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Mig Alley

North Korea – China border

March 1952

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You are probably wondering why the story has suddenly moved to the Korean peninsula.

Listen, this blog is mine and I can take the story anywhere I please, capisce? Just bear with me and you’ll see the connection at some point in the future.

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When the Korean War began in 1950, the North Koreans didn’t have an air force worth its name. Their bosom pals, the Chinese, did but they could not have done much to help since they themselves had a pitiful air force consisting of hand-me-down Yak1s, Mig-2s&3s and assorted other World War II planes that the Soviets had been about to mothball.

Besides, China was itself a paraplegic in 1950, decimated and sucked dry by decades of brutal Japanese occupation.

As to the other communist nation that could have helped, Stalin’s Russia, it was still reeling from the devastation of the Second World War and just beginning to gather its shit together, ill-prepared to provide the North Koreans with any significant support.

North Korea was wide open.

Those days, victory depended solely on air power and America had overwhelming superiority there. Could America have moved in and delivered the coup de grace, bombed Kim Il Sung’s communist dictatorship back to stone age, united Korea into one vibrant democracy that is today’s South Korea and built a permanent presence right at the communists’ doorstep? Did it overestimate the USSR/China’s military capability at that moment? Did America chicken out? I think that it did.

America had no reason to be so apprehensive about a Soviet counter strike.

Yes, a Nazi son-of-a-bitch theoretical physicist named Klaus Fuchs, had recently been saved from the Nuremberg noose and pampered by the US. Yes, he had been put to work on the atom bomb in the Manhattan Project and yes, he had defected and shown the Russians how to build an atom bomb and they had tested their first device in 1949.

But the Soviets were yet to build a reliable nuclear inventory. My bet is that uniting the two Koreas would have been a cakewalk for America if they hadn’t chickened.

The 500BC Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, has written that it is necessary to have an intelligence apparatus that has the means to assess the capability of the enemy. Israel’s Mossad and Aman have proved that. America’s intelligence agencies failed to accurately gauge the Soviet/Chinese preparedness and therefore we now have to live with two nations, North and South Korea, both nuclear-armed in an antsy truce, divided by a deadly DMZ on the 38th parallel.

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There is one country that profited hugely from the Second World War – The United States of America.

For America the Second World War turned out to be a boon which saw unparalleled economic prosperity, of the kind that is especially reserved for nations that fight wars in other lands far from their own.

Let’s get a sense of how the America that we know today became the America that we know today……

Before Pearl Harbour, the US was a peacenik nation, happy not to interfere in the conflicts of others, reasonably secure from cross-border invasions by two great oceans on either side and two friendly nations, Canada and Mexico, to the north and south.

Pearl Harbour changed everything. In the words of Franklin Roosevelt, it “awoke a sleeping giant”.

Between 1941 and 1945 the US government signed $175 billion (USD 4 trillion today) worth of prime defence contracts, 25% of which went to just seven companies – Boeing, Lockheed, North American, Grumman, GM, Ford and Chrysler. Between them, they provided the flying machines, the tanks, artillery, jeeps, trucks and armoured vehicles that were required for the war.

American industry provided almost two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the war: 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks and 2,000,000 armoured personnel carriers and trucks. 

In four years, American industrial production, already the world’s largest, doubled in size.

Numerous large American corporations, that were making cars and trucks, home appliances, toys and other products for peacetime use, switched and transitioned swiftly to wartime production. Ford Motor Company began producing B24 Liberators, 18200 of which were built in the period 1940-1944. In addition to aircraft, Ford plants built 277,896 vehicles (tanks, armored cars and GPW (General Purpose Willys – reconnaissance vehicles known as Willys Jeeps). Chrysler’s wartime production included trucks, tanks, aircraft parts, guns, ammunition, rockets and bombs. GM’s Chevy specialized in all kinds of trucks, aircraft engines and artillery shells. Buick produced the M18 Hellcat tank destroyers and supplied radial engines for Boeing B-17s and B-24s, Douglas C-47s and C-54s. Alcoa, the aluminum giant, switched to airplane fuselages. The Lionel Toy Train Co. began making aircraft parts. Mattatuck, a nail manufacturer, switched to producing machine gun magazines and ammo.

Then there were large shipyards and steel companies such as Bethlehem Steel, Newport Shipyard, Norfolk Dry Dock and New York Naval Shipyard who churned out battleships and submarines by the dozen. By January 1945, the US Navy had 61,045 ocean-going vessels including 23 battleships, over 100 aircraft carriers, 59 cruisers, 425 destroyers, 400 destroyer-escorts, 237 submarines and 54,000 landing craft and assault ships. Plus 37,000 planes.

All of these armaments were built at American factories that were never touched by aerial bombardment.

Before the Second World War, America was a nation ravaged by depression, with a 40% rate of unemployment. By 1950, 5 years after the war, that America was unrecognizable. Those same factories kept on humming with activity, quickly switching back to peacetime production of consumer goods and reconstruction materials.

Every European nation needed household appliances, cars, washing machines, radios, medicine, movies, food, concrete, cement, steel and everything else. Europe’s industrial sector had been flattened and there was a virtual monopoly named America, ready to sell. The Europeans stood in a queue, hungry to rebuild.

America’s employment and household incomes skyrocketted. Every home now had a car, a TV and a front lawn and every man, a job.

America had just discovered that it loved making war.

America had also realized that war was good business. The $175 billion had paid off.

And that is how, in the initial stages of the Korean War, American P51 Mustangs, F80s and F86 Sabre jets (and later on, F100s and F104s) came to own the skies over North Korea.

The term ‘Shock and awe’ would be an understatement. Bridges, railway sidings, workshops, army barracks, civilian settlements, large built-up areas…nothing was spared. North Korean ground forces were clobbered, bombed and strafed mercilessly. It was a turkey shoot.

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Then, suddenly the tide turned. Strange things began happening. Pilots in the F86s started engaging a new kind of hostile jet fighters that looked a lot like their own F86 Sabres, but were heavier armed and could climb faster. They would appear out of nowhere in tight boxes of four that came to be known as a ‘swarm’. Frequently a swarm would zoom right through, above and below a formation of F86s, leaving the Americans gaping, like ‘What the…&???? What were those?’

At first, some imagined them to be rogue American pilots in aircraft that had either been stolen or reverse engineered from the F86s. Given that the F86 Sabre was just a year into service then, the appearance of enemy hardware that strongly resembled and even outperformed F86s, was disquieting to the Americans.

Those “freaky fighters” were the newly developed Soviet Mig-15. In all 18000 were built. NATO gave the fighter the code name “Fagot”, a sobriquet that was meant to be a denigration that soon looked undeserved.

Quickly the American supremacy over the North Korean skies disappeared. The Americans were now fighting the North Koreans as equals. Only, these were not North Koreans actually. They were Soviet and a handful of Chinese pilots in Mig-15 jet fighters that had been loaned by the Soviets to the Chinese.

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As per the mandates of the farce that we all now know as the UN, it was important to maintain the illusion that the North and the South Koreans were fighting each other and not the Soviets & the Chinese, against the US & UK. These were nuclear powers at a time when the rules of nuclear engagement had not even begun to be written. Nuclear holocaust was just a trigger-happy pinkie away. Neither side wanted to risk expanding the war beyond the Korean peninsula.

The Mig-15s and the F86s engaged in dogfights and skirmishes mainly along a stretch of the border between North Korea and China where the Yalu River empties out into the Yellow Sea. The Migs launched from Antung Air Field, close to the border on the Chinese side and the Americans, from Kimpo and Suwon, 350kms away, in South Korea. 

The stretch of the border, where the two sides slugged it out 30000 feet above the ground, came to be known among the US pilots as Mig Alley. (Check out the box shown in the top of this piece).

