Ananda Marga, ignored intelligence, and a plot that nearly ignited West Bengal’s political cauldron.

On the cold night of 17 December 1995, the residents of a few remote villages in Purulia district, West Bengal, witnessed something both surreal and terrifying. A foreign aircraft, flying low and without clearance, dropped dozens of parachutes carrying wooden crates across the fields of Jhalda, Belamu, and Maramu. When curious villagers approached the boxes at dawn, they discovered a staggering cache of arms, which included AK-47 rifles, anti-tank grenades, rocket launchers, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition.

The event, now etched into India’s post-Cold War security history as the Purulia Arms Drop Case, remains one of the most mysterious and politically charged incidents ever to unfold in Indian skies.

The Flight That Should Never Have Been

The weapon-laden aircraft, an Antonov An-26, registered in Latvia, had taken off from Riga and made stops in Bulgaria, Karachi, and Thailand before entering Indian airspace. It was manned by five Latvian crew members, a British arms dealer, Peter Bleach, and allegedly masterminded by a Danish national, Niels Holck (alias Kim Davy).

Five days later, on 22 December, Indian Air Force jets intercepted the same aircraft over Mumbai airspace and forced it to land. Bleach and the crew were arrested; Davy escaped through Nepal.

But the questions began almost immediately:

How did a foreign aircraft penetrate deep into Indian airspace without detection?
Who were the weapons meant for?
And why was the Indian intelligence establishment seemingly asleep at the wheel?

AnandaMarga - The Suspected Recipient

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) concluded that the arms were meant for Ananda Marga, a socio-spiritual organization with a complicated past and a history of friction with the CPI(M)-led Left Front government underJyotiBasu.

The CBI’s 1996 interim report explicitly stated that “the places where the arms were targeted to be dropped were associated with Ananda Marga followers.” A court ruling in 1997 echoed this, identifying a three-storied building of Ananda Margain the drop zone as a probable target site.

At the time, Ananda Marga’s relationship with the state government was deeply adversarial. Its members claimed political persecution, alleging that the Left regime had systematically harassed the organization since the 1970s. The ideological confrontation had, by the 1990s, hardened into mistrust and hostility.

Analysts argue that the weapons were intended to arm Ananda Marga followers, not necessarily to wage open war, but to prepare for armed resistance or retaliatory violence against CPI(M) cadres.

This theory aligns with the scale and type of weapons, such as the military-grade arms far beyond personal defense, suggesting preparation for organized conflict.

A Plot to Destabilize West Bengal?

Within months, the CPI(M) leadership publicly claimed that the arms drop was part of a larger conspiracy to destabilize the democratically elected Left Front government. Senior CPI(M) leaders alleged that the operation was “designed to create law and order breakdown in West Bengal and justify Central intervention.”

Danish accused Kim Davy added fuel to this narrative years later when he claimed, in a televised interview, that the arms drop had “tacit sanction from the Indian government” and that the mission aimed to “support oppressed groups against the Left regime.”

Although these claims remain unverified, they reinforced the perception that the operation was not merely a rogue arms-smuggling act, but a politically motivated scheme entangled in the power struggles of 1990s West Bengal.

The Intelligence Failure

The most damning aspect of the Purulia episode was not merely the drop itself, but the intelligence paralysis that preceded it.

Multiple reports, including a 1996 India Today investigation, revealed that British intelligence (MI5) had alerted Indian authorities about the impending airdrop weeks in advance, yet no preventive action was taken. The aircraft entered Indian airspace, crossed several radar zones, completed its mission, and exited undetected.

A retired RAW official later stated anonymously, “The Center may not have planned it, but it certainly looked the other way.”

Even the CPI(M) accused the then central government of withholding intelligence inputs from the state administration. The West Bengal police, they claimed, were not informed in time, a lapse that may have been deliberate.

Whether through bureaucratic incompetence or political calculation, the Center’s inaction effectively enabled the drop to occur.

The Aftermath and Legal Drama

The CBI arrested the Latvian crew and Peter Bleach, sentencing them to life imprisonment in 2000. Diplomatic negotiations later secured their release, the Latvians in 2000, and Bleach in 2004 via presidential pardon.

Kim Davy, however, remained at large. India’s repeated extradition requests to Denmark were rejected on human rights grounds, the most recent being in August 2024, when the Danish High Court again ruled that India could not guarantee “humane prison conditions.”

The case, though legally dormant, continues to smolder politically.

Central Government: Complicit by Omission

While the CBI found no proof of direct central involvement, mounting circumstantial evidence suggests deliberate negligence.

It is difficult to accept that an operation of such magnitude involving international flight paths, transnational financing, and massive arms cargo could have escaped the radar of Indian intelligence entirely.

If British agencies had indeed shared advance warnings, as multiple accounts suggest, then the central government’s failure to act points not to ignorance but wilful inaction. In that sense, the Center may not have helped the operation, but it certainly enabled it by omission.

Three Decades Later: A Case Without Closure

Nearly thirty years on, the Purulia arms drop remains an unsolved enigma, a tangle of politics, espionage, and unanswered questions.

●      Were the arms truly meant for Ananda Marga, or were they intended to create the illusion of a conspiracy to discredit the organization?

●      Did the central government deliberately ignore actionable intelligence to destabilize a state government run by political rivals?

●      Or was it simply one of India’s most embarrassing lapses in air security?

What is clear is that the Purulia incident revealed dangerous vulnerabilities both in India’s intelligence apparatus and in the murky intersections of religion, politics, and power.

Epilogue: The Night That Changed Indian Airspace Forever

The Purulia arms drop was not merely a criminal act; it was a political message dropped from the sky. It showed how ideological tensions within India could be weaponized by external players, aided - perhaps inadvertently - by internal apathy.

Whether one views it as an act of rebellion, espionage, or betrayal, that December night marked the moment when West Bengal’s political undercurrents collided with global arms trafficking and intelligence intrigue, leaving behind a mystery that still defies closure.