NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 18 Was Promode Dasgupta an Intelligence Bureau (IB) informant in the Indian Communist movement? Certainly the KGB believed so, says The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World.

The just-released book—the second based on classified material smuggled to the West in 1992 by Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin—puts it quite baldly on page 313: ‘‘According to the KGB report, an investigation into Promode Das Gupta, who became secretary of the Bengal Communist Party in 1959, concluded that he had been recruited by the IB in 1947. Further significant IB penetrations were discovered in the Kerala and Madras parties. By the late 1960s KGB penetration of the Indian intelligence community had enabled it to turn the tables on the IB.’’

The book seems to imply that the KGB was competing in India with the CIA as well as the IB, spying on the latter to help the CPI. Monetary support for the CPI arrived in a variety of ways: ‘‘The Soviet news agency Novosti provided further subsidies by routinely paying the CPI publishing house at a rate 50 per cent above its normal charges.’’

By the 1970s, ‘‘while there were some complaints from the CPI leadership at the use of Soviet funds to support Mrs Gandhi and Congress (R), covert funding for the CPI seems to have been unaffected’’.

Sample page 323: ‘‘By 1972 the import-export business founded by the CPI a decade earlier to trade with the Soviet Union had contributed more than 10 million rupees to Party funds. Other secret subsidies, totalling at least 1.5 million rupees, had gone to state Communist parties, individuals and media associated with the CPI. The funds which were sent from Moscow to Party headquarters via the KGB were larger still. In the first six months of 1975 alone they amounted to over 2.5 million rupees.’’

Money was usually transferred to ‘‘a senior member of the Party’s National Council codenamed BANKIR’’. KGB officers would pay him in his office, which they visited under the ‘‘pretext’’ of ‘‘briefings for visiting press delegations from the Soviet bloc’’. Fellow traveller intellectuals were also ‘‘recruited’’ by a vast network of front organisations ‘‘that appear to have been on a larger scale than those of the CIA’’: ‘‘By the early 1980s there were about 1,500 Indo-Soviet Friendship Societies as compared with only two Indo-American Friendship Societies.’’ The ‘‘World Peace Council, headed by an Indian Communist, (was) much used as a vehicle for Soviet peace measures’’.

The KGB’s ‘‘special relationship’’ with the Congress was presumably more worth its while. In 1947, the book says, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia ‘‘dismissed’’ Mahatma Gandhi as ‘‘a reactionary, who betrayed the people and helped the imperialists against them; aped the ascetics; pretended in a demagogic way to be a supporter of Indian independence’’. The Mahatma’s successors in the Congress were better appreciated by the Kremlin, it appears.

The KGB funded Congress and CPI candidates in, at least, elections between 1967 and 1975. After Indira Gandhi lost, the KGB’s Delhi office ‘‘set up an active-measures fund codenamed DEPO in an attempt to buy influence within the Committee for Democratic Action founded by Mrs Gandhi, in May 1977’’. By July the ‘‘fund had available 275,000 convertible rubles’’.

  US, UK spies behind political thriller: CPI  

• CPI’s A B Bardhan: Book is no more than a spy thriller penned by an English writer who wants to make money... Part of a campaign timed to stem the Left’s growing mass base and had been engineered by US and British intelligence... There will be no demand to ban the book. Let this book come, let people read political thrillers. • Cong’s RK Dhawan, key aide to Indira Gandhi: I was in total charge of fund collection in 1977. Elections funds were donated by industrialists. Uma Shankar Dikshit was AICC treasurer. No money, not even a rupee came from any outside source... Lalit Narain Mishra, it is being said, collected funds for the 1977 election while he died in January 1975. I never saw Mishra being entrusted the task of fund-collection.—ENS

Documents were frequently forged to discredit Congress opponents, the book says. One was a ‘‘bogus telegram to London from the British high commissioner, John Freeman, reporting that the United States was giving vast sums to rightwing parties and politicians’’. The forgery was revealed because the telegram was signed Sir John Freeman, when in actuality the British envoy was not a knight.

Aside from Kashmiri civil servants around Indira Gandhi, her Left wing party colleagues were cultivated, the book claims: ‘‘Another leading figure in the Congress Forum for Socialist Action was recruited in 1971 as Agent RERO and paid about 100,000 rupees a year for what the KGB considered important political intelligence as well as acting as an agent recruiter.’’

By 1978, the book reports KGB’s ‘‘Directorate K’’, responsible for penetration of foreign intelligence/security agencies, as running over 30 agents in India, ‘‘10 of whom were Indian intelligence officers’’.