The Isro tragedy: Who will be held accountable for a cooked-up spy case?

Not only did the careers of Chandrasekhar, Narayanan and D Sasikumar collapse, but also the development of cryogenic engines based on Russian technology suffered, as did Indo-Russian co-operation

In a tragic turn of events, space scientist K Chandrasekhar died in hospital hours before the Supreme Court (SC) finally pronounced that the spy case in which he and five others had become embroiled had been an obvious frame-up, awarding Rs 5 million damages to former Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) scientist Nambi Narayanan, who had been “arrested unnecessarily, harassed and subjected to mental cruelty” in 1994. Mr Narayanan, along with Chandrasekhar and others including two Maldivian women, had already been exonerated in 1998; but the fact that the entire case that roiled Kerala politics for almost a quarter of