PROFILE / GOVERNMENT

Undercover
Ajit Doval in theory and practice

PRAVEEN DONTHI

01 September 2017
Ajit Doval is among the very few to constantly have the ear of a prime minister who has centralised power more
than any of his predecessors in decades. VIJAY VERMA/PTI

I |“INDIA’S JAMES BOND”

PRIME MINISTER Narendra Modi and US President

Donald Trump addressed a joint press conference at the
Rose Garden of the White House on the afternoon of 27
June. This followed the rst meeting between the two
leaders, and now each stood at a lectern with his
prepared remarks. Trump addressed the audience rst.
“I’m proud to announce to the media, to the American
people and to the Indian people, that Prime Minister
Modi and I are world leaders in social media,” he said,
drawing some laughter, before plunging into the usual
diplomatic boilerplate. As Trump plodded on—“I look
forward to working with you, Mister Prime Minister, to
create jobs in our countries”—a gust of wind swept
away some of Modi’s papers.

Ajit Doval sprang into action. From his seat in the front
row—where he was seated alongside the Indian foreign
secretary, the Indian ambassador to Washington and
other high o cials—the National Security Advisor rose
faster than any of his fellows to gather the loose sheets
from the lawn, bundle them together, and hand them
back to his boss on the podium. Before he retreated, the
compact 72-year-old, dressed as usual in a studiously
nondescript suit and tie, also attentively replaced the
cover on Modi’s glass of water—another victim of the
wind. Modi later delivered his speech without incident.

The Press Trust of India issued a short dispatch

describing the episode. This was soon published by a
host of India’s major media outlets, each adding to it a
dramatic headline: “How NSA Doval rescued PM Modi
at White House event,” “When Ajit Doval saved Modi
from embarrassment at White House,” and more in the
same vein. These were passed around on social media—
the NSA has several fan pages on Facebook and Twitter,
with tens of thousands of followers between them.
News channels broadcast footage of the scene. Before
the day was done, Doval’s heroics had become a minor
sensation.

AJIT DOVAL is India’s most powerful security

bureaucrat. Appointed by and answerable only to the
prime minister, he heads the National Security Council,
an advisory body that includes the ministers of home,
nance, defence and external a airs. A step lower down
in the organisational hierarchy under the NSC is the
Strategic Policy Group, which includes the secretaries of
each of the ministries represented on the council, the
heads of each branch of the armed forces, and the heads
of India’s primary intelligence agencies—the
Intelligence Bureau, or IB, and the Research and
Analysis Wing, or RAW. The National Security Advisor
is responsible for planning and coordinating the
government’s e orts in pursuit of a coherent strategy
for India’s protection, domestically and internationally.
He also acts as the main lter of security-related
information and advice between government organs
and the prime minister, particularly when it comes to
intelligence. On top of that, as the chairperson of the
executive council of the Nuclear Command Authority,
he recommends action on the control of India’s nuclear
arsenal to the NCA’s ultimate authority, a political
council chaired by the prime minister.

Those are the o cial bounds of Doval’s power. The real

bounds of it are unclear, especially given the cloak-and-
dagger nature of his work, but many familiar with the
inner mechanics of the government are convinced that
these transcend the o cial limits. Doval is among the
few to constantly have the ear of a prime minister who
has centralised power more than any of his
predecessors in decades. An analyst who has worked
with the NSA told me he has immense in uence over
the home ministry, the defence ministry and the
ministry of external a airs. A former member of the
cabinet secretariat said that Doval bypasses the
command structures of India’s intelligence agencies and
deals directly with their operatives. He also said that
Doval acts as one of Modi’s main diplomatic
counsellors, rivalled only by the foreign secretary. A
Bloomberg report in 2016 stated that “some consider
Ajit Doval the most powerful person in India after
Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”

Doval’s projected self-image spills beyond the formal

constraints of the NSA position. Though he has shied
away from public pronouncements since taking o ce,
between 2005 and 2014, the time between his
retirement from the IB and his appointment as the
NSA, he aired sweeping theories on, and hard-line
solutions for, some of India’s most complex domestic
and international challenges. Many of the issues he held
forth on—minority politics, for instance—fall beyond
the usual purview of intelligence and national security.
Breaking the omertà typical of even retired spies, he
also pro ered some astounding details of his 33-year
career in the IB. The result was a popular persona of a
grand statesman and strategist, a super-spy, the perfect
man to handle a life-or-death crisis.

