Narinjara News

Grewal made a million kyats through "great betrayal"

By Arakan Friend

10th March 04

Colonel Biswajit Singh Grewal of Indian military intelligence has received one million kyats from the Burmese military junta for pulling off "Operation Leech", during which six NUPA leaders were shot dead in cold blood by Indian troops after they were invited to come to the Andamans.

Sources in Indian intelligence say the Burmese have also helped Grewal set up a cycle spares factory in Yangon and run a thriving export-import business.

"He took us and the Arakanese for a ride. He was employed by us but worked for the Burmese junta and this is what we are discovering six years after Operation Leech," said a major of Indian military intelligence who worked with Grewal and joined him on trips to Burma several times.

The major, who wished not to be identified, said: " Grewal would keep us away whenever he had discussion on crucial subjects with the Burmese junta. He was clearly doing some secret deals with them but because of the language gap, we could not pick up what he was up to. That became clear later."

Grewal's parents were Sikhs settled in Burma and he speaks Burmese fluently.

India's federal police, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has also caught up with Grewal's game. " Help us arrest him," says a CBI official in Calcutta. The CBI is upset with the Indian army because it did not send any official to depose before them . " We want the mystery of the Leech solved and they are not helping us," say CBI officials.

Neither has the army deposed before the court in Andamans.

The Indian army loves television cameras on their heroes if they achieve success in a major operation. But though their press office claimed "major success" against "gunrunners" during Operation Leech, the Indian army has only shied away from media focus whenever confronted with questions on Leech.

" They have a lot to hide. It is now clear they did not kill gunrunners but betrayed a friendly group of insurgents," said former RAW deputy chief Bibhuti Bhusan Nandy.

Nandy belongs to an era of Indian intelligence when it helped pro-democracy forces and revolutionary groups in Burma. Nandy himself organised support for the KIA and other such groups in western Burma.

" If the culprits of Leech go unpunished, India will loose all its friends in the neighbourhood," said Nandy.

But the Burmese junta has managed to win over the Indian army to the extent that a former chief of India's eastern army, Lieutenant General H.R.S Kalkat went to the extent of saying that India's Burma policy should be " left to the army."

" We are soldiers, they are soldiers and our blood is thicker than the blood of the bureaucrats," said Kalkat addressing the "Bengal Initiative", a respected think tank in Calcutta, four years ago.

And if Indian military officials are amply rewarded with kyats (or dollars), jade and rubies, Burma teak and whatever the Pagoda nation has to offer, there will be more Grewals in the Indian army, willing to help the junta. #

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