Did Jaswant tamper with mole paper?

Has Jaswant Singh tampered with the letter on which he based the charge that PMO had a US mole?

Has former External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh tampered with the letter on which he based the charge that PV Narasimha Rao's PMO had a US mole who leaked the country's nuclear secrets?

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At an NDA meeting on Sunday, Singh indicated that he had scratched out names from the letter but was willing to pass on the document to Manmohan Singh and share with him the mole's identity, if the PM so desired. For a good 10 minutes, others at the meeting, including A.B. Vajpayee and LK Advani, listened in silence as the generally mild-mannered Dinesh Trivedi of the Trinamool Congress grilled the former minister.

The issue came up when the BJP's V.K. Malhotra referred to the disclosures in Singh's book, pointing out that the matter — together with the Kandahar hijack — was bound to figure in Parliament's monsoon session, which opened on Monday. Barely had the Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha taken the floor, then Trivedi demanded: "As a citizen of India, I'd like to know who the mole is? You are duty-bound to disclose his identity… people have a right to know."

The Trinamool MP did not stop at this. "How can you keep quiet about somebody who engaged in anti-national activities, leaking vital secrets because of which our nuclear policy took a backseat," he asked, reminding Singh of the PM's call that he reveal the mole's name.

Clearly on the backfoot, the BJP leader — who couldn't be approached for comments despite repeated efforts by the HT — insisted that he wasn't duty-bound to do anything but would give the PM the letter if he asked for it, as "my conscience is clear". It was in the run of this conversation that he admitted to having scratched out two names from the 1995 communication to a US senator, ostensibly by the mole's American handler. It could not be immediately confirmed whether the “fudged names” were those of the sender (US diplomat) and the senator to whom the letter was addressed.

On his part, Trivedi averred that Singh cannot be selective and must disclose the names that figure in the letter. He also drew the NDA leaders' attention to Vir Sanghvi's column in Sunday HT in which the writer claimed a private individual with direct access to Vajpayee and Advani during the NDA regime was "almost certainly a CIA asset and had been in the agency's pay since the early 1960s". To that, Singh's somewhat facetious response was: such articles keep appearing in the press and successive governments have had foreign moles.

The NDA allies at the meeting included JD(U)'s Sharad Yadav and Digvijay Singh, Shiv Sena's Anant Geete and Ekanath Thakur and the BJD's BK Tripathy.