Former ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan compensated for spy scandal — Quartz India
Even though there was no case to be made, fallout from the scandal changed many personal and political trajectories.
Karunakaran, for one, had to resign. Narayanan was branded a traitor. His family was subjected to targeted harassment. Even ISRO’s reputation was dented, with its buses vandalised and its scientists’ kids facing insults in school.
Narayanan has also said that he was tortured during the 50 days he spent in police custody. He says he was beaten and slapped as his interrogators pressed him to just cough up a Muslim name—any Muslim name.
He maintains that India’s cryogenic space engine programme was set back by a decade, though this claim is countered on the grounds that the scientist had already chosen to retire before he was arrested.
On its part, the supreme court was just shy of admitting a conspiracy against Narayanan: “It is not a case where the accused is kept under custody and, eventually, after trial, he is found not guilty…The criminal law was set in motion without any basis. It was initiated, if one is allowed to say, on some kind of fancy or notion.”
Mariam Rasheeda, the Maldivian native whose arrest initiated the scandal, had said that one of the investigating officers in the case had sought sexual favours from her, and decided to frame her for espionage when she refused his advances.
Karunakaran’s political opponents—within his own party—are then said to have seized on the opportunity to get him replaced with their leader AK Antony. “Let the judicial (committee) go ahead. I don’t want to comment before that,” Antony told Quartz in the wake of last week’s supreme court verdict.
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