Since the Americans had a greater distance to cover, they came to the party, equipped with drop-tanks and were therefore heavier and slower, a distinct disadvantage, especially when trying to maneuver or climb out of a tight situation. On the plus side, the American pilots were better trained and the F86 Sabres were more user-friendly and comfy, with heated cockpits that was spacious and a large bubble canopy that afforded the pilot a panoramic view.

But by far the greatest advantage that the Americans had was the invention of the G-suit, a sterling example of American ingenuity. The G-suit was a set of inflatable bladders that connected with a compressed air outlet inside the cockpit. Let me explain…..

G-forces bear upon a human body in motion, during sudden accelerations or decelerations or vector changes (ie: change in direction of motion). The more abrupt the change, the more severe is the effect on the human body. You may have noticed how your body gets shoved forward when you are driving and have to brake suddenly. Or how you feel the securing straps bite into your chest when you are on a monster roller coaster that has begun its downward plunge. In both cases, the force that impacts your body is known as the G-Force.

The internationally accepted unit of acceleration caused by gravity is “1G”. In metric units, it is equivalent to the weight of 9.81 Newtons of force per one kilogram of mass.

Imagine you are a F86-Sabre pilot coming out of a dive to get away from a Mig tailing you. You are pulling more than 6-7Gs. At that vector change, blood fails to reach your brain and your eyes, preferring to remain around your ankles. You develop tunnel vision and black out within minutes. Not a good situation to be in when the ground is rushing up at you at twice the speed of sound.

A fighter pilot’s G-suit bladders inflate and squeeze tight against the lower body parts, preventing blood from going down, allowing it to circulate to the brain. The Mig pilots didn’t have G-suits and many Migs were lost in dives or tight maneuvers, without a single shot being fired. To the Sabre pilots, this was a huge advantage.

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The most severe recorded case of G-force death was that of Princess Diana when her limo slammed into a Paris tunnel entrance at 70 mph. Without her seatbelt on, her body experienced a sudden deceleration, relative to her heart, that had the force of 70Gs. If we assume she weighed around 80kgs, that would have been a force of nearly one metric tonne. In that instant it tore her pulmonary artery, a condition that was impossible to survive. Had she worn her seat belt, the deceleration would be around 30Gs and she might have had broken ribs but would most likely have survived.

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A Mig-Sabre party in Mig Alley usually lasted only 20-30 minutes max. But that half-hour looked like the Battle of Britain, the famous 1941 air battle for Britain’s skies where hundreds of British Spitfires and Mosquitos buzzed around hundreds of German Messershmitts and Stukas inside a restricted airspace of maybe one or two city blocks, often colliding with each other and breaking apart in mid-air.

In the Korean skies, at one point in the spring of 1951, a dogfight recorded 50 Mig-15s, 48 B-29s and 54 F86s at the same time, zipping around inside an airspace that resembled a box with sides just 10kms long.

Mig Alley saw the dawn of a new kind of air warfare – aerial dogfights with jets zipping around at 600mph. Soon pilots on both sides realized that they needed far swifter reflexes in order to come out of a dogfight unscathed.

Dogfights create aces and within weeks of the arrival of the Mig15s and the start of the aerial skirmishes, Mig Alley began producing aces among the American pilots.

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Aces were being born on the Chinese/Soviet side as well. A wiry young 23-year old Chinese, the eldest of three children of a carpenter from Anshan in the far eastern province of Liaoning, became the first Chinese ace of the Korean War.

That Chinese ace was Flight Lt. Zhao Baotong, Zao Bao to his mates in the 4-aircraft Mig-15 schwarm that he lead.

In case you are still wondering what all this has to do with Babayev, his Tu-95 and his bombing run, take it easy, Part-4 is coming soon.

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A street like this never sleeps. The bars hum till three in the morning and after that it is the turn of the all-night cafés. They are waiting for the drunks and the late revellers who will stagger in for a coffee, a burger or a shish taouk.

Around 3am, those cafés switch the food below the counters with stuff that was put away because it had gone stale. Even the shish taouk is taken off and replaced with an older, skinnier one that had been tucked away inside a mammoth walk-in fridge.

All the stale food is commonly known around this part of town as the 3 o’clock junk. A drunk wolfing down a shish taouk that was spinning on it’s stand two days back and has just started to smell, won’t know the difference anyway.

Lesson-1 : Post-3am, never eat anything in a café on The Main, unless you want to get into an intimate relationship with a lady named Salmonella.

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Every metropolis has one street like this one, deep in its downtown core. If you happen to be flying in low, you will recognize it very easily. It is invariably the brightest string of lights. It isn’t the biggest street in Montreal, mind you. That honor would go to Sherbrooke Street or Sainte Catherine Street. But it is the liveliest, no question about it.

Welcome to Blvd St. Laurent in downtown Montreal – pronounced ‘Boolvah Sang Lawrang’ in French-speaking Quebec.

You needn’t bother with the pronunciation – no one calls it Blvd St. Laurent anyway. A street like this one will always have a more identifiable moniker, like ‘The Strip’ in Las Vegas. Everybody calls Bengaluru’s MG Road ‘Main Street’ and Kolkata’s Mother Teresa Sarani is unrecognizable because you and I know it as ‘Park Street’.

Likewise, Blvd St. Laurent is known to Montrealers as The Main and it is a boolvah. The French Quebecois fuck with your mind constantly. They put consonants at the end of words and mandate you not to pronounce them.

The only redeeming feature about the Quebecois is their women – the Quebecois girls that The Main is always teeming with. Audaciously forward and precocious, they can lead you right up to the edge until all that remains is your choice – whether to end the evening in her bed or just turn around and go home. I have lost track of the number of times when I ……. just turned around and went home.

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Everything is available on this stretch of glitter – for a price. Whether you’re looking for a gun or a gal, some weed or ecstasy, a haircut or a hamburger or sex in the guise of a full-body massage, this length of asphalt has all these and more.

Every waiter and bartender along this street is a drug trafficker if you need to get high. And a pimp, in case you are horny. These gents have none of the furtive looks and the whispered directions to the alley out back, spoken in a hiss through the corner of the mouth. You come to expect that in my country of birth, India.

Not here. This is the west. Here, everything is hanging out there in the open. You want to fuck, do some coke or buy some weed – you do all these things proudly. Folks here have eyelids that are unbattable. The police precinct that covers this street is reported to be ‘on the pad’. You are better protected from a mugger or purse-snatcher on this street than anywhere else in the city.

The Main is a hybrid, between Kolkata’s Park Street and Free School Street. Except for the graffiti and the murals. Nothing in Kolkata matches the wall art you find on The Main. The talent is simply awesome, at once gaudy and then beautiful. Business owners with building walls facing out, gladly pay for the scaffolding and the paint and let amateur painters go to town on them.

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At the corner of The Main and Des Pins, was a Lebanese shish touk joint called Falafel, run by an Armenian named Ben, where I manned the counter for a whole year back in 2002. I said ‘was’ because I don’t see it there anymore. Restaurants have a short life span on The Main.

Falafel was like a half-way house for new immigrants with degrees who hadn’t yet found a position in their field of work and who – like me – had run out of cash. You slogged a bruising 8-hour shift, rubbing shoulders with more PhDs and medical doctors from all over the third world than you would find even in Johns Hopkins.

No, that is an exaggeration but there was more enlightened conversation and wit in there at Falafel than the College Street Coffee House in Kolkata.

Ben himself had been a respected metallurgist in Yerevan before he came to Canada and started out as a dishwasher in Falafel while he looked around for a job. Then 9/11 happened and the slump hit Montreal hard, this city being the Canadian hub of the aerospace industry. Jobs vanished overnight and Ben quickly realized he was going to be there at Falafel for a long while.