This persona has been buoyed in great part by a media

—especially a cohort of national-security and defence
correspondents—that persistently repeats larger-than-
life stories of Doval’s exploits from his IB days, even
though these stories are typically unveri ed and
sometimes unveri able. One common conceit, repeated
often enough to have become cliche, is to call him
MORE FROM THIS SECTION
“India’s James Bond.” Today, he has a higher pro le in
INTERVIEW
the media than any NSA had before him, and is far Former IC Sridhar
more prominent than any other bureaucrat in the Acharyulu’s tussle
with RBI, PMO over
government. list of wilful
NILEENA MS
Doval’s critics say that the stories told of him give a
partial picture of the man and the events he has had a EXCERPT
The murky past of
hand in. His critics also argue that his time in the IB central vigilance
made him an operations man, trained in methods of commissioner KV
Chowdary
espionage and tactics of suppression, but did not
SOURYA MAJUMDER
educate him in the kind of diplomatic and political AND
PARANJOY GUHA
strategising required in his current role, where prudent THAKURTA
accommodation can be as important as subversion and
NEWS
intimidation. Doval’s hawkishness, they say, is a राफेल करार म रलायं स
symptom of this limitation—an example, as the समूह क भू मका को
छपाने के लए सरकार ने
metaphor goes, of how when all a man has is a hammer, बोला झूठ और िकया
everything in his eyes looks like a nail. ी ि ं ो
SAGAR

The NSA’s record so far has been lacklustre. The COMMENTARY

Indian states’ tight
situation in Kashmir is now more volatile than it has leash on urban
governance
been in decades, with militancy once again on the rise.
MATHEW IDICULLA
India’s relationship with many of its immediate
neighbours is worse now than when Doval took o ce, NEWS
The government’s
in May 2014. Even from a narrowly tactical viewpoint, lies and procedural
Doval’s leadership has raised concerns: the response to amendments to
obscure Reliance
last year’s militant attack on the Pathankot Air Force
SAGAR
Station, during which Doval directed operations, was
called inept by numerous experts. None of this bodes
well for India’s safety.

Doval’s political connections have contributed heavily

to his career. During his IB years, he had close links to
the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh. In the build-up to the 2014 general
election, when he was in charge of an RSS-a liated
think tank, there were rumours of Doval aiding Modi’s
campaign and weakening the incumbent government.
The details of his contribution to that project are just
beginning to come to light. He has shown an
unquestioning loyalty to Modi—a disquieting trait, in
some eyes, for someone tasked with informing the
prime minister of di cult facts he might not want to
hear. Doval’s actions and statements reveal an
adherence to the belligerent Hindu nationalism of the
RSS. That a man of such convictions has become the
most popular NSA in Indian history reveals how a large
part of the public has been inculcated with the same
obsessions and prejudices. Studying how Doval sees the
Indian state lays bare how the country’s present rulers
and their supporters do too.

II | OPERATIONS

LITTLE IS KNOWN about Doval’s early years. He was

born in 1945, into a Brahmin family in a village called
Ghiri, in the hills of what is now Uttarakhand. His
father was an o cer in the Indian Army, and the former
Uttar Pradesh chief minister and Congress leader HN
Bahuguna was his mother’s cousin. Doval studied at
Ajmer Military School in Rajasthan, and went on to
earn a degree in economics from the University of Agra.
He joined the Indian Police Service in 1968, as part of
that year’s Kerala cadre. After a stint as a trainee in
Kottayam, he was appointed the additional
superintendent of police for Thalassery. Doval was
there when the town witnessed infamous communal
rioting, at the end of 1971 and beginning of 1972.
According to Alexander Jacob, a former director general
of police of Kerala, who in 1989 wrote a report on the
violence, Doval played an important role in controlling
the riots. By 1972, he had been moved to the IB, joining
its operations wing. Before his retirement in 2005, he
would rise, although brie y, to the directorship of the
organisation.

Appointed by and
answerable only to the
prime minister, Ajit
Doval heads the
National Security
Council, an advisory
body that includes the
ministers of home,
nance, defence and
external a airs.

Doval’s career in the IB coincided with several of

independent India’s major internal security crises. He
left his impress on many of them, even if not as deeply
as popular accounts might suggest. A pattern that
sometimes repeated itself wherever he appeared was
the use of what some in intelligence circles call “out-of-
the-box” methods, often a euphemism for extrajudicial
means. Doval was not solely responsible for these
methods—Indian intelligence services have readily
resorted to them since long before he joined the IB. But
these events and methods, in turn, left their mark on
Doval.

