Morarji Desai, a former prime minister of India in office between 1977 and 1979, was alleged to have been an informant in the employ of America’s CIA, or so says American investigative journalist and author Seymour Hersh. 

The allegations were made in a section of Hersh’s book ‘The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House’ published in 1983. The allegations at the time were largely deemed ridiculous by Desai’s political peers and much of the Indian press including his enemies and detractors. 

Subsequently Desai brought a libel lawsuit against Hersh and the publishers of the book Simon & Shuster in 1984. The judgement in the case delivered by an American jury in 1989, cleared Hersh of the charge of libel brought against him by Desai.

Hersh, clear of the legal storm and able to continue his work, is still breaking stories and offering commentary on world affairs to this day. However while his work is seen as an important pillar in the global press he continues to cite and be criticised for basing his reporting on unidentified sources. 

At least in the Desai case Hersh has not been able to explain away the factually incorrect information from his supposed revelation in the 1983 book. In his book, Hersh says that despite being ousted as a deputy prime minister in 1969 by then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Desai “stayed on in her cabinet”. 

Desai was not in Indira Gandhi’s administration or even on good terms with her after his resignation as both finance minister and deputy prime minister.

Being ousted from Gandhi’s inner circle drastically lowers the possibility of Desai having knowledge of any secret information privy to the Indian cabinet at the time. 

But, giving Hersh the benefit of the doubt this can be attributed to him reporting exactly what information he received from the source. This would, in turn, cast doubt on the accuracy of the sources Hersh revealed (without naming them) during the trial, as being part of the US intelligence community and the presidential administration. 

Hersh also said that Desai was paid an annual fee of $20,000 to provide information to the CIA during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations. While it is a general trend observed around the world that foreign intelligence agencies offer very little money to their assets in exchange for betraying their country, the likelihood of a prominent politician who was the finance minister until 1969, and was under no personal financial hardship being attracted to such a paltry sum, even then, is laughable.

That said, a related minor claim made by Hersh that he approached Indian officials and discussed his 1983 book and the Desai case with them before publishing was vindicated in 2011 by a declassified release by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. 

The erstwhile Indian Foreign Minister P V Narsimha Rao had asserted in the Indian parliament that Hersh wasn’t in touch with any Indian government officials before publishing his book regarding its contents - a claim which turned out to be false.

With the benefit of hindsight and a modern lens we can be sure that the US was ready to collaborate with any enemy of its geopolitical adversaries, and its local clients in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Indira Gandhi especially in the 1970s was close to the USSR and opposed US interests in the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war against Pakistan. As such, she would have fit the mould of a Soviet client in the South Asia region as seen through Washington’s lens at the time. 

After being convicted of violating electoral laws she even declared a state of emergency between 1975 and 1977 during which civil liberties were curtailed and dissent was brutally repressed - drawing further parallels with the Soviet regime of the era.

The abuses during this ‘emergency’ not only fueled popular anger against Gandhi and her Congress party but also gave rise to an opposition movement that spanned a vast political spectrum bringing together many allies and enemies alike including former Congress leaders and defectors loosely linked under the “Janta alliance” banner.

Henry Kissinger who served as the US Secretary of State between 1973 and 1977 and national security advisor between 1969 and 1975 would have undoubtedly been aware of Desai’s role as a prominent figure in the Janta alliance movement. 

Desai himself then came to power as the leader of the Janta alliance in 1977 defeating the Indira Gandhi-led Indian National Congress party in the next elections.

In his 1989 deposition during the libel case Kissinger denied that he had any knowledge of Desai being employed by the CIA. However Kissinger’s testimony doesn’t negate the fact that both the Janata alliance and Washington’s desire to see Indira Gandhi lose power in India converged during this time.

A much more palatable explanation for inconsistencies between fact and narrative in the saga of Hersh’s reporting on Desai is it being a case of the traditional compartmentalisation of information approach taken by governments and their agencies when dealing with covert actions. 

It logically follows that while the US may have tried to support any opposition to Indira Gandhi during the 1970s, Hersh’s sources in the US intelligence agencies and presidential administration were only speaking from the limited view of their portion of said compartmentalised information.

Hersh’s sources may have also served him hyperbole instead of a more accurate assessment of their relationship with Desai during this time. 

It is even possible that Hersh’s sources may have had a personal axe to grind with Desai for his eccentric ideas and unconventional beliefs which could have been seen as barbaric from a Western mainstream point of view at the time; Desai was known for a number of unconventional beliefs in his personal life such as his devotion to urine therapy which he even publicly advocated during a 1978 interview with the CBS weekly news magazine 60 Minutes while on a visit to the US.

As such, the pseudo-scientific nature of Desai’s beliefs around health could have signalled to manipulative forces that he may be an impressionable individual, and what may have been just a simple result of brainstorming ideas put together to compromise Desai may have much later filtered down to Hersh as historical fact.