The slump however proved to be a blessing for Ben. The owner of Falafel, an old Tunisian guy, had made some risky investments in the stock market that left him deeply in debt, following the stock market crash that followed 9/11. Falafel went into receivership and Ben took out a bank loan, bought the owner out for a song and took over the joint.

The other day I was out on a jaunt in this part of town, taking photos of the murals that cover every inch of every building wall on The Main and gathering masala for this blog post. I wanted to breathe the air before I wrote. To my dismay I found that the joint where Falafel stood had been boarded up, sold to a high-end eyeware retail outlet called Harry Toulch. Instantly I felt a pang of nostalgia.

I remembered the last time I was there, in 2014.

I had ordered a shish taouk and was sipping a coffee, staring at the crowd milling at the counter, one that I had manned for a year once. Ben came and sat with me for a while sharing the usual gossip about what the rest of guys were up to, who had got a job in his field and where, that sort of thing. Ben soon had to zip back behind the counter.

That’s when I spotted a disheveled guy with a backpack at the entrance. He was leaning against the handrail and scoping the joint with furtive eyes. I knew him well – that was Nick, the fence. He was thinner and paler than the last time I had seen him, more than a decade back when I was employed there.

Nick’s eyes fell on me and he slouched over, ‘Hey man, where you bin?’ He looked me over with watery eyes that danced around incessantly, the mark of a regular drug user. You had to watch it with Nick.

“Need a Mac, an SLR, man? I got a Nikon1000, brand noo. How about an Iphone?” He unzipped his backpack halfway and I was looking at a pile of cellphones, laptops and cameras in there. For guys like Nick, there is only one way things usually go – in a back alley with knife in the gut.

I shook my head and tried out my street tone,” Ah doan have no dough, Nick. Maybe some other tam?”

“Suit yoreself. dude, but I could give you a great deal. Pick any SLR for twennie. Here, take this Iphone, 64 gigs, brand noo, man. Only thuree dahlars.” He quickly realized I wasn’t buying and he zipped up and went back to standing by the doorway, so he could make a quick exit in case a cop happened by. Nick was the son of a low-level associate in the Rizutto outfight and therefore no one messed with him. Even Ben had better sense than to ask him not to loiter at the entrance.

Falafel was a part of my life in 2002 but during my 2014 visit it felt like another universe, even more difficult it is now after more than two decades, to imagine I had actually spent eight hours a day there. For a brief moment of one year, I was washing dishes, manning counters, mopping the floor, cleaning toilets and I was being cursed at viciously by junkies, prostitutes, teenage drug addicts, fences and Mafioso.

No, let me make a correction there. The mafioso were well mannered and polite and they invariably asked for the bill even though I was under strict instructions not to charge them and they already knew that.

For a year I was in the middle of the madness known as The Main. Every moment of that one year, I was like ‘is this really happening to me?

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There were some fleeting moments too, that are etched in my heart – moments when I crossed paths with living, breathing, vulnerable folks during that graveyard shift. One such moment that I decided to chronicle is in the blog post titled Turning the corner. I hope you will enjoy reading it.

The other lovely moments were those murals I mentioned earlier, if you have been paying attention. I have appended below some photos of the murals of the Main.

In the south, The Main ends up at Chinatown, a most interesting place that I have reserved for another blog piece when I have the time.

In the north, The Main reaches into Little Italy, an area that I am not very familiar with, even though I have been there a few times and found that it could be quite inviting, if you happen to dig Italian food.

Otherwise, Little Italy seems too wrapped up in itself and it’s own.

Besides, I never did develop an affinity for Italians – after the Almighty Lord stopped making any more Lorens, Cardinales and Lollobrigidas.

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The murals of The Main

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When I was in engineering school in Chennai, an older cousin dropped in from Kolkata, her ultimate destination – Sathya Sai Baba’s Ashram at Puttaparthi, a small town that was a 9-hour bus ride to the west.

My cousin, Runadidi, was to Sathya Sai Baba, what rednecks are to Donald Trump – sold, lock stock and barrel on him. Runadi insisted that I accompany her and because my college was on a one-week spring break and also since I wanted to experience the sight and sounds of a weirdo god-man first hand, I tagged along.

Back in the early 1970s, Puttaparthi was about as remote as Novaya Zemlya is, to a Muscovite. Folks visited Puttaparthi only when they had issues that they could no longer deal with – mainly health related issues that they had given up trying to fix medically and were at their wits’ end. Tales of the Sathya Sai Baba miraculously curing folks of life threatening ailments just by the wave of a hand, some holy ash, a cheap trinket that he magically materialized out of thin air and crappy mumbo-jumbo, these were legion in those days.

Little is known about Sathya Sai Baba’s past, except for the hagiography -mostly fable, that turned him into a superhero – that has sprung up around him over the decades. Wikipedia says…

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“As a child, he was unusually intelligent and charitable, though not necessarily academically inclined, as his interests were of a more spiritual nature. He was uncommonly talented in devotional music, dance and drama. From a young age, he was alleged to have been capable of materializing objects such as food and sweets, rings and watches, out of thin air.”

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When we visited Puttaparthi, it was little more than a village, albeit a neat, well-organized village. The internet tells me that today Puttaparthi boasts a shiny planetarium and a sprawling ‘super-speciality’ hospital.

I saw the pics of the hospital on google images – it looks like a multi-tiered wedding cake. The hospital treats patients for free, so who are we to complain. Besides that, there is a college, a music school and immaculate colorful schools and playgrounds, everything free and all financed by the Sai Baba Organization.

Luxury apartment buildings have sprung up on land that was covered with ramshackle mud huts just a few decades prior. A state of the art airport caters to wealthier devotees who fly in on their business jets.

Today, 10 to 50 million people worship Sathya Sai Baba as God incarnate. They stream into Puttaparthi from six continents, finding lodgings in one of the ashram’s myriads of guesthouses and hostels – some really snazzy, with jacuzzis and air-conditioning. Those are smart infrastructural investments made by the Sathya Sai Organization, that ensure a steady inflow of hard currency donations, running into millions.

The largest single donation is reported to be $20 million, from the founder of Hard Rock Café. I guess even billionaires can be schmucks.

In 1975, the Sathya Sai Organization’s cash reserves were $5 billion.

Sathya Sai Baba is raising the daisies but his brainchild, the Sathya Sai Organisation, is a multi-billion dollar financial juggernaut that has 1500 branches all over the world and millions of followers, many of them whole families who have migrated from the west, with kids in tow, after cashing in every last nickel and dime they owned and bringing it with them.

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While “His Holiness” was alive, some of his followers (usually young boys) suddenly found themselves bestowed with extra attention from the guru. You know where this leading, right? Yeah, Sathya Sai Baba had a sinister secret, known only to his close associates – a wholly human craving for the bodies of pre-teen boys. The evidence is strong that Sai Baba frequently used his power to get inside their pants, fondling young penises and rendering to them what came to be his signature obsession – divine blow jobs.

I hasten to add that these are claims made by ex-devotees that have never been proven. Neither has His Holiness ever been charged with any sexual wrongdoing. But the body of testimony is so vast and instances in contemporary history of powerful godmen having their way with innocent followers are so many, I am convinced there was not just some smoke but fire too.

The reason why Sai Baba was never investigated, let along charged is quite clearly his political connections.  Sathya Sai Baba was hobnobbing with senior politicians – including some prime ministers – all his life. At the local level, the Sai Baba Organization has always had most of the top officials of the local state and district bureaucracy in it’s deep pockets. The SSO is their ticket to rich lifestyles that their meagre government salaries could never afford.

And then of course there is all that charity – hospitals, schools, colleges, playgrounds, libraries, bore-wells for drinking water, cisterns for water storage, public toilets – Sathya Sai Baba was untouchable, the populace loved him and anyone who attempted to even think of arresting such a guy would be signing his death warrant.

But I digress…..

