This fiction was passed on to Russia and China to prove India’s ‘anti-Russia and anti-China policies’

New Delhi: As part of a carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has passed off a 20-year-old Indian space observatory as an establishment that is being used to spy on Russian and Chinese defence assets inside their borders.

This fiction, officials said, was passed on as “credible” input by the ISI to the relevant people in Russia and China “sometime” ago as an example of India’s “anti-Russia and anti-China policies”, while attributing the same to the increased coordination between India and the United States.

The establishment in question is more than a 20-year-old Indian Astronomical Observatory at Mount Saraswathi, Hanle, Ladakh, which is situated at an altitude of 15,000 feet above sea level, north of the Western Himalayas.

The satellite communication link to this observatory was inaugurated by the then Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Dr Farooq Abdullah in June 2001.

This observatory, among other things, operates a 2m-Himalayan Chandra Telescope (2m-HCT), which is remotely controlled from the Centre for Research & Education in Science & Technology (CREST), Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Hosakote, Bangalore. The observatory is regarded among the backbone facilities for research in astronomy in India and it also operates multiple weather monitoring instruments including an all-sky camera and an automated weather station.

In recent times, the observatory has seen the installation of infrastructure like a High Energy Gamma Ray Telescope (HAGAR), a Major Atmospheric Cerenkov Experiment Telescope (MACE) and an Imaging Atmospheric Cerenkov Telescope (IACT).

These recent additions, as per photographs seen by this newspaper, have been passed off as assets that India is using to spy on Russian and Chinese defence preparations.

Apart from being shared with Russia and China through official dossiers, the same fiction was shared by the ISI with a select group of Twitter handles for larger dissemination in the public domain and to create an anti-India narrative among the general public in these two countries.

Contrary to the claim by the ISI, this observatory is open to tourists in general. However, since it is in close proximity to the International Border, an inner line permit is required to visit Hanle, the nearest village to the observatory, which has a population of 1,000 people and is located at a distance of about 255 km from Leh.