February 24 will be a day of reckoning in former ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan's life. The fight to get the people, who implicated him in a false espionage case in 1994, punished, has been a long one for the 76-year-old from Thiruvananthapuram. Dismissing a plea for a four-week adjournment, the Supreme Court Bench comprising Justices Dipak Misra, Ashok Bhushan and R. Banumathi has scheduled the final hearing for Friday.
Despite being cleared of all the charges in 1998, the officers who framed Narayanan, thereby cutting short an illustrious career, have been walking free for the past 23 years.
It is a matter of shame that while India and ISRO is basking in the glory of the launch of a record 104 satellites in one go, the former scientist is still knocking the doors of our legal system for justice. Interestingly, he was a vocal supporter of the liquid fuel rocket technology and was in-charge of the cryogenics divisions at the ISRO, when the scandal broke. He, along with another scientist D. Sasikumaran was accused of selling classified information on India's cryogenic engine programme to Russia and Pakistan's ISI through two Maldivian women—Mariam Rasheeda and Fauzia Hassan—for which which he, allegedly, got sexual favours, too.
Kerala Police arrested Mariam for overstaying in India but she proved to be the 'key' to unlocking the ISRO spy case. Or at least, that is what the police and the Intelligence Bureau wanted the world to believe, when they arrested Narayanan from his home in Perunthanni, a suburb of Thiruvananthapuram. Two years later, however, the CBI, which took over the case from the SIT, dismissed all charges against him and slammed the IB and the Kerala Police for the fabricated case. The CBI even filed a closure report before the court. Police officers Siby Mathews (who later served as Additional Director General of Police), and K.K. Joshwa and S. Vijayan (both of whom served as Superintendent of Police later) were accused of implicating Narayanan in the false case. IB officers R.B. Sreekumar, Mathew John and others, were also found responsible of conspiring against him.
The Kerala Government ordered the police to re-probe the matter, but the Supreme Court quashed it in 1998. It acquitted the accused of all charges and also ordered the government to pay Narayanan Rs 1 lakh. In 2001, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) asked the state government to pay Rs 10 lakh for the mental agony, physical torture (Narayanan was in police custody for 50 days, where he and the others were, allegedly, subjected to 'third-degree') and social stigma he and his family suffered. He got the money only 11 years later.
In 2011, the Oommen Chandy government in Kerala decided against taking any action against the three police officers. In fact, the Congress leader, along with A.K. Antony, was instrumental in pressurising the then Kerala chief minister K. Karunakaran to resign following the scandal. Antony replaced him as the chief minister in 1995.
Mariam Rasheeda
The BJP, too, allegedly, used the case to settle political scores with IB officer Sreekumar, who had spoken against Narendra Modi in the aftermath of the post-Godhra riots. Sreekumar was then serving as ADGP (Gujarat). Narayanan met Modi when he came to Thiruvananthapuram in 2013 as the Gujarat chief minister. The saffron party demanded the prosecution of the IPS officer and others, though nothing materialised, even after it came to power at the Centre.
Narayanan appealed against the state government's decision not to prosecute the officers. In 2014, the Kerala High Court quashed the government order and asked it to reconsider the decision. But the officers appealed to a division bench of the High Court, which set aside the earlier court order. It was against the order of the division bench that Narayanan appealed in the Supreme Court in 2015, which awaits closure on February 24.
Meanwhile, what everybody overlooked, as Narayanan said, is the motive of the officers in framing him and others. He has repeatedly said that it was part of a larger conspiracy; one that involved foreign players and was targeted at derailing India's cryogenic programme. Much against America's wishes, India had clinched a deal with Russian space agency Glavkosmos to get the cryogenic engine delivered and even managed to do it with the help of Ural Airlines. But then the scandal broke out and almost all the important people associated with the deal were arraigned. To support his claim of America's Central Intelligence Agency being involved, Narayanan had pointed to the sudden exit of IB director Rattan Sehgal in 1996 for his involvement with the CIA. In fact, space writer Brian Harvey wrote about this conspiracy angle in his book, Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier.
Sabotage or not, the scandal broke the back of India's quest to perfect cryogenic technology. According to Narayanan, the case delayed India's cryogenic project by almost two decades. India is now on the cusp of making space history, having successfully tested its largest indigenously developed cryogenic engine, which will power the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark III rocket.
Narayanan will be eagerly waiting for ISRO to realise the dream he once saw.
