India: India's federal ruling Congress Party-led coalition has found itself enmeshed in a cold war tale of espionage following revelations that the former Soviet Union lavishly bribed its members to "control" its south Asian ally.
The country's main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has called for an investigation into claims in a book, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World, by former KGB senior archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, that the spy agency not only bought secrets from Indian cabinet ministers but regularly paid them retainers.
"It seemed like the entire country was for sale," Mitrokhin quotes then KGB general Olef Kalugnin as saying, describing India as a model for the infiltration of a Third World government. Extracts from the book were published in major Indian newspapers yesterday.
The book suggests the KGB was more successful in infiltrating the highest levels of Indian officialdom than its rival American Central Intelligence Agency, and was adept at exploiting corruption that had become "endemic under Indira Gandhi's regime".
India was Russia's staunchest cold war ally, refusing even to condemn Moscow's invasion of Kabul.
Kalugnin, who was posted in Delhi in the 1970s, claims his organisation successfully used agents to persuade then prime minister Indira Gandhi to declare a state of emergency in India in 1975 that allowed her government to arrest opposition politicians, suspend civil liberties and censor the press for 19 months.
"We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government - in intelligence, counterintelligence, the defence and foreign ministries and police," Kalugnin is quoted as saying.
"On at least one occasion a secret gift of two million rupees [ then worth about €205,000] from Moscow to the Congress Party was personally delivered [ to Gandhi] after midnight," Mitrokhin wrote.
The book claims that suitcases full of banknotes were routinely taken to the prime minister's house to finance her party's activities. It also facetiously claims the suitcases were never returned.
Gandhi ruled India as Congress Party prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 to 1984, when she was assassinated by her bodyguards.
The book, co-authored by intelligence expert Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University, also alleges that the KGB arranged Gandhi's welcome to the Soviet Union during a personal visit in 1953 and "surrounded her with handsome, attentive male admirers". Gandhi was for years estranged from her husband, the charismatic Feroze Gandhi, at the time of her Russia visit in the early 50s.
The book claims the KGB subsidised the election campaigns of 21 Indian politicians, including four cabinet ministers, in national polls.
"We demand a statement from the Congress," BJP leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said yesterday, adding that the allegations were serious.
But the Congress Party and the Communists who support the Congress-led coalition dismissed the claims as "baseless".
"This is the version of one person," Congress Party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi said. There is no way of checking facts as some of those mentioned are dead, he added.