The new recruit’s rst IB assignment took him to

Aizawl, where he served as the head of the Subsidiary
Intelligence Bureau, the local unit of the IB, until 1977.
According to KM Singh, his IPS batchmate and a former
special director of the IB, Doval volunteered for the
posting. It was a bold move. In 1966, rebellion ared in
the surrounding hills, then still a part of Assam. The
Mizo National Front, headed by a former army
hawaldar named Laldenga, established a separatist
insurgency. The government responded with immense
violence. It turned the air force against its own citizens,
ordering the bombardment of Aizawl. Government
forces cleared Aizawl and other cities of the MNF, but
the rebels continued guerilla warfare in the
countryside. Entire villages were forcibly relocated in a
bid to starve the rebels of recruits, hideouts and
supplies. The intensity of the insurgency had waned by
the time Doval arrived, but the area was still very
volatile.

In 1974, six years into his career, Doval was decorated

with the Police Medal, an award for distinguished
service. He received the medal at an unusually young
age—it was typically awarded to o cers with more than
a dozen years of service.

Accounts of Doval's intelligence career typically begin with the story of

how he undermined a secessionist movement led by the Mizo leader
Laldenga. SWADESH TALWAR/INDIAN EXPRESS ARCHIVE
Doval did not stay in Aizawl long enough to witness the
o cial end of the con ict, in 1986, with the signing of
the Mizo Peace Accord, under which the government
granted full statehood to Mizoram. According to some
of his journalist biographers, however, the settlement
was almost single-handedly his doing.

In a pro le of Doval published just as he became the

NSA, the journalist Nitin Gokhale wrote, “The Mizo
Accord of July 1986 … was propelled largely by Mr
Doval’s initiative.” Gokhale added, “As a mid-level
Intelligence Bureau o cer in the north-east, he
in ltrated the underground Mizo National Front …
weaned away half a dozen of its top commanders and
all but broke the back of the MNF, forcing its leader
Laldenga to sue for peace.”

In a piece titled “Ajit Doval, giant among spies, is the

new National Security Adviser,” the journalist Saikat
Datta, citing an undated conversation between
Laldenga and unnamed “interviewers,” quoted the late
MNF leader as saying, “I had seven military
commanders under me. When Doval left, he took six of
them with him and I had no choice but to come on
board and negotiate a peace accord.”

This narrative has often been reproduced in the media,

though there is su cient evidence to complicate it. By
the time Doval arrived in Aizawl, in 1972, circumstances
had already turned against the MNF. In the late 1960s,
to escape increasing repression, the rebels had
developed bases across the international border with
East Pakistan. Following Pakistan’s defeat in the Indo-
Pakistani War of 1971 and the resulting creation of
Bangladesh, the rebels were expelled from that
sanctuary and left stranded. The MNF made its rst
overtures of a settlement with India soon afterwards,
but talks stalled. Vijendra Singh Jafa, the chief secretary
of Assam at the time, later wrote that three of the
MNF’s top leaders crossed into India at around this
time to surrender under an amnesty. All of this came
before Doval’s arrival.

In early 1972, India recognised Mizoram as a union

territory, as a precursor to eventual statehood. This
bolstered moderate factions inside the insurgency. Jafa
wrote of another contributing factor in the rebels’
decline as well. In 1975, the serving inspector general of
police for Mizoram was assassinated. His replacement
was a retired army brigadier, GS Randhawa. “The new
police chief adopted the strategy of impersonating the
enemy” in order to hunt them down, Jafa wrote. “He
achieved a remarkable degree of success, and is often
credited with ‘breaking the backbone of insurgency’ in
Mizoram.”

There was still work to do to seal the peace, and here

Doval seemingly played his part well. Negotiations
between the government and the rebels gathered
momentum during his tenure. In 1975, Laldenga wrote
to the prime minster, Indira Gandhi, expressing his
interest in peace. After secret parleys in Delhi, the two
sides drafted an agreement reiterating that Mizoram
was an integral part of India.

VK Duggal, who was the district magistrate in Aizawl at

the time, told me, “The approval and directions came
from the prime minister, and the role was performed by
the lieutenant governor and the IB. The IB did the
underground negotiations. … Doval was the eld man
in Mizoram. He had good connections with the
underground.”
Doval, in a newspaper interview in 2006, recalled
inviting rebels into his home in Aizawl while keeping
their real identities from his wife. “They were all heavily
armed but I had given my word that they would be
safe,” he said. “My wife cooked pork for them even
though she was not used to cooking pork.”

