'Classified: Hidden Truths in the ISRO Spy Story', a book by J Rajasekharan Nair looks for truth behind the ISRO spy case

New Delhi: A new book seeks to unearth the hidden truth behind the ISRO spy case by unravelling how state agencies are “surreptitiously trying to bury the wreckage of a failed operation masterminded by ISRO to illegally transfer cryogenic rocket technology from Russia to India”.

J Rajasekharan Nair says 27 years after it hit the headlines, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) espionage case is still alive and kicking.

“This time, with Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registering the First Information Report (FIR) before the Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM), Thiruvananthapuram, against seven Kerala Police officers and 11 officers from IB, all retired, for conspiring to effectuate the illegal arrest and subsequent torture of S Nambi Narayanan, one of the six discharged ‘accused’ in the spy case (1994),” he says.

According to Nair, the new development has pushed the public into a mire of contrived truths.

“That’s partly because of the asinine and disgusting move to project the espionage case as the sad story of Nambi Narayanan, effacing even the names of the other five victims - two of whom are no more - from public memory. It is also because of the stealthy manner in which the state agencies had reacted to the case then and now, and partly because of the hidden fractures in our system,” he writes in “Classified: Hidden Truths in the ISRO Spy Story” (Srishti Publishers).

“Classified” is a sequel to Nair’s 1998 book “Spies from Space: The ISRO Frame-up”.

He says the entire matter that “appears to be a single case is a multi-layered and complex federation of mini-narratives in which timing of intersections, concinnity of melodramas, entry of the dramatis personae, and their eloquent silences were so neatly trimmed, timed, and fused that they unfolded like a single end to end espionage story”.

“Classified” tries to re-read the text of the ISRO espionage case through documents, facts, and prudence, and not through the projection of individuals as the good, the bad, and the ugly.

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“Contrary to popular belief, it was not the Supreme Court but the CJM court in Ernakulum, Kerala on 2 May 1996 that discharged all the six accused in the ISRO spy case after accepting the Closure Report of CBI that concluded the case was false and baseless,” the author says.

“In 2018, the Supreme Court passed its orders in an SLP filed by S Nambi Narayanan challenging the Kerala High Court that decided no action was necessary against the police officers who had investigated the ISRO spy case,” he adds.

Nair claims that the real facts that “led to the CIA fabricating the absurd spy case have not been addressed by any State Institution, including the Supreme Court and CBI”.

Instead, the State agencies are “surreptitiously trying to bury the wreckage of a failed operation by ISRO to illegally get cryogenic rocket technology transferred from Glavkosmos to ISRO using clandestine methods and outwitting the provisions of the amended MTCR”, he says.

Nair says his book “tells about this failed operation and the role of former ISRO technocrats, including Nambi Narayanan, in the illegal operation and how it led to the CIA planting the absurd spy story using moles in IB”.

“If the Supreme Court or the Union government orders a judicial inquiry into the factors that led to the spy case, a lot of skeletons would tumble from the cupboard of ISRO and Nambi Narayanan. So the case is not yet dead, though efforts are on to bury it alive without opening the can of worms,” he adds.

“My attempt is to expose the counter-narrative being scripted by the state agencies and Nambi Narayanan presenting Narayanan as the only sad victim of the ISRO case,” he says.
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