On a cold December night in 1994, muffled voices and thuds rent the air at Latex Guest House in Thiruvananthapuram, where a couple of Intelligence Bureau officials were interrogating a leading Indian space scientist accused of selling India’s rocket secrets to Pakistan through two Maldivian women. The next morning S Nambi Narayanan, the scientist, was found slumped on the floor, cold and unconscious.

When Nambi asked his tormentors why he was being tortured, one of the men said: “You sold our motherland to the enemy. If one day we are proved wrong, you can slap us.” Nambi says he has kept his slippers ready.

Friday’s Supreme Court order granting Rs 50 lakh compensation to Nambi and constituting a committee headed by Justice DK Jain “to find out ways and means to take appropriate steps against the erring officials” is not the end of a 24-year-old battle that the scientist has been fighting – it must be the beginning of the last round. A quarter century of cases has answered the ‘what’ and, partly, the ‘who’ of the story. What remains to be told is the ‘why’ part of it.

That the Isro spy case was a figment of someone’s imagination has been clear since May 2, 1996 when the chief judicial magistrate, Ernakulam, accepted a CBI report that found the case to be a fabricated one. CBI had sent separate confidential reports, one on the IB investigation to the Union government, and the other on the special investigation team to the Kerala government.

CBI said IB’s interrogation reports were incoherent and full of contradictions, that the IB officers acted in an unprofessional manner. The central agency named then IB joint director Mathew John and deputy director RB Sreekumar for having failed to conduct a fair and objective inquiry. CBI also named Kerala police special branch inspector S Vijayan, crime branch DSP KK Joshwa and DIG Siby Mathews. These men, one presumes, are “the erring officers” the apex court was talking about.

The Justice Jain committee has the mandate to find out if there were more conspirators. The most crucial part, however, remains outside its purview: what was their intention? A discerning reader of the case since its beginning may find not one, but at least three conspiracies behind the fake Isro spy case. And if one were to arrange them chronologically, they get progressively more serious.

Conspiracy one was personal, a misadventure of a Kerala police officer called Vijayan, who arrested a Maldivian woman called Mariam Rasheeda from a lodge in Thiruvananthapuram on October 20 on charges of overstaying. Later it turned out to be false; she had gone to Vijayan to report that she may not be able to fly out despite having a ticket since there was a bandh on that day. Mariam later said the officer had sought sexual favours, and after her arrest she was tortured physically.

The first link to Isro was a telephone number Vijayan found in Mariam’s diary, that of D Sasikumaran, an Isro scientist who worked under Nambi. Mariam later said she had consulted Sasikumaran’s wife, a physician. By the end of November 1994 Vijayan and Siby Mathews had “netted” seven people, including Nambi, Sasikumaran, Fauziyya Hassan (another Maldivian woman), K Chandrasekhar (a representative of Russian space agency Glavkosmos) and SK Sharma, a labour contractor.

Conspiracy two was political. As the spy case got bigger with some Malayalam newspapers falling for the salacious details the Kerala police supplied, the AK Antony faction of Congress, which was trying to bring down the K Karunakaran government in Kerala, found an opportunity. Then Youth Congress leader Cherian Philip is on record that he was among the conspirators led by Oommen Chandy who dragged in the name of IG Raman Srivastava, who was Karunakaran’s favourite police officer, into the spy case. Finally, Karunakaran had to resign.

The third conspiracy – the one yet to be proved – may be international, and details of this episode could bring out some very dirty liaisons between some IB officers and foreign intelligence agencies. Pertinent to note is the timing of the spy case. India had just launched its first PSLV, for which Nambi was the project director for two of the four stages of the rocket. He was also heading the cryogenic engine project which was to fuel India’s future projects including interplanetary and manned missions.

It is well known that India can launch satellites at a fraction of the cost of what the US and the European Space Agency charge. India mastering satellite launches, especially with the cryogenic engine that can power bigger rockets, would mean a lot of money flow into the country that would otherwise have gone West. And someone was clearly not happy with that. They partly won, as the spy case slowed down India’s cryogenic project by at least a decade.

In his book ‘Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier’, prolific space writer Brian Harvey details how when Russia was about to hand over cryogenic technology to India, the US clamped sanctions on the two countries. It is also little known history that India had, through a smart circumvention of sanctions, flown crucial parts of the cryogenic engine from Russia in the underbelly of three Ural Airways flights less than a year before the spy case broke out.

And the man India entrusted with the operation answers to the name Nambi Narayanan.

When Nambi asked his tormentors why he was being tortured, one of the men said: “You sold our motherland to the enemy. If one day we are proved wrong, you can slap us.” Nambi says he has kept his slippers ready