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Runadi and I rested ourselves in a guesthouse upon arrival that evening and at sunrise the next morning, we presented ourselves at the vast Prasanthi Nilayam (abode of peace) mandir and lecture hall that the brochure said could easily seat 15000. This is where the Holy Swami would deliver another one of his divine homilies.

We spent an hour waiting in a line and another hour sitting cross-legged amid thousands of other worshipers on the marble floor of the terrace outside. The hall was already packed and we would have to watch him from the terrace. Through the large doors, we could see as many foreigners in the hall, as there were Indians. Half of all the staff were white men and women, walking around barefoot, in simple white sarees and kurta-pyjamas. Dozens of chandeliers hung from the ceiling, which was garishly decorated with gold, pink and yellow.

An aisle bisected the hall, cutting right through to the stage and that’s when I noticed that it was gender segregated, with women to the right and men to the left. Runadi and I were at the door, just outside the hall, where the rule apparently didn’t apply. Behind the stage, at the far end, I noticed a door but it was only in the late 1990s that I began reading about what went on behind that door. It was His Holiness’s private ‘sexual healing’ room, probably the place where he molested those young boys.

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Runadi and I were beginning to get bored when an electric charge ran through the crowd. Immediately necks craned to catch a glimpse of the guru.

Sathya Sai Baba appeared through the door of the back room – a stocky guy with a broad smile and that ridiculous Jimi Hendrix afro cut and his customary floor-length ochre robe. He waved as he walked down the aisle, pausing first on the women’s side and then on the men’s side and back again, taking turns, readily accepting what looked like slips of paper (probably pleas and petitions) that were being feverishly stuffed into his hands which he passed on to an aide following him.

I turned to glance at Runadi and she was gone, her eyes glazed over, chest heaving as if she was short of breath, pretty face glistening with sweat.

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The instant he began to speak, I felt like throwing up. He spoke in English. He was no schmuck – most of the suckers gathered there were white-skinned.

His Holiness, Sathya Sai Baba’s voice had a gravelly texture, his south Indian  accent laughably cringe-worthy. “Gaaad louse you. He louse yeevarybaaddy,” he proclaimed, to ecstatic cheers. The blondes in the audience didn’t care if they understood a word or they didn’t.

The lecture itself was a simple one. Aside from stressing on strict vegetarianism, Sai Baba didn’t appear to subscribe to any specific ideology. His words seemed flowery and vague, combining the symbolism of Hindu mythology with a dash of the Buddhist belief about all that transcending-worldly-desire crap. He added to that a table spoonful of charity that the Abrahamic faiths espouse and he had a winning brew.

Most of all, the guy sounded so corny. Here are some of his quotes that I’m definite he spouted that day….

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God is the Seed, The Universe is the Tree, Impulses and passions are the branches, Intelligence is the flower, Pure Consciousness is the fruit, Love is the sweetness in the fruit. 

Man’s many desires are like the small metal coins he carries about in his pocket. The more he has the more they weight him down. 

Love all. Serve all. Help ever. Hurt never. 

Every experience is a lesson. Every loss is a gain. 

Without God, life is like a school without a teacher. It is a wire with no current passing through it; it is a body with no soul.

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No kidding. That is supposed to be profound? Frankly, His Holiness needed a better quote writer.

In fact, a brochure we had been handed confirmed my impressions of the lack of an ideology. It stated that, ‘there is no new path that His Holiness is preaching, no new order that He has created. There is no new religion that He has come to add or a particular philosophy that He recommends. His message is unique and simple – that of love and compassion’. (Love – in very broad terms, I presume).

I admit that I found the vagueness of his message rather refreshing. His chatty tone seemed like he didn’t aspire to be anything but being like just one of us, warts and all. Judging by the prosperity that the Sathya Sai Organization has seen, that style has obviously worked. Today, followers of the Bhagwan are the most fanatical anywhere. They see his hidden hand in everything that happens on earth.

Behind me, a woman wailed and I turned – she was white, maybe around 30. Her eyes had a maniacal shine and her whole torso rocked back and forth ecstatically. Spittle dribbled from the corner of her lips. She was pretty but she looked as if she had stopped taking care of her physical appearance. Man, the woman really was out of it.

Disgusted, I tuned out and waited gamely by Runadi’s side while she stared at the charlatan, mesmerized. She didn’t look much different from that woman, except for the rocking and the spittle dribble part. Ugh, I couldn’t wait to be some place else.

Such zombie-like followers in that ashram were in plenty that day. Stories of brainwashed believers of Sathya Sai Baba are legion if you care to check the internet – an American schmuck named Leland says that His Holiness came to him in the guise of a Tijuana (Mexico) traffic cop and then later on as a Japanese airline stewardess. An Argentinian woman gave up her Buenos Aires apartment and her medical practice after ‘Baba’ summoned her in her dreams. A wheelchair-bound cancer patient from Amsterdam – abandoned by her husband and living with friends who were Sai Baba devotees – saw a vision of the guru beckoning her. One day her friends surprised her with a ticket to India and she took off and remained in Puttaparthi till she ultimately succumbed to her illness.

They say she died with a smile on her face.

Ultimately they all (barring a few hundred disgruntled, sexually molested ex-devotees) got what they were looking for. Maybe I am the sucker here, but if I wanted a blow job, a pot-bellied guy in an afro-cut and an atrocious accent is the last person on earth I’d go to.

—————————————–

I don’t remember exactly how long the lecture went but when I came to, Runadi was shaking me. Our muscles creaking, we rose from the cramped cross-legged position by the door. Folks were crowding around the main aisle that led down from the podium, watching rapt, as His Holiness slowly made his way toward the exit. Runadi and I just happened to be standing right by it. Great!

Then as the Sathya Sai Baba neared us, something amazing happened.  He came to a halt right in front of Runadi and waved his arm around to signal to everyone to pipe down. He brought his gaze down and gestured toward Runadi’s tummy and told her, “Don’t worry, it’ll all go away in a few weeks and you will feel like new once again….”

Funny, even I found the voice strangely clear and reassuring, like he knew what he was talking about. The words were carefully vague – you could look at anyone who obviously looked stressed out and say those words, but Runadi was clearly moved. There she stood, shaking, tears streaming down her face. I didn’t know in what context he was saying she would be fine. Fine from what?

I didn’t know anything was wrong with Runadi, but that’s because I came to know of it only later that evening –

Runadi, though just 27 then, had very severe ulcers that had all but eaten away at her innards, thanks to years of eating very spicy food laced with hot chillies. I mean, she couldn’t eat if you didn’t put a bowl filled with those lethal red chillies right next to her thali. She said she had given it up and sought treatment but the damage to her stomach wall had been too extensive. This trip was a desperate last ditch effort to try and seek help from the supernatural.

A month after that visit to Puttaparthi, I got a postcard from Runadi and in it she was ecstatic. After nearly a decade of pain and suffering and blood oozing out of her bowels, her tests now showed perfectly healthy tissue, instead of bleeding ulcers. Her doc was amazed that recovery had been so complete and swift.

I am a man of science and I dismiss anything that cannot be explained by science. Runadi’s recovery was nothing short of a miracle and I am convinced that Sathya Sai Baba had something to do with it, though I have no idea how.

So, there you go – child molester to some and savior to others. Take your pick. But if he could heel just by a glance, isn’t building a superspeciality hospital an oxymoron?

——————————————-

Runadi’s ulcers had undergone what medical science calls remission, a phenomenon that is described as the spontaneous disappearance of the symptoms of an ailment that is not fully understood by medical science. Through history, medically documented cases of remission are legion. Cancers have been known to have set in and then mysteriously disappear.

The first known cases of remission were recorded by the disciples of a certain carpenter named Jesus H. Christ. Of course, in Greek and Hindu mythology almost nothing can be explained through science. Gods and Goddesses routinely went a step further than just making ailments disappear – they made their surrogates immortal. But I am done with all that nonsensical mumbo jumbo.

