ISRO capability in launching 104 satellites in one go last week was much celebrated, but one of the brains behind conceptualising them, and the much-famed Mangalyaan mission, is still fighting for justice.
The reputation of 75-year-old former ISRO scientist S. Nambi Narayanan was destroyed after he was named in the infamous and cooked up ‘ISRO spying case’ of 1994. Narayanan, along with colleague D. Sasikumaran, were charged with selling defence secrets to two alleged Maldivian intelligence officers. He was accused of being a victim to a ‘honey-trap’, was arrested, and spent 50 days in jail.
The CBI dismissed the charges against him as “phony” in May 1996 and the Supreme Court dismissed them in April 1998.
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Narayanan, along with French scientists, was instrumental in building the Vikas engine used in the mission to Mars and also in the recent mission where ISRO launched 104 satellites simultaneously.
He has spent the past 23 years trying to bring the three police officers from Kerala who had falsely implicated him in the so-called ‘sex-scandal’. Speaking to The Hindustan Times, Narayanan displays a sense of anguish at not being able to bask in his moment of glory: “There, they are using the same system that I worked upon and developed. But here, I am still fighting to get justice. I have wasted my 25 years,” he is quoted as saying.
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The CBI report that cleared Narayanan also recommended action against the three police officers who implicated him. The Kerala government is said to have dilly-dallied on the case and began an SIT probe into the matter but the apex court quashed the case.
Narayanan believed that he was being framed by people who did not want India to gain an upper-hand in space technology by building cryogenic space engines and tried to impede his work. He moved the Kerala High Court against Siby Mathews, K.K. Joshwa and S.Vijayan, the three officers who filed the case.
The Kerala government had defended the trio however in the High Court, saying that they were good officers who had since retired. Aggrieved that the matter was not reaching a logical conclusion, Narayanan moved the apex court.
A report in The Times Of India says that Narayanan’s lawyer V. Giri, told the court on Monday that “In a situation like this, if the erring officers are allowed to go scot-free, it may give a long rope to the investigating agency to take anyone into custody without a reason. Such a situation would be anathema to the concept of justice.”
