Double standards

The revelations in a new book, the "The Mitrokhin Archive II" by a former Soviet spy, about how the KGB bribed an Indian cabinet minister and the Congress as well as the Communist Party of India (CPI), have drawn a surprisingly muted response in India.

Had the same revelations been made about the CIA, one can only guess at the furore that would have followed (recall the unproven allegation that YB Chavan had been a CIA agent""there was an almighty uproar and the editor of the newspaper that made the charge had to resign).

Clearly, there are double standards, because to be pro-Soviet even today carries some hint of socialist patriotism, including in some government ministries. The shock may also be less because the Cold War is over, and since the Soviets lost all, their bribing achieved little.

Certainly, it was an extraordinary time in modern history. One of its most remarkable features was the massive effort that the US and the USSR expended on subverting each other and each other's friends. Necessarily, subversion implies espionage, on the one hand, and seeking to extend your influence, on the other.

Towards this end the two superpowers unleashed a flood of dirty tricks on the world, part of which was bribing local sympathisers, wherever they could be found. The bribes were intended to procure either influence or information, or, if you were lucky, both.

There was also entrapment on a huge scale, with a view to blackmailing later. It was an old game but the scale was entirely new. And India was by no means either the sole or even one of the more important targets.

Much of what the book says has been known, or at least widely suspected, for a long time. That the Soviets, acting through the KGB, were active on a large scale was an open secret; some of the methods used (like the rice deals) have also been widely discussed.

But the details of individual operations, including the sillier aspects of the handing over of slush funds to the CPI, were not. Now that they have been revealed, there is bound to be a quiet revaluation of the period when Indira Gandhi was so beholden to the CPI.

This was before the CPI(M) became the main Communist party in 1977 after its victory in West Bengal. It hardly seems likely that Indira Gandhi, who was often denouncing an unspecified "foreign hand" that was usually meant to mean the CIA, was unaware of what was going on in terms of the generalities.

That she did nothing about it is clear enough. The question is why. Was this the tacit price of assured support in the Security Council?

The CPI must also explain what it was up to. That it had always taken its cue from the USSR is an established fact, from as long ago as 1928, when, on Stalin's directions, it refused to turn itself into a party of workers and peasants, whose cause it still claims to espouse.

In 1942, during the Quit India movement it sided with the British and some of its prominent members became police informers. In 1962, the party refused to condemn China for its invasion of India. And, last but not least, it was not until 1972 that the party gave up claiming the right to secede, whatever that meant in the Indian context.