As agency messages relating to Mr Seymour Hersh’s charge against Mr Morarji Desai came in on Thursday, our reaction was one of stunned disbelief. Everything we have known about Mr. Desai led to the inescapable conclusion that he could not be guilty of such a heinous crime – his long record of dedicated service to the country, his ambition to be India’s Prime Minister which he did not hide even during Mr Nehru’s life-time, his self-righteousness and pride, his connections with leading Indian businessmen who could easily have met his personal and political needs, his singular inability to engage in secret activity of any kind and so on. He has, of course, been an anti-communist all his life. Indeed, till 1977 when he became the country’s Prime Minister and then came to realize the importance of the Soviet connection, he is known to have been privately critical of Mr Nehru’s and Mrs Gandhi’s allegedly pro-Soviet foreign policy. This ideological bias has exposed him to persistent attacks by the Indian left. He has also been opposed to Mrs Gandhi, especially since 1969. But all this cannot possibly be adduced as evidence that he cooperated with the CIA and fed the US administration material which it could use against India. Mr Desai favoured the war with Pakistan in 1971 as much as any other Indian. Before 1977, he was never known to favour good relations with Pakistan. The ridiculously low sum mentioned – $ 20,000 a year – made the whole story look silly. Even so, on Thursday we decided to withhold comment because we wanted to see the text of what Mr Hersh had written in his book.
The excerpts which appear elsewhere in this issue contain a number of obvious mistakes of fact which our political correspondent has exposed. This leaves little room for doubt that Mr Hersh has not been as careful as he should have been while making so serious a charge against no less a person than a former Prime Minister of so important and self-respecting a country as India. In fact, he has been quite casual. He could, for example, have easily checked up that Mr Desai did not stay on as deputy prime minister after Mrs Gandhi had divested him of the finance portfolio in the summer of 1969, and that she did not return to the office of Prime Minister in July 1979. While this carelessness establishes that Mr Hersh has not scrutinized the “information” leaked to him by some former CIA men, it does not provide a clue regarding the motives of those individuals. We cannot, therefore, say whether there has been a confusion of identities and whether the individuals concerned have deliberately indulged in this “dirty trick” (to use a favourite American expression). And what on earth could their purpose be? All we know is that an honourable man has been maligned grievously and gratuitously. Mr Hersh did not need to bring in Mr Desai’s name to make his charges against Mr Nixon and Mr Kissinger stick.