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The Indian Spy by Mihir Bose.

The spy who remained in the cold

Kulbhushan Jadhav, formerly of the Indian Navy, and Mohammed Habid Zahir, formerly of the Pakistan Army, might be the latest cogs in the dangerous, life-sapping game of trans-regional spying introduced by the British.

The spy who remained in the cold

Master of the game: The book has unexpected turns — how Talwar double crossed Netaji and facilitated the arrest of most of his lieutenants



Sandeep Dikshit

Kulbhushan Jadhav, formerly of the Indian Navy, and Mohammed Habid Zahir, formerly of the Pakistan Army, might be the latest cogs in the dangerous, life-sapping game of trans-regional spying introduced by the British.

The spies for Russia, Italy, Germany and, primarily the British, lived a life on the razor’s edge in the 1940s. Mihir Bose adds one more to the folklore of the Great Game by doggedly pursuing a branch line in the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s sage: the man who escorted Netaji to Kabul through the dangerous badlands, west of the Indus and convinced the Italian Ambassador into issuing a passport that enabled Netaji to flee to Germany via USSR.

The tale unwound all by chance. A British historian looking into the files of the North-West Frontier Province (tribal areas) stumbled upon a confession given to the Lahore police. As is known, the British burnt most of such records before leaving India. But call it bureaucratese, a document of the Punjab Police found its way into the tribal area files.

The man, codenamed Silver by the British and once handled by the brother of the conceiver of James Bond, Peter Fleming, briefly figured in Bose’s biography of Netaji. As the learned Tapan Raychaudhuri justifies the need for a full-length book on Bhagat Ram Talwar: “This prince among spies surely deserves a biography in his own right. Hats off to a man who deceived everybody and survived the [Second World] War without being hanged.”

The Second World War was replete with spies from both sides who became legends: Juan Pajol Garcia (27 aliases), Richard Sorge (warned Stalin of German invasion) and Cicero (valet of British envoy in Turkey). But our own Talwar beats them hollow because of the theatre in which he operated: from Churchill to Obama, and as Donald Trump will find out, no one could make people of the tribal areas bend to their will or play by their rules. Talwar not only deceived them into believing that he was a Muslim Pathan but had the unique distinction of simultaneously spying for four countries — Germany, Italy, France and the British — and never getting caught. The grateful Germans even awarded him the Iron Cross!

This was the time when the British were using the air force, army and dollops of hard cash to keep the tribals under check. Talwar made innumerable trips through these areas but such was his knowledge about the lay of the land that he would invariably skirt areas where punitive missions were underway.

The book sweeps in more than just a hagiographic account of a Punjabi Hindu whose family settled in the tribal areas four generations back and intermittently participated as an equal in the blood feuds that pockmark this land. There is always a well-researched context for every incident and the best part is Bose doesn’t take sides as the saga swings to and fro from the Indian mainland to Kabul. Communists (Talwar was one), spy handlers, the deceiver and the deceived, all are given an equal treatment.

The story of the Second World War, as we have been told, is the victor’s account: the good guys triumphed over the evil. Not true, says Bose, as he goes on to uncover the many skeletons in their cupboards, including rank racism, double dealing and brutality. As George Orwell once sarcastically said, the British were fine and decent folks ``if you don’t count [what they did to] the niggers.’’

The Communist Party features prominently, especially after 1942 when they decided to help the British in keeping the factories running to meet the demands of the war, that conveniently for them turned into a fascists [Germans, Italians et al] versus the good guys who now included their ideological wellspring, the Soviet Union.

The book has unexpected turns — how Talwar double crossed Netaji and facilitated the arrest of most of his lieutenants and how his guru was left to die in the USSR by comrade Achar Singh Cheena.

After vanishing in 1945, Talwar aka Silver, remerged briefly after 28 years but remained uncover because among the men who had known his work, some had become delusional while the comrades kept the information to themselves. He kept himself in public life but like all good spies who hang up their boots, it is not known where and how he passed away in 1983.

As Bose says, 75 years after Silver/Talwar began making the dangerous crossings through the tribal areas, the story has no closure unlike fictional spy stories. If any real-life saga about the Great Game rivals Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, then this is it.

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