The prime minister has been remarkably candid in his statement to the Lok Sabha on the question of the presence of a plutonium-powered US monitoring device in the Himalayas. This is as it should be in matters which impinge on this country’s relations with another and concern millions of people at home. Mr. Morarji Desai has also not tried to gain any political advantage for his party out of the fact that another similar device, which was subsequently removed from the Nanda Kot peak and returned to the United States, was placed there in 1967 when Mrs. Indira Gandhi was the prime minister. As he has said, considerable “concern, apprehension and anxiety” existed in India in the sixties regarding Chinese intentions and capabilities and the government at the highest level considered it necessary to cooperate with the United States in establishing certain monitoring facilities in the Himalayas as a precautionary measure. As such it is unfair to blame either the late Mr. Lal Bahadur Shastri, who consented to the installation of the first device on the Nanda Devi, or Mrs. Gandhi. Their action was in consonance with a strong and widespread anti-China sentiment in the country, though it must be recalled that soon after the Chinese attack in October-November 1962, Mr. Nehru had cancelled the agreement with the Voice of America which could not have been concluded without his prior knowledge and made it known that joint air exercises with the United States and Britain in 1963 would not be repeated.
Mr. Desai’s statement closes the controversy arising out of Mr. Howard Kohn’s article in Outside. Contrary to what he has written, the CIA did not plant the monitoring devices in the Himalayas by stealth. The government of India was privy to the installations. Indeed, in the case of the second pack in 1967 it was not even deterred by the fact that the first one had been lost, perhaps irretrievably, and that it could pollute the Ganga waters if for some reason the casing deteriorated. But the mishap leading to the loss of the device and the consequent health hazards apart, some aspects of this cooperation in intelligence gathering remain notable. It is, for example, pertinent to recall that just about the time when Washington persuaded New Delhi to agree to the installation of the first device, President Johnson abruptly and insultingly withdrew an invitation to Mr. Shastri – April 16, 1955 – and he and his administration deliberately turned the Nelson’s eye to the use by Pakistan of US gifted military equipment in the Rann of Kutch which encouraged Islamabad to try to seize Kashmir by force later that summer. The American policy clearly had two faces. But how did the Indian decision-makers reconcile themselves to this fact? Did the need for aid, especially food aid, have something to do with it? Similarly, it is interesting that despite her disenchantment with Washington over the devaluation of the Indian rupee in June 1966, Mrs. Gandhi should have continued the cooperation with it in intelligence gathering. An explanation is due from her, specially in view of her recent charges against the CIA and by implication against at least some of the Janata leaders.