Spying on India: A quantitative analysis of espionage against post-colonial India

This article is the first comprehensive quantitative study about people arrested for spying against India. It introduces the Spying Against India Dataset (SAID), which systematically utilises press articles from India’s newspaper of record to build a dataset for understanding espionage against India. This article employs a review of over 1200 newspaper articles, which was narrowed to 181 specific cases of alleged espionage involving 684 accused spies over about 65 years. SAID includes alleged spies’ names/case descriptions, number of conspirators, motivations, connections to the military or government, sex, nationality, country spying for, city and state of arrest, guilt and confession status. Covering decades of intelligence history, SAID introduces a quantitative open-source methodology to better understand how a country has been spied on when the country has rarely declassified its intelligence history.