Today, there is even a branch of science known as neurotheology (a.k.a spiritual neuroscience) – the study into the possibility of a neurological basis for not only the role of spirituality in health, but any subjective experience that cannot be explained by objective scientific observation afforded by pure science. It says that if a disease afflicted person believes strongly enough that he’ll get better, he actually will.

In Runadi’s case, I am certain that the chance meeting she had with Sathya Sai Baba convinced her that he had appeared before her for a purpose and that she could heal and that was entirely sufficient to completely cure her.

——————————

I am thinking of doing a PhD in neurotheology. That way I can convert a date with Scarlett Johanssen from being a merely subjective fantasy to an objective negligée clad reality.

Title : “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World”

Author : Anne Applebaum, Staff Writer – The Atlantic & Senior Fellow – Johns Hopkins University

Publisher : Penguin Random House

July, 2024

Hardcover : $26.25 at Chapters, Canada

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Few contemporary writers can match the depth of understanding that Anne Applebaum has, of the recent wreck of democratic politics the world over. When you ask her who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies. Or, rather, her former conservative friends on both sides of the pond. 

Applebaum recalls the 1999 New Year’s Eve house warming party she and her husband, Polish cabinet minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, had thrown. It was a stylish manor house in western Poland that they had rebuilt from ruins.

The guest list was brimming with intellectuals – Poles, Brits, Americans, even some Russians, all rejoicing. They had vanquished the Soviet empire and helped build a new world order that had no place for authoritarianism. They had stood up against a cruel and suffocating tyranny. They had fought for free markets, free elections and the rule of law. They had gleefully cheered when, instead of disbanding since there was no longer any threat, NATO had expanded. They were thrilled they had played a part in the strengthening of the EU. 

The glitterati at the party believed the world had turned a page. Now it would be easy for nations to help their people lead better lives.

News had just come in that Boris Yeltsin had stepped down as President of Russia that morning and named a successor, the country’s Prime Minister, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, an obscure fidgety ex-KGB agent with a voice so unsure that, when he spoke, he could hardly be heard.

At that point in time, it didn’t matter who came in at the helm in Russia, especially not the mealy mouthed Putin. The war against communism had been won. Now, all that was left was for “trickle-down” “shock” capitalism to take root, for ordinary Russians to display their entrepreneurial spirit and set the business world alight, for resourceful Russian tech experts to cash in on the World Wide Web and the dot com bubble.

It was now time to bring about spectacular economic prosperity to Russia and consequently the world.

In the midst of the party, a tipsy female Polish guest, pulled out a pistol and fired a few blanks into the air, momentarily stunning the crowd, only to be instantly buried under raucous laughter and cheering.

Midnight was nigh. A new year, a new dawn, new era awaited the excited, young, happy gathering.

It was the time for history’s winners to rejoice. 

————————————

Anne Applebaum has been writing for years about the rise in authoritarianism and the erosion of democracy around the world.

Her latest book, “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World,” is a potent read on how today’s autocracies are not just ruled by one powerful leader, but are instead a sophisticated interconnected network. She reveals how they collaborate and support each other through financial systems, technology, and propaganda that spans well beyond their borders.

This loose network is not an alliance. It is a cabal. It’s members don’t share any political, spiritual or cultural ideology. But they do have one thing in common – they don’t like the word “democracy” and paradoxically, as the decades roll by the cabal is growing more and more powerful, adding more and more members.

Anne Applebaum is the author of several books, including “Gulag: A History,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, “Iron Curtain: The Crushing Of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956,” and the best-selling “Twilight Of Democracy: The Seductive Lure Of Authoritarianism.”

Applebaum is a columnist for the Atlantic and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University. She has passed thru first, Yale and then, Oxford and therefore I needn’t say any more about her state of enlightenment.

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In “The Twilight Of Democracy,” Applebaum was focused on those who make a tyrant possible. And in this book, she has turned her attention to those tyrants, more specifically, the cabal or in her words, Autocracy Inc. which, she says, operates like a semi-organized business corporation.

As I mentioned before, Autocracy Inc is not an alliance. The cabal doesn’t have a guiding principle. It’s not really an axis because that implies that they’re unified in some way. There isn’t any secret cavernous room with a scaled down model of some sinister new weapon of mass destruction on display in the middle of a table that will take out an entire metropolis at the blink of an eye, with the members seated round the table and a Blofeld-like guy with a shaved head, a cat on his lap and a silky voice, like in a James Bond movie.

It’s more a network of convenience. When there are issues on which they find they care about the same things, they cooperate. They have plenty of differences. They don’t share the same ideology – nationalist Russia, communist China, Bolivarian socialist Venezuela and theocratic Iran have different ways of legitimizing their regimes and different explanations of who they are. But they do share one common ethos – envy and hatred of the western democratic system.

In that sense, the cabal is like a big umbrella corporation, a holding company much like my own employers, Raytheon, that runs different companies with each company doing its own thing, but also cooperating with each other when it is convenient.

Sitting at the head as the Chairman of the Board at Autocracy Inc. is unquestionably Putin, the President of Russia. The other executive board members are….

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey) who holds the unique status of a diplomatic bridge between the west and the east and cooperates with the rest of the cabal off and on, when he feels it might help his image.

Victor Orbán (Hungary) who is technically a member of NATO and the EU but who also seeks to be close to Autocracy Inc.

Aleksandr Lukashenko (Belarus) and Basher Al Assad (Syria), who do not have the capability to survive on their own and have all but sold their souls and gifted their nations to Putin.

Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela), who has nothing in common with the others except the thirst for total power.

Kim Jong Un (North Korea), the murderous anti-aircraft gun killer who thinks he can thumb his nose at just about anyone, friend or foe, simply because he has nuclear weapons capability.

Ali Khamenei (Iran), a jaded cleric with a governing system that is so dysfunctional that Israel can pick off its generals, scientists and associates at will with abandon, from right under his nose.

Except for the Ayatollah, all of the others have a love of solid gold bidets and faucets.

And lastly, China’s Xi Jin Ping, President and CEO of Autocracy Inc. After Putin, Xi is perhaps the most pivotal, the most Machiavellian leader, ruling with an iron fist the world’s second most powerful nation as well as the second largest economy. Like Putin, who is nostalgic about the old Soviet bloc and wants not only the erstwhile satellite Soviet republics back but the whole of Europe, Xi thirsts for hegemony over China’s neighbours and the entire South-East Asia.

In their pursuit of hegemony, Xi and Putin occasionally step on each other’s toes (like in Africa), but they quickly come to understandings on who has which African nation. Xi has Ivory Coast, Niger, Congo and South Africa, while Putin has Egypt, Burkina Faso, Mali and Sudan.

Autocracy Inc has second-tier associate members too, fence sitters who play both sides, with a keen sense of the wind direction, such as Mohammad Bin Salman (Saudi), Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (UAE), Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (Qatar), Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa (Bahrain), Narendra Modi (India) and Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua).

The erstwhile Soviet Republics are strongly represented too. Besides Belarus, mentioned earlier, there is Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, all ruled by despots.

The continent with the most associate members is Africa. Besides the nations mentioned earlier, there are Cameroon, Eritrea, Equitorial Guinea, South Sudan, Djibouti, Rwanda and Uganda.

Then there are the bottom feeders, the generals of Burma, Hun Sen of Cambodia and the Sultan of Brunei.

Autocracy Inc has just gotten started.

———————————

Applebaum calls the war in Ukraine the first full-scale kinetic battle in the struggle between Autocracy, Inc. and what might loosely be described as the Democratic world.

