It wasn’t until 2002 that the identity of Kim Davy, the mastermind of the Purulia arms drop, was officially established in India.21 On the night of 17th December 1995, a large cache of military-grade arms, including automatic rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, handguns and ammunition, had been dropped by air into a village in Purulia District, West Bengal. The very act of dropping arms in such large quantities and the defiant style of the opera-tion are considered unique in the annals of India’s criminal history.22 While the Latvian crew of the aircraft and the British arms dealer Peter Bleach who procured the weapons were arrested by the Indian police, a gunrunner called
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Kim Davy who was the key operative escaped arrest. Little was known about the man who had procured the funds and planned and executed the entire operation. Even his accomplice seemed to have few details about him. Ac-cording to initial reports, he was said to be a New Zealand passport-holder who had quietly slipped out of India in the confusion that followed.23 At other stages during the investigations, he was thought to be an American national hiding in the USA.24 In short, for about the first seven years the investigations into the most spectacular breach of India’s national security and its airspace were apparently conducted without much knowledge of the identity or whereabouts of the man who organized the operation.This audacious breach of national security25 and intelligence failure26 in the Purulia case has from the very beginning been a matter of intense public fascination, speculation, and conspiracy theories in India. The objective of the arms drop was widely said to be to derail the Communist regime in West Bengal though at other times it has been suggested that the ultimate re-cipients may have been the anti-Communist rebels in the Chinese-Burmese border regions.27 While the final destination of the weapons cache remains buried in mystery, the brazen mode of operation where the aircraft strayed off its approved flight path without being detected, its re-entry into Indian airspace after four days, and finally the escape of the prime suspect from Mumbai airport presents yet unanswered questions. Not surprisingly, the Indian investigating agencies have been criticized by the courts and the me-dia for their failure to bring the main accused to justice.28 Given the serious implications of this case for India’s security and sovereignty, the effort to bring the fugitive Kim Davy to stand trial in an Indian court has continued to have a high priority.
On 18 March 2002, the arms-drop case took a fresh turn with the rev-elation that Kim Davy was actually a Danish citizen called Niels Christian Nielsen residing in Denmark. This fact was disclosed when the Danish TV channel TV2 aired a documentary that showed Nielsen living freely in Co-penhagen while the CBI in India had declared him to be untraceable and an absconder during the trial. While this public disclosure was a vital step to-wards finding Kim Davy, it was not exactly a surprise for journalists and legal activists who had been following the case from the very beginning. In fact, Copenhagen had already figured as the place where the original conspiracy had been hatched in the testimonies presented during the arms-drop trial in Kolkata.29 According to news dispatches, the CBI had reportedly contacted the Danish Ministry of Justice as early as August 1996 to establish the iden-tity of the associates of the accused.30 In May 1997, the Danish authorities
had positively identified the two Danish citizens involved in the plot as Peter
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Hæstrup and Brian Thune, who had been instrumental in providing con-tacts for the procurement of arms.31 In early 2000, an investigative report by a BBC correspondent firmly established the Danish connection by identify-ing the main accused as a Danish mercenary trader of “weapons, minerals and insurgents ... holder of forty passports and as many aliases ... and ac-cording to his former accomplice Peter Bleach ‘someone who can raise half a million dollars within a few hours over a couple of phone calls.’”32
In the meantime, the introduction of a new law against terrorism in Den-mark following the September 11 attacks in New York meant that the extra-dition of Danish citizens had become a real possibility. In May 2002, me-dia reports in Inme-dia duly publicized that Niels Christian Nielsen (now Niels Holck) was indeed residing in Denmark.33 This wide publicity put CBI in a tight spot for not having made enough effort to arrest the accused. By early 2003 when the CBI had still not acted upon this information, the Delhi High Court acting on a PIL ordered the agency to report the action it had taken to arrest the prime accused.34 The CBI replied that it had broached the matter with a visiting Danish minister but had not received any response. In other words, the question of Niels Holck’s extradition had by now entered the official agenda of Indo-Danish bilateral relations. This brief account of the Purulia saga as it unfolded in India allows us to begin outlining two ways in which the case was popularly misread in Denmark.
First, the extradition case in Denmark is sometimes interpreted as a flex-ing of muscles by an increasflex-ingly assertive India in the area of foreign policy.
However, even a cursory reading of the widely available public accounts would reveal that it is not the Indian state, but rather human and legal rights activists who have spurred the state into action to trace the prime accused.
