The River Of No Return...

For the National Democratic Alliance and its ministry of information technology, the proposed Indo-US Sankhya Vahini project may be a ‘river of knowledge’ but in actual terms it seems to have generated more of a flood of controversy, around the sticky issue of national security.

The question that has proved to be the most bothersome and embarrassing for the bjp-led government: was the Sankhya Vahini project seriously pursued only after American intelligence agencies concluded from their internal investigations that their failure to detect the May 1998 Pokhran nuclear test explosions was because of their lack of penetration of the Indian security systems?

Therefore, though there is little doubt that a country-wide high-speed data link is an integral and necessary part of the Centre’s Sankhya Vahini, to be headed by Indian-American honcho Raj Reddy, some agencies say that India’s vast data network could easily be compromised.

An official, who doesn’t wish to be identified, says: "It’s true that the network will benefit educational institutions, public and private corporations, service providers for learning, training and research, but the fact of the matter is that the entire Indian data base, including security systems, will be at the Americans’ direct disposal." According to the proposal, this high-speed data network will be linked to the International University Network (IUNet) being established by the Carnegie Mellon University in the US. Interestingly, IUNet will hold the majority 49 per cent equity with the department of telecom services (dts) holding 45 per cent.

The controversy also happens to be personality-centric. Raj Reddy, slated to head the programme, is a man with the highest security clearance from the Pentagon. Reddy’s career graph shows that he is no run-of-the-mill NRI billionaire living in the US. A 1958 engineering graduate from the Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu, Reddy left for Australia, where he represented the ibm Corporation. In 1963 he went to the US to study computers. In 1969 he joined the Carnegie Mellon University as an associate professor. By 1979 he had managed to get a grant of $5 million from the Westinghouse Electronic Corporation to start a robotics centre at the university. What is even more telling is that the centre continues to work on several US projects despite having failed to emerge as a viable commercial venture and despite Reddy’s inability to turn Carnegie Mellon into a Robotsburg.

Reddy drew attention for the first time in India in the late 1980s, when in a highly controversial move he helped V.S. Arunachalam, predecessor of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and scientific advisor to the ministry of defence working on a number of ‘sensitive’ projects, secure a job at Carnegie Mellon. Opposition parties had demanded a statement from the government and details on how a man in Arunachalam’s position was allowed to leave government service and go abroad to work on similar projects. Arunachalam, interestingly, is also on the Sankhya Vahini board.

In February 1997, US President Bill Clinton appointed Reddy member of the president’s information technology advisory committee, which among other things, is also supposed to advise the president "on the defensive as well as the offensive aspects of the information infrastructure security". The defensive aspect deals with preventing the penetration of the US information infrastructure by foreign intelligence agencies and their hackers, while its offensive role consists of doing the same things that it is supposed to check in its defensive capacity-developing a capability for penetrating the information infrastructure of foreign countries. Now the catch: the computer emergency response team of the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) functions from Carnegie Mellon, where the Sankhya Vahini will be based.

In a written testimony before the Senate sub-committee on communications in March this year, Reddy enumerated measures for strengthening information infrastructure security in the US. Arunachalam was among the people who Reddy thanked in the testimony. Apart from being an advisor on information technology to US intelligence and the Pentagon, Reddy wears another hat. Not unnaturally, he is also the chairman of the Carnegie Group Inc., member of Microsoft’s technical advisory committee and chairman of seec Inc. The last reportedly has a link-up with the widely successful Satyam Infoway.

On August 10, 1998, Reddy and Arunachalam prepared the first draft of their ambitious Sankhya Vahini proposal "to establish a very high bandwidth all-India national data network...which will initially connect at least 10 metropolitan cities and over 100 universities, institutions of higher learning and research centres...and will also provide the test-bed for developing and providing multi-giga bit technologies that will soon become the norm throughout the world." This proposal was approved in principle by the information technology task force of the Indian government on September 5, 1998, and an MoU signed in Washington on October 16, 1998, in the presence of the Indian ambassador to the US, Naresh Chandra-Reddy signed on behalf of the US and the then secretary, department of telecommunications (DoT), Anil Kumar, put his initials on the dotted line for India.

Says B. Raman, a former raw number two: "Intriguingly, within a few weeks of the submission of the inquiry report (by the US intelligence on how they missed Pokhran), this proposal for a US-aided data network in India to be connected with the data network at Carnegie Mellon surfaced. Since the school of computer science at the university works in tandem with the DIA, all its foreign collaboration projects are subject to prior clearance by the Pentagon. This project was apparently cleared without any delay."

After Pokhran-I in 1974, the Americans had imposed severe restrictions on sensitive technology transfers to India. After Pokhran-II, Washington vastly expanded the blacklist and according to it, cooperation without prior permission was prohibited. Visas issued to Indian scientists were cancelled and Indians were generally frozen out of the seminar circuit. In fact, since 1974, all sensitive technological cooperation with Indian institutions are subject to security vetting by the US intelligence followed by a careful scrutiny by an inter-departmental committee, resulting in long, painful delays in the clearance of even projects which are regarded non-sensitive.

Argues Raman: "While inordinate delays have been the norm in all such projects since Pokhran-I, the Clinton administration and its intelligence network have seemingly not erected hurdles for Sankhya Vahini. Instead, all clearances vis-a-vis this project happened in a jiffy between August and October 1998, despite the prevailing sense of outrage and anger over Pokhran-II."

Security officials here say that US agencies want to see this project quickly implemented in their own national security interests so as to widely facilitate their penetration of India’s information infrastructure. They claim, these tactics are not new, as far as the Americans are concerned.

In 1995, the Australian navy ordered a temporary suspension of the use of Microsoft software in its establishments following suspicion that Microsoft was collaborating with the dia for penetration of the Australian navy’s information infrastructure.

The same year, an inquiry ordered by President Jacques Chirac of France conclusively established a similar penetration by the Americans of the French navy.

Recently, a similar charge has been made by EU countries against the Echelon project of the US and British intelligence, not just telephone tapping but penetration of the information infrastructure of EU countries.

But top PMO officials say the security fears are unfounded and that they have been well-debated. But a note circulated by the DoT shows that the security aspect has been glossed over. "Sankhya Vahini will have the option, in accordance with prevalent government regulations, to set up its own international gateways or purchase international gateway connectivity directly from third parties. The company, shall, however, consider VSNL as the preferred provider of international connectivity. On security monitoring-related issues, the company will follow the prevailing regulations and terms and conditions laid down in the Internet service provider licensing agreement between the licensing authority and providers in India. The company shall not use its network for voice telephony unless permitted by the government," an exercise in obfuscation, if one existed.

Even as Prime Minister Vajpayee told his party MPs that the project will see the light of the day, despite objections being raised not just from the Opposition but some from the Hindutva fold as well, the key question remains unanswered. Will the project, despite its many progressive aspects and quantum technology leaps, lead to distortion of the information infrastructures of Indian nuclear, missile and other sensitive defence projects in the future?