POOJA Sharma’s husband is probably a RAW operative if my friend, Rajan Narayan, is to be believed. The fact remains that the former DGP of Goa, Jaspal Singh, worked in the Intelligence Bureau and arguably did a stint in RAW before returning to Goa as the DGP.
Not many may know it – but those who work in the Research & Analysis Wing or RAW as it is called, are a mixture of high ranking officers from the Indian Navy, Indian Army or Indian Air Force, who work with senior officers from the Indian Police Service (IPS) who are selected for the central services after their career records are carefully screened.
RAW employees work with assumed identities for the simple reason that they never divulge to their own families that they work for RAW. Unlike the IB men and women who are given identity cards so they can avail of free travel in trains, RAW employees are given no such identity cards which would be self-defeating. They work in consulates and embassies throughout the world and it is safe to assume that we have our own RAW agents in countries like the UK, USA, Russia, China, Japan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

UNDER SURVEILLANCE
THESE agents are kept under surveillance by the counter espionage agents of these countries, so whom they talk to, whom they meet for dinner, what they do, where they go, are all kept under tacit surveillance because it goes without saying that it is mostly those who work in the embassies and consulates who are given the additional work of snooping in the countries where they are posted.
Ambassadors, consular officers, such as attaches and others often try to identify those who will leak out some sensitive information for money, women or some other weakness which all men and women have. Men can be “honey trapped” and this is a euphemism for being video taped while having sexual intercourse with foreign women, who are glorified prostitutes used to entice men with weakness for women.

SRIKRISHNA COMMISION
AS a senior journalist in some of the national newspapers, I had the opportunity to identify these so called agents occasionally. While covering the Srikrishna Commission, I came across a man who used to sit with the journalists but never take down notes while the other hacks were busy scribbling away. Intrigued, I watched him carefully and asked him which newspaper he represented. He gave me the name of a small Marathi newspaper which I knew could not afford to send a reporter to cover the Srikrishna Commission. This small newspaper relied on agency reports.
After phoning and cross-checking that they had no reporter by that name covering the Srikrishna Commission, I confronted this man who shamefacedly admitted he was an Intelligence Bureau operative and his duty was to observe those covering the Srikrishna Commission and also which lawyers represented which Muslim organization or other organization with links to groups whom the government wanted watched.

WEAKNESSES OF MEN & WOMEN
ONE of the names whom the IB wanted watched was Majeed Memon, who at that time was an advocate like any other advocate, but has only recently been designated as a senior advocate when he has reached the wrong side of his 70s.
Be that as it may, after befriending this IB man, I learnt a few tricks of the trade, how to watch a “target” as they called the person, how to identify that person’s weaknesses, because, well everybody does have some weakness or the other. Men mostly have a weakness for women or liquor, while women have a weakness for good clothes, expensive perfumes, expensive handbags, etc, which brought about the downfall of TMC MP Mahua Moitra.
Like my good friend Rajan Narayan, whose articles in this newspaper can ignite a bonfire, because he is the “goonda” with the pen, I learnt to keep my secrets and my sources to myself. But after decades have elapsed, I feel there is no harm is divulging some identities of those who revealed their secrets to me. Simply because most are dead and are not affected.
One person who was a very good source was my friend, Arun Gawli, whom the IB and the state intelligence wanted watched. I never understood why he was so feared because he spoke freely to me in a language which was akin to Marathi but not the Bambaiya Marathi, which was why I needed an interpreter to translate what he told me.
Arun Gawli told me that some top IPS officers in Maharashtra had to pay Rs5 crore to get the post of police commissioner of Mumbai city. I could never verify this claim, which was why I never published it anyway. But after the scam in which NCP minister Anil Deshmukh was arrested for demanding collection of Rs 100 crore or thereabouts from liquor bars in and around Mumbai, what Arun Gawli told me got me thinking. Gawli will probably not remember me because there were other journalists who interacted with him.

PRIZED PHOTOGRAPH!
BUT I have got a prized photograph of Arun Gawli sipping tea with me. They used to call him “daddy” in Dagdi Chawl because he got jobs for unemployed youth, which was why he was elected as an MLA and his daughter became a corporator in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.
Another source was Haji Mastan and Karim Lala, both of whom are dead and gone, but whom the state intelligence and IB wanted watched. When I received phone calls from these agents, I would politely tell them to go to hell for the simple reason that I was a professional journalist and it was not my job to give these incompetent snoops information which they ought to have been collecting on their own,
Whether gangster or not, journalists owe a duty to their sources never to divulge their identity, which was why Arun Gawli, Haji Mastan and Karim Lalla agreed to interact with me, after gauging my sincerity as a journalist. The only barrier was the language they spoke. Karim Lalla and Haji Mastan could be understood to some extent. But Arun Gawli, as I related earlier, was a different kettle of fish altogether.
The one person who got on my nerves was a woman Resident Editor of a national daily who knew more about Kanjivaram sarees than about gangsters, lawyers and the law. My senior, who was jealous of my scoops, would complain to her that I would refuse to reveal my sources. “Why don’t you want to reveal your sources? So that only you can make use of them?”
I contemplated complaining about this woman to the management but was dissuaded by my colleagues. Her great claim to fame was interviewing Salman Rushdie who stayed in the Taj Mahal Hotel under an assumed name, to avoid being attacked after a bounty was put on his head following his penning of the “Satanic Verses.”