A formerly classified Central Intelligence Agency report dated May 21, 1986, indicates that the agency pressured Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to fire his foreign minister, Bali Ram Bhagat in 1986. The CIA cites Bhagat’s criticism of the U.S. bombing of Libya and his attendance at a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tripoli. Bhagat launched a blistering criticism of the U.S. bombing of Libya at a meeting at the United Nations in New York.
Before becoming foreign minister, Bhagat served as Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, from 1976 to 1977.
In response, the U.S. informed Gandhi that if India wanted to acquire Western technology, he would have to dismiss Bhagat. Gandhi received the message loud and clear when he fired Bhagat and replaced him with Commerce Minister P. Shiv Shankar, who was more to Washington’s and Langley’s liking. Shankar helped initiate the close U.S.-Indian technological relations that ultimately saw a number of high-tech U.S. jobs being outsourced to India.
After firing Bhagat, Gandhi and Shankar began to move India away from the policies of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was originally formed by Gandhi’s grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, in concert with Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The CIA lambasted Bhagat for being “inclined to tell audiences what they wanted to hear rather than the message Gandhi wanted delivered,” whether at the UN or in Tripoli.
Shakar’s appointment as foreign minister and moderation of Indian foreign policy resulted in the “expansion of technology ties with the United States,” according to the CIA report.
Although Shankar was appointed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to head the Congress Party’s Foreign Affairs department while also serving as the party’s chairman of the Friends of the Soviet Union Committee, his job was to provide competition to similar committees set up by the Communist Party of India that were affiliated with the Moscow-backed World Peace Council. Shankar, according to the CIA report, never had strong feelings toward the Soviet Union and the report indicates that he may have been Langley’s eyes and ears within the Indian government and Congress Party on developments in relations between New Delhi and Moscow.
Gandhi also appointed as Shankar’s minister of state for external affairs Eduardo Paleiro, a member of parliament from the former Portuguese colony of Goa. This appointment, too, was met with favor from Langley.
Bhagat is an example of yet one more, albeit less known, victim of the CIA’s operations to change other governments through stealth political actions. The list of government leaders deposed in such a fashion is a long one and includes Australian Labor Prime Ministers Gough Whitlam and Kevin Rudd, New Zealand Labor Prime Minister David Lange, French President Charles de Gaulle, Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana, Prime Minister Timoci Bavadra of Fiji, Prime Minister Walter Lini of Vanuatu, Prime Minister Gerrit Schotte of Curacao, Turks and Caicos Chief Minister Michael Misick, and Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. There were “constitutional coup” attempts against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Prime Minister Michael Manley in Jamaica, and Jordanian Prime Minister Awn Khasawneh.
Note: One of this editor’s political science professors at the University of Mississippi was a member of Foreign Minister Bhagat’s extended family, which hails from Patna, Bihar. He was Dr. Goberdhan Bhagat, an adviser to the United Nations in the 1950s and 60s.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