The brutality of this war, the construction of concentration camps in occupied territories, the torture of incarcerated Ukrainian citizens, the kidnapping of thousands of children, taking them to Russia and giving them new identities…. All these are clear evidence that Vladimir Putin wants to show the world that the old rules of international behavior no longer apply.

Putin does not care anymore about the world that was created in 1945. He doesn’t care about the UN charter. He doesn’t care about UN laws and organizations that use the language of human rights. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about the so-called unspoken or unwritten rules – that we don’t change borders by force. He didn’t get the lesson that we all learned from the Second World War – that all disputes should be resolved by negotiation and through UN’s institutions.

Applebaum says Putin is trying to establish a new world order where the above norms are no longer relevant, where every alliance, every relationship shall be transactional, just as it used to be upto the end of the 19th century.

Look at Ukraine. 50 countries got together and provided money, weapons and intelligence to Ukraine. But, while Putin might have underestimated the unity that then came from that invasion, democracies have underestimated the scale of the challenge from Autocracy Inc.

Yes, Putin grossly miscalculated the aftermath of his aggression. Recalling Crimea 2014, he assumed that there would be no response to his invasion. He didn’t expect NATO to organize itself. He didn’t expect the US and its allies to contribute to the defense of Ukraine. Most importantly, he didn’t expect the zeal with which the Ukrainians stood their ground and fought back. He didn’t expect the completely lack of morale in his troops. It was all a surprise for Putin. He had expected to annex Ukraine in a few weeks.

The west was surprised too, says Applebaum. It had assumed that sanctions and that the combined military aid effort would end the war. The west didn’t count on the Chinese continuing to sell, not so much weaponry, but the ingredients for weapons, the chips, the electronics and the materials for weapon building.

The west didn’t count on the many ways in which other countries would seek ways around the sanctions, whether it was smugglers going through Turkey and Georgia, or whether it was India continuing to buy Russian oil. The west assumed that its economic power was so awesome that it could shut down the Russian economy. That has not happened.

That sanctions alone don’t work was a revelation to the western alliance.

———————————-

With Autocracy Inc, Putin gave birth to a new form of totalitarianism, according to Applebaum. He had begun by stealing money. He stole from the coffers of the city of St. Petersburg. He was soon joined by his KGB cronies and together they took the plundered funds out of the country, laundered it through Western institutions – stock exchanges in Frankfurt, London and New York and the largest western banks and brought the money back in.

The kind of power that Putin enjoys is very different from the kind of power the leaders of the Soviet Union had. You won’t find the members of Autocracy Inc on the Forbes List of billionaires but they are very, very rich folks. They use their money to stay in power, buy friends and favors. Most of all, they use their billions to buy legitimacy. They are careful not to directly own anything but they acquire in the names of trusted cronies and relatives, property in exclusive neighbourhoods in rich western nations, they own flashy jaw-dropping villas, dachas, yachts and aircraft.

The money helped the members of Autocracy Inc get there and it helps them stay there. Putin was really the originator but now one can see modern dictators also beginning to learn about tax havens and all the different ways of stealing and hiding money.

In the early 1990s, the western world held a hope that communism’s demise and the resulting free economy and openness would lead to, if not democracy, at least more liberal thinking and better standards of living in the erstwhile dictatorships. For a short while it seemed, at least from the west, like that was happening. The west started feeling good about it.

What the west failed to recognize was the degree to which our own business leaders, especially in our financial sector, were in fact helping to enrich small groups of people in those communist states who then, once they had power, were reluctant to ever give it up.

Kleptocracy, ill-gotten gains, inevitably lead to autocracy because people who have stolen the money, who have used that money to retain power, don’t want to give it up. They hate phrases like “transparency” or “rule of law” or “anti-corruption drive” and immediately push back on them. Creation of a police state becomes imperative. Harassment and arrests become the norm. That is what happened in Russia. That is actually what was happening in Ukraine up until 2014, when the Ukrainians organized the “Maidan” movement, which was really an anti-corruption revolution. The wannabe Ukrainian dictator, Viktor Yanukovych, one of those gold bidet/faucet guys, fled to his protectors in Moscow.

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So, which are the go-to places where members of the cabal hide their wealth?

Surprise, surprise!! The most popular joints are in the US states of Delaware, Wyoming and South Dakota. Delaware is Democratic while Wyoming and South Dakota are Republican-governed. There is nothing ideological when it comes to hard cash. These are tax haven states where the nameless wealthy hide their billions,

The process is very simple. You grab hold of a lawyer and open an “LLC”, a Limited Liability Company whose real owners are allowed to remain anonymous through chains of holding companies and fully protected against lawsuits and creditors.

All you need to do is…

1. Name your LLC. … 
2. Choose your registered agent. … 
3. Prepare and file a Certification of Formation of a limited liability company. … 
4. Receive a certificate from the state. … 
5. Create an operating agreement. … 
6. Get an Employer Identification Number. … 
7. Create a maze of off-shore holding corporations connecting to the LLC
8. Pay a piddly alternative entity tax.
9. Inject your ill-gotten gains into the LLC. Do whatever the fuck you want with it thereafter.

1 to 7 are completed literally in a matter of minutes, by a lawyer. The paperwork won’t reveal your identity, so for investigators, this is where the trail vanishes.

While the lawyer submits the docs, you will be nursing your martini at the nearby country club. You are running an LLC by the time the waiter brings your second drink.

So now you are set. You can buy property, maybe a 15000 sq ft penthouse condo worth $250 million in Trump Tower, anonymously. Anonymous purchasers of Trump properties are legion.

Luxury property purchase is notoriously common in the UK – London, to be exact, where there is an enormous amount of foreign kleptocratic wealth and where lots of new buildings that maybe wouldn’t have been built otherwise are almost empty because they function like Swiss bank accounts, ie: they are simply another form of hidden money. Land space now is at a premium, prices have sky-rocketed and left legitimate buyers unable to acquire property.

Russian kleptocrats now dominate the high-end real estate business in the UK.

————————————

Autocracy Inc takes the dissemination of ideas and information very seriously. Members invest in it heavily. The Chinese have bank-rolled a huge network of television, radio, news websites, newspapers and other forms of broadcasting in Africa, Latin America and Asia. They have content sharing agreements with different newspapers around the world. Their wire service, Xinhua, is very cheap and easy to get hold of, often cheaper than AP or Reuters.

The cabal also thinks of ways to get information to people in a way that they’ll accept. Very quickly they have learnt that you want the source of information to seem native, local. And so, rather than the news coming from a news channel in China, they have an African newspaper write something positive about China or something negative about America.

The Russians have enthusiastically run with the idea of ‘local’ news sources for some time now, though it is more remote-operated. They have begun to create fake websites, newspapers and other forms of media that look like they are Ecuadorian or Peruvian or French or Arabic, when they are actually being churned out by a group of 20-yr olds inside an obscure apartment block in Kaliningrad. They harp on the degeneracy and decline of the west and the superiority of autocracy.

The disinformation spread by Autocracy Inc sometimes has very specific goals – conspiracy theories. One that went viral at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion was about how the US had been building biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine. It was fact-checked, refuted and denied multiple times. Nevertheless, the Russians continued to push it. They pushed it on Chinese media too and the Chinese also repeated the same set of narratives. You could find them in Venezuelan media. You could find them in multiple places around the world.

The Russians also spread the falsehood about Syria being this awesome, loveable, welcoming tourist destination, when in fact it is a war torn hell hole.

———————————-

Autocracy Inc lives on lies. Remember how the wannabe autocrat, Donald Trump, began his presidency with the lie about the crowd size at his inauguration in the National Mall? It was a very stupid lie, easily fact-checkable. Trump knew it. But he believed quite rightly that if he repeated it a thousand times it would eventually stick.

I mean, who cares how many people were on the National Mall? But he wanted the U.S. Park Service to lie about it and he wanted his press spokesman, that asshole Sean Spicer, to lie about it.