The draft peace agreement needed o cial rati cation,

so in March 1976 the IB organised an emergency
convention of the MNF in Calcutta. “Doval performed
excellently in arranging for the hostile leaders to
attend,” JFR Jacob, the chief of sta for the eastern army
command at the time, wrote in his memoir. “There
were protracted negotiations leading to a peace
agreement that still stands. Doval was indeed the most
outstanding IB o cer I had the good fortune to work
with.”

There is little veri able

information about
Doval’s stint in Pakistan.
But numerous
journalists have put
forward stories to ll the
void-as has Doval
himself.

The 1976 agreement came under the prime ministerial

tenure of Indira Gandhi. The Mizo Peace Accord, which
cemented the peace, came a decade later, under Rajiv
Gandhi, after much tortuous political manoeuvering
along the way.

“All the strategies implemented by us were ultimately

political decisions,” VK Duggal told me. “The political
leadership had to take into consideration many factors.
I can’t say that Doval had contributed more, but his
contribution to implementing the strategies adopted at
the time was more than substantial.”

A former IB o cer and contemporary of Doval told me,

“He became a drinking partner of Laldenga. He won
Laldenga’s trust. … In these operations, it is seldom one
man who is responsible, but sometimes one man is
crucial. Largely, you can give him credit for Laldenga’s
operation.” It was on the basis of this work, the former
IB o cer said, that Doval climbed up in his career. “The
rest is all propaganda.”

“The MNF was a spent force, they had no fresh arms or

recruits and were willing to make a compromise,” the
human-rights lawyer Ravi Nair told me. “They
desperately met everybody when they came to Delhi,
including George Fernandes”—a prominent opposition
leader at the time. Nair was serving as Fernandes’s
political secretary at the time, and was consulted by
Laldenga. He pointed to international developments
that limited Laldenga’s choices: the creation of
Bangladesh, the withdrawal of support from China after
a shift in its foreign policy, the loss of sanctuaries in the
Chin Hills of Burma. “All these things led to Laldenga’s
compromise,” he said. “If the Intelligence agents start
taking credit for the changes in geostrategic changes—
hallelujah!”

DOVAL’S NEXT COUP, according to the popular

biographies, came in Pakistan. The IB man arrived there
at some point in the early 1980s, on a posting to the
Indian high commission in Islamabad. Before that, he
served a few years in Sikkim, again as the head of a
Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau, at a time when India
was consolidating its position in the territory, which
was incorporated into the country in 1975.
Given the sensitivity of intelligence work, there is little
veri able information about Doval’s stint in Pakistan.
But numerous journalists have put forward stories to ll
the void—as has Doval himself.

“Doval was the man who dared to sneak deep into

Pakistan at the risk of his life and remained in that
country incognito for years, delivering virtually real
time intelligence on Pakistan’s Kahuta nuclear plant,”
the journalist Rajeev Sharma wrote in 2014, in a piece
titled “Why ex-IB chief Ajit Doval is the best NSA India
could ever get.” The journalist Shishir Gupta wrote in
2012 that Doval “is said to have walked into Pakistani
nuclear establishment at Kahuta during his six-year
long posting in Islamabad in the 1980s.”

One security journalist told me that Doval managed to

get inside a barbershop that served scientists from the
nuclear facility, and collected samples of their hair.
These, he said, were analysed to determine the grade of
uranium the scientists were working with.

This level of detail on a sensitive operation, and on

Doval’s role in it, seems remarkable when compared to
the lack of agreement across available accounts of even
the basics of Doval’s Pakistan posting—such as his
o cial designation. It is also doubtful that Doval could
have operated as a spy without the knowledge of his
Pakistani counterparts—passing intelligence o cers o
as mid-ranking diplomats is an old trick in the business.
A senior RAW o cer told me that spying is impossible
for anyone posted at the high commission in Pakistan
because of “constant, bumper-to-bumper surveillance.”

