The Saffron Project
The USSR in the early 1980s was, by all accounts, internally and externally at a major crossroads. By the spring of 1981, Yuri Andropov was approaching the conclusion of his third year as General Secretary and his efforts to purge the system of "malaise and corruption" and promoting a generation of new, innovative and most importantly modern-minded officials across the
nomenklatura and increasingly into the high halls of power in the Presidium, Supreme Soviet and even Politburo seemed to be paying fruit, while his efforts to pursue a new, more aggressive five-year plan to dust off Kosygin's ideas and reorient the Soviet economy out of its late 1970s Brezhnevian stagnation had only just begun. Internationally, the benefits of
detente seemed to be paying off as an ebb in tensions with Washington had given breathing room to Moscow. USSR had just pulled off an impressive show at the 1980 Olympics that had greatly burnished its image and as "68ers" of younger, more ideologically intransigent left-wingers in the West came of age in professional, academic and bureaucratic roles and memories of the Prague Spring that same year faded, Soviet prestige seemed elevated at a time that its ideological opponents in the West seemed either hapless, corrupt, or both.
This more muscular, optimistic veneer projected from the Kremlin in the Andropov years papered over a lot of internal issues, however. The corruption purge had not fallen upon high-ranking party members and the rank-and-file equally; it was whispered, when around safe ears, that the heavyweights who had been rounded up and fired (or given an extended Siberian vacation) seemed to curiously enough be Andropov's intra-party rivals or those who stood in the way of his preferred allies. The Soviet economy, after enjoying robust growth in the late 1960s under the Eighth Five-Year Plan, had fallen into a lengthy malaise that in many ways mirrored the ailments suffered in Western market economies during the 1970s but were in fact considerably worse with a program of inflexible collectivization; Mikhael Gorbachev, one of Andropov's younger "shakers," as Kremlinologists came to term them, was bold enough to decisively name the problem as "stagnation" in official albeit secret internal memorandums, and the lack of punishment attached to the norm-breaking Agriculture Minister for speaking so bluntly against the status quo betrayed how seriously Andropov took this problem.
[1]
The international aspects of Soviet influence were concerning, too. Prague in 1968 had badly shaken the Kremlin's faith in its close-in empire and the cracks seemed to be showing in post-Ceaucescu Romania and now Poland as well. The Sino-Soviet split and the gradual rapprochement with Beijing begun by the United States before the spectacular collapse of Richard Nixon's Presidency
[2] had created a considerable wrinkle within world communism, with now two competing poles for the global hard-left, and the ideological purity and convert's fanaticism of Maoism generated considerable appeal to the rising left-wing movements of the Third World. This need to pay ever-closer attention to what China was up to, especially with the debacle that was the third of three terms under the more conservative and fervently anti-communist Republican Party in the United States, led Andropov to gradually reorient Soviet attention from west to south and southeast.
Detente and an apparent diminishing Western appetite for military spending and commitments led Andropov and his inner-sanctum cronies such as Aliyev and Ustinov to conclude that the early 1980s would be defined by redefining Sovietism for the Third World and, at a time when the post-Mao China seemed uniquely weak and supine, reorienting world communism back onto Moscow's preferred axis. The world was more complicated in 1981 than it had been even in the postwar chaos of 1945, with the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Middle East, and the Kremlin would need to demonstrate it understood this and had a response.
Andropov's attention thus fell increasingly on a loosely-related constellation of active measures related to South Asia, what came to be termed internally at the KGB as the Saffron Project, so-named for the color associated with India and, in particular, Indian Hindu nationalism and its various grievances and insecurities.
[3] India was a remarkable prize in the global contest for ideas, the backbone of the so-called "Non-Aligned Movement" since the days of Nehru. As the largest domino sans China to fall in the late 1940s collapse of the old colonial-imperial order, it had fallen not to revolutionary communism but rather a type of bureaucratic Fabian socialism nicknamed the "License Raj" but much like the rest of the Third World come to be dominated by a familial dynasty, in this case the Nehru-Gandhi family that now had produced the current Indian Prime Minister returned with a vengeance in 1980 in Indira Gandhi, and her likely successor, her son Sanjay.
India's problems were myriad. It suffered from crippling levels of poverty and illiteracy, its various economic reforms over the years had done about as much good as the USSR's, and it was riven by sectarian tensions, not just between Hindu and Muslim but increasingly with the Sikhs of Punjab. Pakistan loomed large in India's imagination as a great foe, especially after the brutal Bangladeshi War of Independence that had seen millions killed in Bangladesh (then "East Pakistan"), especially as the flexible and ambitious populist regime of Zulfikar Bhutto had gotten its sea legs and grown more confident as an international player, managing to somehow be close with the USSR and its Marxist client in Afghanistan but also play nice with China and the United States, going so far as to have been the choice of exile for the late Shah of Iran. Critically, the majority of the Punjab was in Pakistan, even if the majority of Sikhs lived on the Indian side of the border, and though Bhutto was no friend to Sikh nationalism, that mattered little to either the paranoiacs of Hindu chauvinism or, increasingly, the smaller-and-smaller circle of confidants around the heir apparent, Sanjay Gandhi.
Sanjay, both domestically and internationally, had a reputation for being eccentric, if not erratic and perhaps outright unstable. His influence over his mother during the "Emergency" in India, where the country had nearly toppled into the same kind of autocratic morass that so many other similar states had, had been notorious, and his empowerment of party-aligned hooligans, corrupt party hacks like Defense Minister Bansi Lal or personal friends such as Vidya Charan Shukla, head of broadcasting had hollowed out much of the professional core of the Congress Party's lower echelons and rising talent. In a party already sympathetic to the Soviet Union since the time of Nehru, in other words, the ground was fertile for the KGB to start making inroads with the most important and least accountable man in South Asia.
India was a springboard, in other words, to bigger and greater things. Active measures campaigns began ratcheting up starting in the fall of 1980 and then at a strong clip after the new year, not just in India but across the region. Soviet diplomats, confident that Bhutto had no intention of meddling with their clients in Afghanistan
[4], began to step up overt aid in Pakistan. At the same time, efforts began to be made to "penetrate" Sanjay's circle, which was not a particularly difficult task with how careless and carefree many of the people he surrounded himself with were. A few bribes here, some honeypots there, and in less than twelve months Saffron was a vast network of informants, loose-lipped marks, and operatives befuddled at how easy it was to burrow their way remarkably near the beating heart of power in India.
Once there, the influence campaign began. What if it was the case that Sikh separatism was not a fully indigenous plot? What if, perhaps, Pakistan - and not just Pakistan, but the CIA - had something to do with it...?
[1] The Soviet economy wasn't quite at breadlines status in early 1981 yet, and is stronger here than in OTL at the same point, but its not exactly strong.
[2] Kinda wild to think that ITTL Ford was President longer than Nixon
[3] RSS and Hindutva were not the force they are today in 1981, but INC had just clawed back power in 1980 from the BJP and Hindutva was very much a response to increasing Islamic radicalism in the Middle East in the late 1970s
[4] Bhutto is a big reason why the USSR has less of a need to intervene in Afghanistan militarily ITTL