What Trump was actually saying was – I am in control. I get to decide what the truth is.

Lies confuse people, turn them into cynics. “How do I know this is true” becomes a common refrain. Cynicism leads to a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, disinterest and ultimately, apathy.

“Ah, politicians, they are all the same. Things will never ever improve.” How many times have you heard someone say these words? Probably a zillion?

Applebaum stresses that ultimately, public apathy leads to a disengagement from politics and that is exactly what Autocracy Inc wants – for it to be left to do its own thing, without interference.

Xi Jin Ping warns the powerful Chinese business community, the billionaires, to not interfere in Chinese politics, not be involved in or make any statements about the status of governance, however oblique that statement might be. Remember what happened to Ali Baba’s Jack Ma?

———————————-

This book doesn’t mention Donald Trump a lot but many of Applebaum’s descriptions of autocrats sound like him. We just saw how the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, praised the nomination of Senator J.D. Vance as Trump’s VP nominee, even though everybody knows Vance is a lousy prick. Lavrov recognizes an autocrat when he sees one and knows how much autocrats love praise.

The ultimate triumph of Autocracy Inc is when America will join its board of directors. That is not some far-fetched nightmare. All that it will need is for Trump to win. Given the most recent polling data, it is not an impossibility and could be likely, if some damning dirt implodes Senator Kamala Harris’ campaign somehow, between now and 5th November.

If Trump wins, what are challenges we will all face with the world’s three most powerful nations – Russia, China, and the United States – as autocracies? How do we in the west defend our democratic system and our freedoms?

Applebaum has a few answers, such as more folks getting into politics and taking charge of their narrative, but I will leave you to get the full load on her thought by reading the book to the end.

At 4.15am on the morning of Wednesday the 12th January 1966, the Lubyanka Metro station, in the heart of Moscow, had already begun to fill up as commuters, bundled up in heavy coats and astrakhans began streaming down the stairs and onto the platforms below.

As in any totalitarian system, faces were grim, staring straight ahead, trying not to make eye contact. They were occupied, trying to survive the system, unaware and unconcerned that the Indian Prime Minister had passed away just a day prior in Tashkent.

Situated at the edge of Lubyanka Square, at the junction of the red Sokolnicheskaya Line and the purple Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya Line, the Lubyanka Metro is an imposing underground structure that teems with commuters, until train services stop at 11:30pm and restart around 4am. All along the walls, at regular intervals, is emblazoned in bright red, the word  Лубянка, meaning Lubyanka, for commuters to be able to discern the name of the station clearly from a moving train.

After the first screams were heard, it took a while for the Moscow Metro Militia to arrive and during that period, the curious among the crowds strained over each other’s shoulders to catch a glimpse of the blood-spattered body on the tracks.

Homicide would not have been suspected had it not been for the fact that the man had no winter clothing on, not even a sweater that would have been necessary even in the relative warmth of the metro station. The corpse was in a uniform, that of an Intourist head steward’s white livery, bristling with ornate buttons and epaulets.

There was another thing that made an accidental slip and fall onto the tracks an impossibility – the head steward’s head was missing.

In so far as the Soviet system permitted persistence, a persistent Militia investigator might have found the head – in a cell, a few stories above the very same metro, inside the heart of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which was also home to a sprawling complex that is instantly recognizable the world over as the deadliest prison on the planet – the Lubyanka.

It was the KGB’s way of tying up loose ends.

————————————-

Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had suddenly died after a banquet in Moscow a day prior, had little in common with his predecessor, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Although Shastri had been a cabinet minister for many years before he became Prime Minister, he never ever leveraged his position of power for his interests. As far as is known, he had no personal interests, other than just one. He had made serving the Indian people his sole personal interest. He was a founder member of Servants of India society – which included Mahatma Gandhi, Lala Lajpat Rai and Gopal Krishna Gokhale – which asked all its members to shun accumulation of private property and remain in public life as servants of people.

In today’s world, the Servants of India Society would sound like a bunch of aliens on a distant planet.

Lal Bahadur Shastri had died a poor man. All that he owned at the end was an old second-hand government-owned car, one of many that the Indian government sold after extensive use. He had purchased it in installments and he still owed money on it when he died.

——————————-

The renowned Indian journalist, Kuldip Nayyar, who was at that time the Indian PM’s media adviser, has recorded what happened in the immediate aftermath of Shastri’s death….

…..That night I had a premonition. I got up abruptly to a knock on my door. A Russian official, a woman, was standing there. 

“Your prime minister is dying,” she started to say. Without waiting for her to complete her sentence, I hurriedly dressed and drove with an Indian embassy official to Shastri’s dacha which was some distance away. 

The Soviet Premier, Alexei Kosygin, standing in the verandah when we arrived. He raised his hands to indicate that Shastri was no more. Behind the verandah was the dining room where a team of doctors was sitting at an oblong table, quizzing Dr R.N. Chugh who had accompanied the PM. 

Next to it was the Shastri’s room. It was extraordinarily large. On the huge bed, his body looked like a dot on a drawing board. His slippers were neatly placed on the carpeted floor. He had not used them. In a corner of the room, on a dressing table, there was an overturned thermos flask. It appeared that maybe Shastri had struggled to open it. There was no buzzer in his room, the point on which the government lied when attacked in Parliament on its failure to save the his life….. 

Ayub Khan was genuinely grieved by Shastri’s death. He came the dacha at 4 am and said, looking towards me: “Here is a man of peace who gave his life for amity between India and Pakistan.” 

Later, he told the Pakistani journalists who had assembled for a briefing that Shastri was one person with whom he had hit it off well. “Pakistan and India might have resolved their differences had he lived,” Ayub Khan said. 

Aziz Ahmad, Pakistan’s foreign secretary, rang up Bhutto to inform him about Shastri’s death. Bhutto was half asleep and had apparently heard only the word “died”, because he asked, “Which one of the two bastards?”

———————————–

If the CIA listening post at Badaber, outside Peshawar in northern Pakistan, had the technology in 1966 to listen in to telephone conversations or if Lt. Chuck Shriver, the man who was monitoring Soviet radio traffic that night had been listening in, he would have heard a cryptic conversation that lasted just ten seconds. It was an exchange that traveled between the Kremlin and the heavily guarded Massandra Palace outside Yalta, in Crimea, the winter retreat of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

“We got the wrong guy,” the voice from Kremlin said. The voice went on to explain what had happened. The man responsible for the ‘foul-up’ had been taken care of, he said.

Nothing unsettled the strongman and yet, he paused before saying,” This is a tragedy. We have to correct this. Ask Semichastny to call me.” He was referring to Vladimir Semichastny – Head of KGB.

———————————————-

As for Ayub Khan, he relinquished power to an army crony and whiled away his days lolling around on a deck chair by the pool, receiving well wishers at the posh Islamabad Club by the Rawal Lake. The club was (and still remains) an exclusive establishment for only the Pakistani elite – army brass, high-level politicians and bureaucrats, members of the diplomatic community and well-heeled businessmen.

One day in New York, at a luncheon during the UN General Assembly in the spring of 1967, the charge d’affaires of the Soviet Embassy in Washington sought out the Pakistani Ambassador to the UN and handed him an envelope addressed to the Field Marshal himself, eyes only. It was promptly carried in the diplomatic pouch to Islamabad and handed over unopened, to Ayub Khan by a Major in the ISI, just as the waiter was setting down his third scotch on the rocks.

The note quoted an excerpt from Chapter-4 of the Holy Quran and as he read it, the Field Marshal stiffened. It read…..

