Baroda-based economist