In 2014, before he became NSA, Doval personally

regaled an audience in Pune with another fragment of
his Pakistan lore. He had just nished a lecture, and was
taking questions. “Sir, I heard that you were in Pakistan
for ve years,” a young man began by saying. “Seven
years,” Doval corrected him. The young man asked him
to share some of his experiences from the time. “I will
share a small anecdote with you, because somebody
wrote about it in a newspaper a few years ago,” Doval
replied in Hindi. Once, he said, he was passing by a
mausoleum in Lahore, and, since he was living in the
guise of a Muslim, decided to go in. He was noticed, and
called over, by a man with a long white beard sitting in a
corner. The man told him, “You are a Hindu.” Doval
said that he was not. The man told Doval to follow him,
took him down a few streets to a small room, and closed
the door behind them. He insisted again that Doval was
a Hindu, and Doval asked why he would say so. “Your
ears are pierced,” the man replied. Doval relented, and
said he was born a Hindu, and had had his ears pierced
as a child, but later converted. The man refused to
believe it, and advised Doval to get plastic surgery to
cover up the piercings. Then he told Doval that he was a
Hindu too, and that “these people” had killed his entire
family. Now, he said, he was surviving as he could, and
was happy to see “people like you.” Then he opened an
almirah to reveal small idols of Shiva and Durga, which
he continued to worship even as his neighbours looked
at him as a respected Muslim.

This story made the rounds on Indian social media, and

found its way into mainstream media as well. But to
Pakistani ears, it rang untrue. One user on the Pakistani
discussion forum Siasat reacted, “Hard to believe some
one with such a hard core hindi accent can pass of as a
Pakistani muslim for 7 years.”

“He was doing nothing covert in Pakistan,” a former

o cial of the ministry of external a airs who was in
Pakistan around the time told me. “He was deputed by
the IB to look after the internal security of the high
commission. The cover was information o cer, I
think.” According to a senior editor who has known
him for many years, Doval had his family in Pakistan
with him, and his son, Shaurya, attended school there.

The veteran journalist Shekhar Gupta wrote about

Doval last year, “He was undercover only to the extent
that his posting, if I recall correctly, was as head of
commercial section. I do not believe there was so much
commerce between India and Pakistan.” Doval, he said,
was busy “keeping a close eye … on the subversion and
separatist propaganda to which Sikh pilgrims visiting
their holy places in Pakistan were exposed”—this was at
the height of the Khalistan movement. “In an ugly and
unfortunate incident, fully instigated and orchestrated
by Pakistan intelligence, he was once attacked by
a jatha at one of these pilgrimages.” The Inter-Services
Intelligence, or ISI—Pakistan’s main intelligence agency
—is widely considered to have been involved in the
Khalistani insurgency.

G Parthasarathy, who was the Indian consul in Karachi

from 1982 to 1985 and later the country’s high
commissioner to Pakistan, told me that he remembers
Doval being designated the rst secretary in Islamabad.
“I must say he had a very sharp political sense,”
Parthasarathy said. “He was the rst chap to contact
Nawaz Sharif, a young, upcoming politician in 1982,” in
the position of nance minister for Pakistani Punjab.
When the Indian cricket team reached Lahore while on
a tour of Pakistan in 1982, Sharif welcomed them with a
huge party at his home. This, Parthasarathy said, was
facilitated by Doval.
TOWARDS THE END of the 1980s, Doval was back
across the border in Indian Punjab, to take on the
Khalistani insurgency—India’s direst domestic security
threat at the time. In 1988, his biographers say, he found
himself at the Golden Temple, in Amritsar, after
Khalistani militants barricaded themselves inside the
temple complex. The memory of Operation Bluestar in
1984—when Indian forces stormed the complex to force
militants out, at great cost to civilian life, the shrine
itself, and relations between the government and the
Sikh public—was still fresh. The government needed a
better solution this time.

Under the command of KPS Gill, the director general of

police for Punjab, government forces began a siege of
the complex on 9 May, after militants set o a re ght.
Snipers were positioned at high points around it, and
water and electricity were cut o . The security forces
started picking the rebels o . Trapped and demoralised,
the rebels surrendered on 18 May, bringing Operation
Black Thunder II, as it came to be known, to an end.

Gill, in response to criticism over the lack of

independent observers during Operation Bluestar,
invited hundreds of journalists to witness Black
Thunder II. This, and the large presence of security and
administrative o cials throughout, meant that many
accounts of the operation were published at the time
and in later years. A few of these contain snippets on
intelligence operations.

Maloy Krishna Dhar, who was part of IB operations in

Punjab at the time and later a joint director of the
organisation, described the siege in his 2005 book Open
Secrets. He wrote that, in the run-up to the siege,
“Certain reports received from intelligence moles
lodged in the parikrama indicated arrival of fresh
weapons and explosive devices.” Shekhar Gupta and the
journalist Vipul Mudgal wrote for India Today, “On
March 9 … o cers were at the pickets watching every
movement, counting heads, guns and identifying faces.”

