It all began in 1975, when two gunners Aya Singh
and Sarwan Dass were arrested by the army on the basis of a confidential
report by the Intelligence Bureau. These men were first interrogated
by IB officers and after it became clear they had been spying
for Pakistan, they were handed over to the Military
Intelligence. During their interrogation by the IB,
the gunners did not implicate any other army personnel.
Aya Singh and Sarwan Dass were in army custody from
July 1975 to August 1978. Throughout this time,
they seem to have every now and then come up with
a few names.
Initially, they named some other sepoys and a Captain
Nagial as co-conspirators. Nagial was arrested in August
1975. A general court martial was held which found him innocent and he was honourably
acquitted. The same sequence of events followed with a Captain Kochar
and then Major R S Gahlawat who was arrested in April 1977.
After Gahlawat was also declared innocent,
Aya Singh's GCM was finally held, but surprisingly, not on charges
of espionage but for leave without absence. Sarwan Dass was also
charged on the same grounds. And both the gunners were awarded
seven years in jail and dismissed from service.
But later that year, events were to take
another turn.
Aya Singh again came up with another name -- this
time Captain R S Rathaur's, an intelligence officer who had worked
in the Samba region. And despite all the other red herrings he
had thrown to the MI, in March 1978, within a month of naming Rathaur,
Aya Singh's sentence was terminated and he was reinstated in service.
On 24 August, 1978, Rathaur was arrested.
Meanwhile, a similar scene was being enacted with
Sarwan Dass. After being sentenced to seven years in jail,
he was also reinstated a month after he accused Captain A K Rana
of being a spy. In October 1978, Rana was also arrested.
Rathaur and Rana -- arrested on the basis of
dubious sources and self-confessed spies -- were to become the
prime accused in the Samba case. And both of them have gone to
court saying they were brutally tortured over a long period of
time to name other people, some of whom they didn't even know.
Rana led to 50 other people while Rathaur
says he was forced to implicate 12 others -- one of them being
the unfortunate Ram Swarup.
Then, according to Ved Prakash himself, a man who
sat in on Rathaur's court martial, several discrepancies were found
in the army's case against him. Incensed with the way Rathaur's
trial was conducted, he later wrote a book called The Samba
Spying Scandal.
In it, he describes how Rathaur was taken to the
Pakistani post Kandral by Aya Singh. But Survey of India reports
show that Kandral is an Indian post! On the day when Rathaur
is said to have made the crossover, he was on leave in his village -- numerous villagers including government officials had come
to testify to this. On another date of the alleged crossover he
was being given a farewell in the mess in the presence of at
least 20 other officers.
Kind courtesy: Sunday magazine
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