Noteworthy info

THE CIA dispatches and ambassadorial telegrams which have been compiled by journalist Kalyani Shankar and used in her soon-to-be-released book on India and the US in the sixties are an eye-opener. The confidential notes are available to the public after the standard 30-year moratorium and kept in the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, where Shankar accessed them from. Then ambassador Chester Bowles was generally dead on the mark about events in India, whether it was predicting Nehru’s successor, the state of the prime minister’s health in his last days, or giving thumbnail sketches of important Congress leaders. The names of informers have been scratched out from Bowles’s messages, but it is obvious that they were ministers and senior government functionaries. A memorandum from the CIA to the White House just before Indira Gandhi’s visit in 1966, when India was facing food shortages, reveals the cynicism of American foreign policy. The message states: “The slate has been wiped clean of previous commitments and India (is) coming to us asking for a new relationship on the terms we want.”

Unfriendly act?

SPEAKER Somnath Chatterjee feels that parliamentarians should form their own country-specific Indo-friendship groups and not lend their names to friendship societies in which commercial and private bodies are also associated. The speaker recently constituted several such friendship associations, including the Indo-US Friendship Association. The composition of this body has raised eyebrows. Chatterjee has appointed Yashwant Sinha of the BJP as chairperson of the group and Sitaram Yechury and Janardhan Reddy as vice-chairpersons. The first two have come out publicly against the Indo-US treaty in no uncertain terms. Yechury, in fact, has made no bones about the anti-US imperialism stance of his party.

Spaced-out delivery

THE parliamentary standing committee on information technology headed by former police officer Nikhil Kumar has exposed just how sloppily the department of posts has been managing its huge real-estate reserves. Consider this: the postal department has a total of 1,871 plots which have been lying vacant, some for as long as 50 years, covering an area of over 3.82 lakh square feet. Despite sitting on such huge land reserves, the department has been paying an annual rent of Rs 45 crore for hiring space. Additionally, 99 departmental buildings have had vacant space for years. In Uttar Pradesh, in the Hamirpur circle, space has been vacant since 1854. When this glaring statistic was brought to the notice of the postal department, it tried to wriggle out by claiming that the concerned department had got confused between vacant space and vacant land. Either way, someone somewhere has a lot of explaining to do.

Intelligence gap

AT the BJP’s recent national executive meet, former Intelligence Bureau Director Ajit Doval was asked to give a powerpoint presentation on terrorism. The material Doval used for his talk was largely collected while he was in office. This has ruffled the feathers of some of his former colleagues. One of them has reportedly written a letter of protest to the cabinet secretariat, questioning whether a former Intelligence Bureau chief can disseminate such privileged information.