In his 2002 book Operation Black Thunder: An Eyewitness

Account of Terrorism in Punjab, Sarabjit Singh, the
deputy commissioner of Amritsar in 1988, wrote, “On 13
May Nehchal Sandhu, Assistant Director, IB, posing as a
press reporter, had talked on the telephone to the
militants inside the Temple. According to him, the
militants sounded dispirited. He, therefore, suggested
to them that they should talk to the Deputy
Commissioner on the phone for a way out.” The next
day, Singh reported, the militants spoke to several
senior o cials, including Gill. Singh credited the
operation’s success primarily to Gill, his fellow police
o cer Julio Ribeiro, and Ved Marwah, the chief of the
National Security Guard, a special force under the home
ministry that played a crucial role in the siege.

None of these accounts—including those written years

later, when protecting the identities of the operatives
involved was no longer essential—mentioned Doval.
Around the time he became NSA, however, a crop of
new articles described his daredevilry as the centrepiece
of the siege.

In “Return of the Superspy,” a pro le of the new NSA,

the journalist Yatish Yadav wrote,

Sometime in 1988. Residents of Amritsar around

the Golden Temple … and Khalistani militants
spotted a rickshawpuller plying his trade. … The
rickshaw puller convinced the militants that he
was an ISI operative, who had been sent by his
 Pakistani masters to help the Khalistan cause.
Two days before Operation Black Thunder, the
rickshaw-puller entered the Golden Temple and
returned with crucial information, including the
actual strength and positions of the terrorists
inside the shrine. He was none other than Ajit
Doval undercover. When the nal assault came,
the young police o cer was inside Harminder
Sahib, streaming much needed information to
security forces to carry out search-and- ush
operations.

The journalist Praveen Swami, writing in February 2014,

put forward an even more detailed account.

New Delhi ignored Mr. Penta’s threats: the bombs

were duds, and the man Mr. Penta thought was
an ISI o cer would serve, decades later, as
Director of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB).

The President of India later handed Mr. Doval a

small silver disc, embossed with the great wheel
of dharma and a lotus wreath, and the words Kirti
Chakra.

Swami named Doval in the acknowledgements of his

2006 book India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad.

Doval, writing a review of the book, alluded to his long

association with the journalist. “Many years ago,” he
wrote, “I had seen a researcher’s doggedness and an
intellectual’s curiosity in the journalistic exterior of
Swami—traits an intelligence professional normally
frowns on! His craving to know beyond the obvious and
 nding a conceptual explanation for what exists, has
only sharpened with the passage of time.”

Operation Black Thunder II was witnessed and written about by scores

of first-hand witnesses. Doval appears in only one eye-witness account,
but features more prominently in more recent journalistic retellings.
SWADESH TALWAR/INDIAN EXPRESS ARCHIVE

The only eyewitness account of Doval’s presence at the

siege came from Karan Kharb, a retired colonel who
commanded a squadron of the National Security Guard
during the siege. In an article published in June 2014,
the month Doval became NSA, he wrote,

When Ajit Doval arrived there, not everyone

knew him. Only a select few of us knew about this
super cop’s incredible role in this operation. He
gave us a rst-hand account of all that was going
on inside the Golden Temple Complex … In utter
disregard to personal safety, he moved around all
over the complex even as bullets were raining
from all directions. Much later, we learnt that he
had disguised himself as an agent of ISI.
Kharb con rmed these details when I met him, and
added some others. “Even while we were ring, he
would go inside and come out,” he said. Kharb also told
me that he and Doval are friends.

The journalist Dinesh Kumar, who was inside the

complex when the ring started on 9 May, told me, “I
have very serious doubts that Doval was in the Golden
Temple. The ring started about 1 pm. We exited the
temple only at 7 pm. We were four journalists and ve
others, but all of them were with us and we knew
them.” How Doval passed on intelligence if he was in
fact inside the complex is also a mystery. An ability to
freely move in and out of the complex during the siege
would very likely have attracted suspicions. The only
other option in those days before cell phones, Kumar
pointed out, would have been to use a walkie-talkie—
again a magnet for suspicion.

Satish Jacob, another journalist who witnessed the

siege, told me, “I spent three days freely mixing with the
sharpshooting NSG commandos perched on the
rooftop of a hotel overlooking the holy tank in the
Golden Temple during Operation Black Thunder. I
never noticed this super cop.” Jacob said Praveen
Swami’s story of Doval’s exploits “may well be true, but
sounds too good to be true.” Vipul Mudgal, also a
reporter at the scene, said that “though this sort of
claim is di cult to deny or con rm, I doubt it very, very
much.”

