New Delhi: Former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi had asked then Intelligence Bureau (IB) chief M.K. Narayanan to write a brief on how India maintained internal security for visiting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1988, the former civil servant has said.

The brief, made for former leader of the Soviet Union (USSR) Mikhail Gorbachev on his request, was mentioned in Congress leader and former diplomat Mani Shankar Aiyar’s autobiography Memoirs of a Maverick: The First Fifty Years (1941-1991). 

“What I recollect is that I set out, in brief, a list of the major law and order events and insurgencies that shook India from 1947-1988,” Narayanan, a 1955-batch retired IPS officer who eventually became India’s NSA under the Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance government in 2005, told ThePrint.

“It began with a description of the initial communist uprisings in the Telangana region of the then Madras State and in North Bengal, during the late 1940’s.”

The request by Gorbachev for such a brief finds no mention in an internal Soviet report of his “friendly” visit to India, translated and made available by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Wilson Center), a Washington-based think-tank. 

But the report describes the topics discussed during the visit — including India’s support for Soviet efforts in the field of nuclear disarmament and their attempts at halving their strategic offensive weapons. 

The two leaders discussed the situation in Afghanistan, with Gandhi affirming India’s support for the Geneva Accords and offering India’s support for the process of national reconciliation in that country. 

The Geneva Accords were agreements signed between Afghanistan and Pakistan and guaranteed by the United States of America and USSR. Signed in April 1988, they consisted of a variety of instruments on settling the situation in Afghanistan and offered a timeline for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from that country, 

Other topics discussed include reaffirming the agreement to exchange information and coordinate policy towards Pakistan. According to the report, Rajiv Gandhi also raised concerns on the militarisation of Japan and its “possible consequences”. 

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While the archives provided by the Wilson Center make no mention of Gorbachev’s request to Gandhi for a brief on how India maintained internal order, there are other fascinating tidbits of information, including a recorded conversation between the two on 2 July, 1987. 

In that conversation, former prime minister Gandhi thanks Gorbachev for all that the Soviet leader did for Gandhi’s children — Rahul and Priyanka. 

“I’ve just spoken with them, they are very glad,” Gandhi is quoted as saying. 

Gorbachev then asks Gandhi how they were doing. “How did you find them? Did they become stronger,” he asks.

To that, Gandhi responds: “Yes, they look great. Especially my daughter became stronger. They both benefited from an active lifestyle, swimming, and rest.”

‘Policeman’s job’

Narayanan, who was the governor of West Bengal from 2010 to 2014, told ThePrint that the brief he made for Gorbachev contained many aspects of India’s internal security issues  — the Naga insurgency in the Northeast in 1950s, 60s and the early 70s, the linguistic agitations, and the Naxalite insurgency. 

“(The brief) mentioned aspects of communal violence in different regions of the country during the 50s, and the 60s; Sikh militancy and violence in the Punjab from the late 50s etc.,” he said.

An appended note detailed the measures taken by the Indian government in each of these situations. 

In his autobiography Memoirs of a Maverick: The First Fifty Years (1941-1991), Aiyar describes Narayanan’s brief as a “thorough policeman’s job”. After reading through it, Gandhi called Aiyar, then joint secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office, and asked him: “Is this the way we have held the country together?” As Aiyar notes, the brief, while comprehensive, talked of “no dimension other than thumbscrews on the nails of rebels!”

Eventually, Aiyar drafted a new brief on Gandhi’s instruction, attaching Narayanan’s version to the annex to give Gorbachev a fuller picture. 

But Aiyar notes in his memoir that Gorbachev had “not even glanced” at the letter when Gandhi visited Moscow in July 1989 — his penultimate foreign visit before the end of his tenure as prime minister. 

(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)

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