spy vs. spy

aug 3rd, 2006

kim philby and the other british traitors at least had the decency to run off to their benefactors, the soviets. india's traitors don't have the grace, nor, alas, the need, to do so. they can thrive in india while selling the country down the river, loudly professing their china-love, vatican/baptist-love, saudi-love.

india has become jaichand-nation. benedict arnolds abound.

reminds me of an iit classmate whose dad is a big wheel in marxist politics in kerala. this gent, who shall remain unnamed, used to be very anti-america when he was in college. but guess where he ended up for his post-b tech education and subsequent working life? oh yes, america.

kunchan nambiar said it best in a different context: "deepasthambham maha-ascharyam, namukkum kittanam panam"

that is, "all this [a new lighthouse] is very nice, very impressive, now how about some money for me too?"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: G

http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=EDITS&file_name=edit3%2Etxt&counter_img=3   India's spies for all seasons

Sunanda K Datta-Ray My fear about the spy scare - not so much a real scare as exciting gossip that diminishes Mr Jaswant Singh's highly readable memoir A Call to Honour: In Service of Emergent India - is that it might reinforce what he calls American "reluctance to accept (India) as a responsible member of the international community."

Crying wolf is not the pastime of responsible people. Indira Gandhi's obsession with the "Foreign Hand" made mockery of a subject of the utmost seriousness. The present chatter, replete with Rajya Sabha privilege motion and formal US denial, continues that damage. Sadly, it is prompted less by the deliberately intriguing summary on page 126 of the book than by the author's subsequent seemingly unguarded comments. To outsiders it must seem as if Indians conjure up spies for all seasons... and purposes.

Espionage is essential to statecraft everywhere. But whereas Britain's Cambridge Communists were guilty of treason, what was known as the "Scotch for Secrets" scandal (six officials in Rajiv Gandhi's office were convicted of passing classified information to the American Central Intelligence Agency) was merely frivolous. I always felt Morarji Desai should have made a public issue in this country of his rebuttal of New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh's allegations and established that spying is not a joke. That also applies to cloak-and-dagger accounts of meetings in hotel car parks and packets being handed over involving the Intelligence Bureau's Rattan Sehgal.

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