Shadow Wars

Yatish Yadav

Wars are not always conducted on battlefields. Disinformation campaigns can also produce destructive results. When the Janata Party led by Morarji Desai came to power, the R&AW’s activities were curtailed because of Desai’s deep suspicion of intelligence agencies. Within a year, the socialist government was in disarray and the international press was flooded with reports of intense feuding within the political establishment. British spies stationed in Delhi drafted a report linking Hinduism with corruption and sin and this was leaked to the international press in the early 1980s.

R&AW analysts were surprised by the excitement in the global media over the leaked report and the poor interpretation of Hinduism that the agency believed was part of the UK’s imperial hangover. According to the leaked report, corrupt behaviour in Indian society was linked to Hindu beliefs, which emphasises individual rather than collective redemption. A more damaging allegation in the report was that, ‘In Hinduism, there is no good or evil as in the case of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.’

This was followed by the inference that ‘a natural concomitant of the absence of sin is the lack of ideas about truth. To a Hindu, the truth is usually that which most suits his convenience at any given moment. There is little place in Hindu ethos for truthfulness, unselfishness, social service or moral courage.’

According to a R&AW analyst codenamed Krishan Bhandari, this was psychological warfare, hitting at the faith of India’s majority community. There are a number of ways to make a country and especially its intelligence agencies irritated, said Bhandari. The British had used the detonator of religion to explode propaganda and the American press had used it to undermine India, a country it perceived to be close to the communist Soviet Union.

An analysis produced by the R&AW in 1982 said:

It will be noticed that the level of the discussion is fairly low. It is Eurocentric, in other terms, it is a highly parochial view of a person whose experience has been limited to the western European-Judaism-Christian-Islamic body of beliefs, the related faiths of people who believe in the Kitab. The answer to this, of course, is that dilemmas about truths both at normal times and during crises are universal phenomena. The famous question of Pontius Pilate to himself when asked to judge the accusation against Jesus is central to Christian history. ‘What is truth?’ asked the jesting Pilate and paused for an answer. It should not be difficult after research to loc