Earlier this month, UPIU mentor Syed Nazakat shared how he uncovered India’s secret prison system. Today, the Daniel Pearl Award finalist discusses his second story on the topic, about how India expanded its rendition program to neighboring Nepal.
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Nazakat: While covering the aftermath of the India’s Secret Torture Chambers story, I started to hear from different sources about a tactic the Indian intelligence agencies had been using to deal with terrorist groups who used to operate from Nepal. It was a difficult story to follow. When I told a senior police officer that I was going to investigate the rendition program his reply was, “How the hell are you going to do that?” And I thought, “How the hell am I going to do it?”
I had no idea. I really didn’t know how it would be possible to penetrate the wall of secrecy.
The key moment for me came when I met a relative of someone who was picked up in Nepal and then brought to India. It was weird case, as the police maintained that the suspected terrorist was arrested in Delhi. I asked other former prisoners about other people they might have met inside prison who have faced the same situation. Then, one by one, I came to know of more such suspected terrorists.
I set out over the next few months for India’s home ministry to court rooms to prisons, from intelligence and police officers to lawyers and to ex-prisoners and their families in India to Nepal’s remote villages to reveal something that was never made public. I found sources inside the administration who confirmed the existence of rendition program, and that allowed me to get a handle to go ahead with the story. I sat down with the India’s best spy masters and asked them about how the secret operations against terrorists were done in Nepal. They argued for the need to have this covert program.
At the heart of the persuasion of these stories was a genuine journalistic attempt to seek information and truth. In India, “black sites” and “extraordinary rendition” are not official terms, but they describe something very precise: that a suspected person could be picked and taken to some unknown places and interrogated, and at worse, killed in cold blood. In some other cases, he could be transferred from one country to another without any legal process, without any extradition or court hearing.
The story was a real scoop. No one in India ever thought that such a massive rendition program was conducted by India in Nepal.The story generated lot of debate in India. It was followed by many publications in India, Nepal and as well in Pakistan, and there was online discussion on the India’s rendition program. As Canada was a part of India’s rendition program, I was also interviewed by Canada Broadcasting Corporation’s Rick MacInnes-Rae for the award-winning international affairs program Dispatches. (Scroll halfway down the page.) Within a week of the publishing of the story, many families also approached us with details of their disappeared relatives.
You can read this story here, and more of Nazakat’s work here.