The original trial at which Niels Holck’s associates were sentenced was con-cluded more than a decade ago, in early 2000. At that time, the prime sus-pect, Kim Davy, was officially declared an absconder, and subsequently the Indian authorities made no visible effort to trace or identify him. It was a Public Interest Litigation filed by an activist that drew the attention of the court towards Niels Holck’s presence in Denmark, and it was the court which directed the Indian government to pursue his extradition.35 Since the late 1980s, social activists in India have effectively utilized PIL as an instru-ment of action that has often forced the state to act on issues as varied as pollution control, encroachments on public spaces and deforestation to chil-dren’s rights and communal violence.36 In India, this form of judicial activ-ism is seen as empowering for citizens who have been seeking to challenge
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the state on crucial issues in the past couple of decades. The Purulia case has been kept alive precisely because of the efforts of the activists, who petitioned the court to seek answers from the state on matters of national security.37Secondly, there is a widespread belief in Denmark that India is pursuing the extradition case in order to appease the internal interests of its govern-ment coalition.38 This proposition falters once we begin looking at the actual political landscape of current political alliances in India. To begin with, the Purulia operation is alleged to be an anti-Communist conspiracy engineered by anti-Communist forces in the West as well as in India including an ex-Member of Parliament for one of Congress’s alliance partners.39 The target of the operation was said to be the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which had been ruling the state of West Bengal since 1977. By this logic, the aggrieved party in this case would be the CPI(M) which the external and internal forces were conspiring to dismantle. However, the CPI(M) has not been in any significant position to demand or influence the extradition case over the past five years. The CPI(M) has been out of power since 2008 when it withdrew support from the Congress Party-led coalition at the Centre, and it suffered a further spectacular loss in the 2011 state elections in West Bengal. Even prior to that, the party did not make the Purulia case central to its negotiations with the Congress Party.40 Its recent statements on this case have largely been in response to the discussion generated in the media after Niels Holck’s appearance in an Indian television debate, where he re-framed his actions as part of an international anti-Communist plot.41 The Congress Party, for its part, has clearly rejected the demands for further judicial probes into the case. The only other party that could have any interest in this case is the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) whose former Member of Parliament, Pappu Yadav, is alleged by Niels Holck to have been part of the operation. How-ever, Pappu Yadav has long been incarcerated in prison on unrelated criminal charges, and since 2010 the RJD has been derecognized as a national party having dramatically lost the last election. It is noteworthy that no major political party in India has taken up Purulia as a key plank for either popular mobilization or negotiations.42 In short, the idea that the compulsions of alliance politics are responsible for this case taking center stage seems to be grounded in a misunderstanding of the Indian political landscape.
Once we begin looking at the ways in which the Indian government has dealt with the Purulia arms-drop case, it is the desire to resolve the matter rather than seek international confrontation that becomes more apparent.
Far from making Purulia a display of its political muscle in the global arena, India has seemed much keener to seek solutions to the ensuing diplomatic
altercations with friendly nations. This wish to de-escalate crisis while keep-
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ing up its public face is best illustrated by the ways in which India has dealt with the other accused in the case. To begin with, the five Latvian crew members (who later took Russian citizenship during the trial) and the Brit-ish arms dealer were given life imprisonment upon the conclusion of the original trial in early 2000.43 Quite extraordinarily, the crew members were given a Presidential pardon a few months later, while the British prisoner was similarly granted release in 2004.44 The privilege of a Presidential pardon, as is well known, is not something that is often exercised. However, in this case the prisoners who were said to be from friendly nations were granted this rare privilege and sent home. This decision has irked Indian security analysts who believe that the exercise of the Presidential pardon after a due judicial process is a setback for the Indian justice system as well as counter-productive to its security concerns.45
In the case of Niels Holck, similarly, India has made substantial conces-sions to Denmark that have been severely criticized by Indian foreign-policy commentators. Already in 2007, India had offered assurances to Denmark that the accused would not be sentenced to capital punishment, would be treated according to the UN Convention of Civil and Political Rights, would have constant access to the Danish consular services, would be granted an expeditious trial and, even more importantly, would be sent to his home country to serve the sentence passed.46 Even though the last concession is a subject of internal political controversy – it contravenes the Repatriation of Prisoners Act 2003 which does not allow the transfer of prisoners involved in crimes against India’s security and sovereignty – India has offered it as a means of assuaging the concerns expressed by Denmark.
This kind of negotiation has been criticized widely in India as representa-tive of a lax attitude towards the question of national security which risks set-ting a precedent for similar concessions in other expatriation cases.47 In the summer of 2011 when the extradition case was being tried in Copenhagen, a popular TV channel televised a series of critical debates in which the focus was on the failures of the Indian intelligence and investigative agencies in the Purulia case. Remarkably, Niels Holck and Peter Bleach were given am-ple time to voice their stories in a series called ‘the truth about Purulia’ in a setting conspicuous by its lack of national chauvinism.48 The highly popular anchor, Arnab Goswami who is otherwise known for pursuing middle-class nationalist themes and staging dramatic displays of outrage on live TV had turned his full attention to the shortcomings of the CBI rather than the for-eign culprit – Niels Holck – who had taken liberty with India’s soverfor-eignty.49
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The media focus has firmly been on the theme of security and its viola-tions rather than seeking retribution. The suggesviola-tions made by Niels Holck, therefore, that some unnamed ‘special forces’ within India are conspiring to extradite him in order to torture or murder him seems highly imaginative.50The broad picture before us, then, is that of a longstanding critical debate about national security within India. In this debate, the state and its agencies have been held accountable by activists and the media for not having pre-vented the arms drop and later for not pursuing the key operative. The focus on Niels Holck is a byproduct of this debate and not its essence. However, this complex history has largely been absent in the way the event has been perceived in Denmark. In the Danish episode of this long-running drama, as we will find, the event has found a new raison d’être and consequently a new narrative where Niels Holck appears as a victim of India’s coercive power.