A former IB o cial involved in the agency’s Punjab

operations at the time told me, “There is a standard
operational procedure that is laid down. Doval was the
joint director at the time. The DIB”—the director of the
IB—“controls everything. … No senior o cer can think
of going inside.” If a mole were needed, the o cial said,
“A constable or a head constable would be used in such
circumstances, or most probably someone related to the
militants with some comfort level. We never send an
outsider. No terrorist organisation will accept because I
say I am from the ISI.”

By the early 1990s, Khalistani militancy was largely

eliminated. The current consensus credits that success
primarily to the local police under KPS Gill and Julio
Ribeiro. Intelligence, including that from the IB, must
have contributed to their work, and Doval must have
had a hand in it—but to what degree is unclear. Kharb
told me that Doval “was the overall in-charge for the
covert operations in Punjab.” In 2011, Doval wrote an
introduction to a book titled The Politics of
Counterterrorism in India. There, he claimed a share of
credit for the IB, saying that the work “successfully
demolishes the commonly held view that Khalistani
Militancy was defeated by force alone and underlines
the seminal role of covert maneuvering by India’s
Intelligence Bureau, which deftly exploited strategic
mistakes made by the ISI.” Shekhar Gupta wrote in
2016, “I have often said, somewhat half-facetiously, that
each A or B category Punjab militant killed or captured
in the Operation Black Thunder phase (1989-90) should
be marked ‘caught Doval, bowled Gill’. In the last phase,
Mr Doval was more involved tracking Khalistan
terrorists across the country, and did that with his usual
panache.” The details of this work remain to be written
about.

BETWEEN 1992 AND 1996, Doval was posted to the

Indian embassy in London. Very little of what he did
there has come to light. The accounts of his work in the
Northeast, Pakistan and Punjab became public only
much later in his career. His rst appearance in the
limelight came at the turn of the millennium.

On Christmas Eve in 1999, an Indian Airlines ight

from Kathmandu to Delhi, designated IC 814, was
commandeered by hijackers. The airplane landed in
Amritsar, before ying on to Lahore, Dubai, and
eventually to Kandahar.

In Delhi, a crisis-management team of top bureaucrats

and ministers was convened under the watch of Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. On 27 December, an
Indian delegation under Vivek Katju, a senior o cial
from the ministry of external a airs, arrived in
Kandahar with a team of negotiators. The team
included two RAW o cers, Nehchal Sandhu of the IB,
and Doval.

Shortly after the crisis, an article in India Today by

Harinder Baweja and Saba Naqvi Bhaumik narrated the
negotiations. The Taliban posed as neutrals, but it was
clear they really sided with the hijackers. “Confronted
with this twin o ensive, the negotiating team took on
di erent roles. While Katju negotiated with the Taliban,
Doval engaged the hijackers,” Baweja and Bhaumik
wrote.

In exchange for the hostages, the hijackers demanded,

among other things, the release of 36 Islamists held in
Indian prisons and $200 million in cash. “Doval began
with the request that the hijackers rst release all the
women and children,” Baweja and Bhaumik reported.
“The idea was to gauge the commitment of the
hijackers and to play on their human instincts.” It did
not work. In a later interview, in 2006, Doval told
Baweja, “They were on a dayeen mission. … I have
gone through all the hijackings this country has faced.
One of the main tasks of a negotiator is to read the
mind (of the person) and see that what is their frame of
mind. So they started with that. I thought that after 36
hours they would start showing a certain amount of
exibility, but there was no change in that.”

In March 2000, Jaswant Singh, the minister of external

a airs, told parliament that at one point the Taliban
stepped in to tell the hijackers that their demands for
money and the release of the body of a militant buried
in India were un-Islamic. Singh claimed that these
demands were then dropped.

On 30 December, according to the India Today report,

the Taliban gave the negotiators and the hijackers an
ultimatum. The hijackers agreed to settle for the release
of three of the 36 Islamists they had originally named.
Most important among them was Masood Azhar, who
went on to found the extremist group Jaish-e-
Mohammed.

The hostages were exchanged on the last day of the

millennium, and the hijackers disappeared into
Afghanistan. Jaswant Singh ew to Kandahar alongside
the three Islamists. The journalist Seema Mustafa wrote
in 2015 that uncon rmed reports at the time spoke of
Singh having carried with him the ransom the hijackers
had demanded—giving the lie to his later statement in
parliament.

