A Scientist Sacrificed

after the Supreme Court of Bharat cleared his name in so-called espionage, former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientist S Nambi Narayanan recently remarked that he had to undergo “untold misery” and “suffering” when he was jailed. He also reiterated that the “ISRO spy scandal” was no spy case at all and those that plotted the story should have been a little clever.

“This was nothing but a fabricated case. They found out that I had sold a yet-to-be-created cryogenic technology to an enemy nation. How is it possible to sell something when it was never there?”

On September 14, 2018, the Supreme Court awarded Narayanan Rs 50 lakh compensation for the humiliation and suffering he underwent after being arrested by Kerala police. The Apex Court has also ordered the setting up of a committee led by a former Supreme Court judge, DK Jain, to inquire into the role of the officials who implicated the ISRO scientist. The officials include, then Inspector General of Police Siby Mathews and then Deputy Superintendent of Police KK Joshua and S Vijayan.

Narayanan introduced the liquid fuel rocket technology in Bharat in the early 1970s, when A. P. J. Abdul Kalam’s team was working on solid motors. He foresaw the need for liquid fuelled engines for ISRO’s future civilian space programmes. He was encouraged by the then ISRO chairman Satish Dhawan, and his successor UR Rao. Narayanan developed liquid propellant motors, first building the successful 600-kg thrust engine in the mid-1970s and after that moving on to bigger engines. After nearly two decades of work and with assistance from France he led his team to develop the Vikas engine used today by all ISRO rockets including the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) that took Chandrayaan-1 to the moon on Oct 22, 2008. However, with the success of Chandrayaan-1, any laurel didn’t come the way of Narayanan. Why? It is because he was falsely defamed much before his work broke new grounds!

In 1994, Narayanan was falsely charged with leaking vital defence secrets to two alleged Maldivian intelligence officers, Mariam Rasheeda and Fauzia Hassan. Defence officials said the secrets pertained to highly confidential “flight test data” from experiments with rocket and satellite launches. Nambi Narayanan was among two scientists (the other being D Sasikumaran) that were accused of selling ISRO secrets for millions. However, his house seemed nothing out of the ordinary and did not show signs of the corrupt gains he was accused of.

Narayanan was arrested and he spent 50 days in jail. He says that the Intelligence Bureau (IB) officials who interrogated him wanted him to make false accusations against the top brass of ISRO. He alleges that two IB officials had asked him to implicate AE Muthunayagam, his boss and then Director of the Liquid Propulsion System Centre (LPSC). When he refused to comply, he was tortured until he collapsed and was hospitalised.

In May 1996, the charges were dismissed as phony by the Central Bureau of Investigation. They were also dismissed by the Supreme Court in April 1998. In September 1999, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) passed strictures against the government of Kerala for having damaged Narayanan’s distinguished career in space research along with the physical and mental torture to which he and his family were subjected. After the dismissal of charges against them, the two scientists, Sasikumar and Narayanan were transferred out of Thiruvananthapuram and were given desk jobs!

Is it merely a coincidence that Narayanan’s case has a Congress connection? When he was falsely implicated by Kerala police in 1994, Congress leader K Karunakaran was the Chief Minister of Kerala. In 2011, Congress leader Oommen Chandy after becoming the Chief Minister of Kerala decided to close the long pending case against the three key police officers, namely, Siby Mathew, S Vijayan (Circle Inspector, Special Branch) and KK Joshua. These three officers were put under investigation by CBI, and the agency had recommended that action should be taken against the officers for ‘unprofessional conduct’.

The CBI also had placed recommendations before the then Chief Minister EK Narayanan of CPM, in December 1997, but he chose not to issue any order, citing a pending appeal from the scientists and the CBI against the Government decision to withdraw an earlier notification referring the case to the CBI.

The Apex Court finally decided the appeal in favour of the scientists and the other accused. This judgement came on April 29, 1998, but the file proposing action against the police officials remained under the carpet for 13 years, when finally in 2011 Oommen Chandy chose to close the case.

It has also come to the light that the illegal acts of certain senior police and Intelligence Bureau (IB) officials have not been probed at all. Rattan Seghal was the Additional Director of IB those days. The top IB officials involved in the ISRO Espionage Case were Mathew John, Joint Director, IB and RB Sreekumar, Deputy Director, SIB, Thiruvananthapuram who were acting under the command of Seghal. There are wide reports that Seghal was operating at the behest of the CIA and that in December 1996 he was forced to take compulsory retirement from service for his links with the CIA. These facts have surfaced from a writ petition filed by Adv PS Sreedharan Pillai, currently Kerala BJP State president, on behalf of KK Ramachandran Master, a prominent Congress leader and former minister in the State, before Kerala High Court on October 22, 2013.

The case is closed for all these years, and now Court has asked to compensate Narayanan. What has been lost in the malfunctioning of the State system, is a remarkable career of the scientist which could have contributed way more than what he did!