“Wheresoever ye shall be, doom shall overtake you,

Even though you be perched in lofty towers”

Those prophetic words came true on a clear day in April 1974, a waiter at the Islamabad Club reported having seen a ruddy white man sit down at the Field Marshal’s table and speak with him briefly. The visitor’s voice had been carefully disguised to sound like that of someone from America’s deep south. He seemed solicitous, insisting on preparing Khan’s cup of tea by his own hands as a mark of respect.

A few hours after he met the man, Ayub Khan collapsed and died of a fatal heart attack. The foreigner by then was nowhere to be seen. He wouldn’t be. Within two hours of the meeting, the man had boarded a Pan Am flight from Islamabad to the Indian capital, New Delhi. From there he planned to connect to Moscow on an Aeroflot TU-104B that was being held specially for him, it’s twin Mikulin-500 turbojets turning over idly. No worries about the delay – most of the passengers were Russians and they knew that complaining about anything meant a brief stint in a gulag.

——————————————–

The killing of the Indian Prime Minister was unfortunate and unintended, but the new KGB poison that had been allotted an interim code name ‘C2’ and was virtually untraceable to forensic science, was  deemed an unmitigated success.

Col. Yuri Ivanovich Modin, head of the Aktivnyye Meropriyatiya  – the ‘Active Measures’ section of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which had been responsible for the development of C2 – was immediately given two simultaneous promotions to General, receiving a chauffeur-driven Zil and a dacha outside town.

——————————————-

In everything, there is always a winner.

——————————————–

Epilogue:

The Soviets, in remorse for killing “the wrong guy”, must have coerced his successor, Indira Gandhi, into letting it go. In exchange for her acquiescence, they stepped the massive free deals in heavy engineering projects and military cooperation that led to the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation.

India benefited hugely from the treaty, in terms of industrial and military aid. The cash and technological aid came with no repayment schedule. Some say that it helped India prevail in the 1971 war with Pakistan.

——————————————

In every unfortunate event, there is always a silver lining.

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Tashkent

Uzbekistan Soviet Socialist Republic

January 1966

The banquet that followed, to celebrate the success of the talks, had dragged on, giving the little man just three hours to sleep, which had been fitful. His personal physician had given him a mild sedative, but it hadn’t worked, leaving him drawn and fatigued.

All of a sudden, he was reminded of the day, twenty four years prior, during the Quit India Movement, when he had been granted parole by the Brits to visit his dying daughter. He could not save her in the end, as the drugs required were too expensive. There were many who had been ready to offer financial support but that had always been anathema to him.

Besides rock-solid integrity, inside that tiny five foot frame, lay an iron will and a keen mind that understood political strategy and that evening at Tashkent, it had prevailed. He was relieved at finally bringing the curtain down on a very nasty one and half month conflict that had begun with 33000 Pakistani troops charging across the Line of Control, unprovoked, dressed as Kashmiri locals.

By the time the talks had begun, Indian troops had pushed back and occupied over 1800 sq. kms of Pakistani territory.

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The conflict had been a glaring display of an unequal match in terms of armaments. While India fought with outdated British-made Folland Gnat jet fighters and aging World War-2 M4 Sherman tanks, Pakistan was flush with state of the art F86 Sabre jets, F104 Starfighters and spanking new M48 Patton tanks that the US had so generously given away, under the misplaced notion that it was a fight against communism.

Those 48 days of conflict had seen the Chinese trying to stir up trouble in the north-eastern borders of India, bringing up imagined border disputes, so that Indian military resources would be stretched, diverted away from the west, where the conflict with Pakistan was raging. But with Soviet backing, the little man had told the Chinese that they could go fuck themselves and they probably did follow his advice, because they withdrew tamely and nothing further was heard from them.

By the time, the ceasefire talks came around, the conflict had claimed 8000 lives, destroyed infrastructure and consumed armaments worth over $100 million, funds that either nation could ill afford at that point in time.

The provocateur, Pakistani dictator Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, didn’t have to worry though. Over the years, he and his generals had received millions for letting America set up bases in their territory and from those bases, run blatantly illegal covert, high-altitude U2 reconnaissance flights operated by the CIA over the Soviet Union. The Americans were behind him.

As the hosts, the peacemakers, the Russians were ostensibly non-partisan but the little man knew whose side they were really on, thanks to a captured American U2 pilot named Francis Gary Powers……

Five years prior, Gary Powers had taken off from an American air base at Badaber, near the Afghan border, that the Pakistanis had allowed the US to build to be able to launch high-altitude reconnaissance missions over the USSR. The U2, a long, slim aircraft developed by Lockheed specially for the CIA, could cruise at 65000 ft, a height that the US believed the Soviet surface-to-air missiles of the day did not have the capability to reach.

The Americans were wrong and Powers’s aircraft was hit. He bailed out and was captured alive. Too chicken to swallow his cyanide capsule, Powers spilled the beans on Russian national TV that was then copied and broadcast over every news channel known to mankind. (He was later on freed in a prisoner exchange).

The Russians now hated the Pakistanis for colluding with the US in the violation of sovereign Soviet airspace.

The KGB had an Arabesque mindset. Retribution would come. It was a matter of time.

But here and now in Tashkent, it was time for kiss and make up…..

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At the negotiating table, in the grand conference hall of the majestic Senate House of Uzbekistan, the Pakistani leader, his territory in Indian control and his back against the wall, had tried to bring out even the pettiest gripe on to the table until the very last minute and the diminutive Indian had adroitly swatted them aside with his firm but gentle tone that even the Soviet Premier, Alexei Kosygin had come to respect.

The little man had made the Pathan seem like a boorish imbecile. It had been a spectacular bit of statesmanship that left the Pakistani side with only a fraction of their original demands met. Years later, after the cold war had officially ended, Yuri Gorshkov – then a 27-year old aide to the Soviet Premier, would recall in an interview with Time Magazine, the awe with which he had witnessed a barely five foot high fragile pipsqueak of a man take down a six foot three inch ex-Sandhurst Pathan Field Marshal.

Later, back in Pakistan, Tashkent would be seen as a defeat, by hardliners in the civilian government as well as the military establishment in Rawalpindi. The climb-down would be acknowledged by historians as the beginning of the end of the Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan’s dictatorship.

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Just before the toast, at the banquet, there had been a bit of a bungle by the Soviet hosts. The little man was supposed to have been seated on the Soviet Premier’s right, while the Pakistani strongman’s place was to be on Kosygin’s left. This was significant because he was a vegetarian and required a different combination of cutlery.

It took only a few minutes for a scrambling, red-faced Russian Intourist head steward to set things right, amid some self-deprecating humor from the Russian head of state. By the time the toast was being proposed, the head steward had been replaced by another Intourist employee.

After the banquet, he had been driven to his dacha around 10 pm. For dinner that night, spinach and potato curry had been sent over from Ambassador Kaul’s house, but the little man had hardly touched it. He had asked Ram Nath, his personal valet, to bring him a glass of milk, something that he did before retiring every night.

Sometime around midnight, Ram Nath reported finding him struggling to get up from bed and reach for the bedside lamp. Seeing the valet at door, he had requested a glass of water and told him to go get some sleep because he had to rise early to leave for Kabul. Ram Nath offered to sleep on the floor next to his bed but he told him it wasn’t necessary and that he could retire in his own room upstairs.

The assistants were packing the luggage a little after one in the morning when they suddenly saw the little man at the door. With great difficulty he said, “Where is doctor sahib?” He meant his personal physician, Dr R N Chugh. As he spoke, a racking cough convulsed him and they helped him back to bed. Jagan Nath gave him water and remarked: “Babuji, now you will be all right.”

As he lay back with a sigh, he no longer had the sense of disquiet on his face. Instead, he appeared unnaturally calm, his face having acquired a strange bluish tinge. Struck his serenity, Ram Nath and Jagan Nath gazed down at him, as he folded his arms over his chest, exhaled and gradually grew still.

The little man, India’s second Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was no more.

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Ps : Watch out for Part-2