After coming down heavy on the Kerala Government for unleashing a witch-hunt on former ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan, the Supreme Court had directed the formation of a three-member committee under retired SC judge D K Jain to probe if there was a conspiracy among the then police officials to falsely implicate the top ISRO space scientist.
Now the committee will have its first sitting in the state capital on 14 and 15 December.
In 2018, then Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A M Khanwilkar and Justice D Y Chandrachud decided to appoint a committee under judge Jain to inquire into the role of officials of the Kerala police in the arrest of Narayanan.
While the Centre appointed a top official — D K Prasad, the Pinarayi Vijayan government appointed former Additional Chief Secretary V S Senthil.
Reacting to the news Narayanan said “I do not know if I will be contacted as their job is to find out if there was any conspiracy and it’s not just the three former Kerala police officials, as there are others also. Maybe the committee was doing the groundwork to help them go forward in their probe, I do not know,”.
It all started in 1994 when Narayanan was arrested on charges of espionage along with fellow scientist D Sasi Kumaran, two Maldivian women and a businessman.
The CBI cleared Narayanan in 1995, however, he has been fighting a legal battle against the then top police official Siby Mathews who later reached the rank of the Director-General of Police, S Vijayan, and KK Joshua, who probed the case and implicated Narayanan. Another police officer T.P. Senkumar, a former state police chief who was tipped to probe spy charges involving Narayanan had called the Nambi Narayanan a ‘below average scientist’.
When the ISRO spy case came to light, there was a massive factional feud in the Congress party between senior leaders, the late K Karunakaran and the A K Antony who later became India’s Defence Minister.
In the book Spies from Space: The Isro Frame-up written by journalist J Rajasekharan Nair who did detailed and comprehensive reporting on ISRO spy case is worth reading.