By its very nature, the dealings in the corridors of power between government functionaries, big businesses and middlemen, are Byzantine. In ’80s India, Coomar Narain, a man who worked for the Maneklal group, a Mumbai-based trading company, was identified as the face of an espionage scandal—it was the first time an Indian spy was placed before the public, on colour television.
Coomar had built a network of stenographers and clerks who worked at the PMO, people traditionally thought to be without access, and passed information on India’s defence purchases, its nuclear energy programme and military strategies to foreign governments.
In his book A Singular Spy: The Untold Story of Coomar Narain (Bloomsbury), Kallol Bhattacherjee, says Coomar’s motivation was non-ideological. Bhattacherjee, a journalist focused on foreign affairs for two decades, identifies this to be the tipping point that started “surveillance governance in post-1947 India; something that would become more creative as government agencies perfected techniques” for tracking its own officials and citizens.
Excerpts from a conversation:
Coomar Narain spied and got documents out of which PMOs?
It appears that he was active in the business of information exchange since the late Nehru years and that of Lal Bahadur Shastri. Indeed, it was in the 1960s that his employer began to take giant strides in collaboration with major foreign tech companies from Poland, Germany, France and so on. The Rajiv Gandhi era ended his career as it was then that an internal security crackdown took place after the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
According to you, is Coomar a corporate lobbyist or a spy?
For me, he was a human being who was a corporate lobbyist, who nurtured insecure government officials who looked up to him as a father figure while he sold information to foreign powers on the side. He was also a troubled husband whose wife had a complicated past, a step father to a crime-prone teenager and ultimately a man dealing with his own delusions and paranoia.