They were on a dayeen

mission. … I thought
after 36 hours they
would show a certain
amount of exibility, but
there was no change in
that.
The entire episode was a disaster for the Indian political
and security establishment. The opposition at the time
denounced the government’s “abject surrender.” AS
Dulat, then the head of RAW and a member of the
government’s crisis-management team, termed it a
“goof-up” in his book Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years. LK
Advani, the hard-line home minister, threatened to
resign in protest against the release of the three
Islamists since he felt it made India look soft. Doval
called the whole thing a “national intelligence failure”
in a 2006 interview.

Mustafa wrote that the asco over the hijacking “was

followed by a massive cover-up operation with all the
players seeking to shift the blame.” All the o cials
involved went on to get promotions, she said, and “one
of them is back in the harness today.”

Dulat, speaking on television in 2014, said, “In the IC

814 case, there was no scope for any elaboration. Our
options were all closed. The only thing left was how to
get the passengers on the plane back at the least price.
That Doval-saab got it done. Not just Doval, there were
others too. … It was a teamwork.”

While many others connected to the episode proved

reluctant to discuss it in public afterwards, Doval
returned to it again and again after his retirement. In an
interview with the journalist Myra MacDonald,
published in her 2016 book Defeat is an Orphan: How
Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War, he said “we
could have got the hijacking vacated” were it not for the
hijackers receiving support from the ISI. His role in the
episode is a constant feature in media accounts of his
successes.
A MAJOR THEATRE of Doval’s work in the 1990s was
Kashmir. India confronted a bloody insurgency in the
valley through that decade, as thousands of young
Kashmiri men crossed the Line of Control to receive
training in Pakistan and returned as militants. Despite
severe repression and a ballooning troop presence, by
the middle of the decade the government was
struggling to reassert control over the valley.

Doval was one of India's negotiators with the hijackers of flight IC 814.
He later called the operation a "national intelligence failure." REUTERS

Doval played a part in a new strategy of containment.

He “watched the Pakistanisation of the militancy from
close-up, monitoring the growth of in ltration from
over the LoC, designing some of the most far-reaching
counter-measures to contain it, and working to expose
Pakistan’s hand using pro-government renegades,” the
British investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy
Scott-Clark wrote in The Meadow, their 2012 book on
the kidnapping of six Western tourists by Kashmiri
militants in the summer of 1995.

In a magazine interview in 2012, Levy said that Pakistan

perpetrated the kidnapping, and that India recognised it
“as a useful tool to expose its neighbour’s proclivity for
destabilising Kashmir, at a time when the West was
reticent to get involved, and perceived Kashmir as a soft
human-rights issue.” They said “hardliners within
Indian intelligence and the army” ran an operation to
drag the situation out in order to “frame Pakistan as a
state sponsor of terror,” and that “IB, RAW and the
army all knew of the hostages’ whereabouts for almost
the entire time they were in the Warwan Valley—some
10 or 11 weeks from mid July 1995.” When Al-Faran, the
group behind the kidnapping, decided to give up,
“renegades supported by some in the Valley’s intel and
military establishment took over the hostages.” Of the
six hostages, one escaped, one was decapitated, and
four were never found and are presumed dead.

An expert on security in Kashmir who studied the

kidnapping closely con rmed these details to me. He
added that the intelligence o cers who ran the
operation included Doval and AS Dulat—Doval’s
superior in the IB in the mid 1990s, before he was
promoted to head RAW. The incident played out during
a period of governor’s rule in Jammu and Kashmir, the
expert pointed out, and so the intelligence people
largely had their way.

The expert told me of Doval’s “Zero Doubt Policy”—“a

name his colleagues came up with, as he dreamed up
pragmatic ideas, often thinking the unthinkable,
presenting them in brie ng settings without a icker of
an eye.” The term referred, the expert continued, to
how Doval “appeared to entertain no doubts, ever.”

Public information on Doval’s work in Kashmir is

sparse, but Indian journalists have put forward some
details. Speci cally, the standard biographies credit him
with persuading Kuka Parrey, a folk-singer turned
insurgent, to switch sides and found the Ikhwan-ul-
Muslimeen, a counter-insurgent unit of turncoat
militants. The unit came to be widely accused of rape,
murder, blackmail, abductions and disappearances.

The suggestion that Doval turned Kuka Parrey into an anti-insurgency

militia leader is complicated by several accounts that point to military
and security forces having a hand in bringing the separatist into the
government fold. MERAJ UD DIN

“Turning Parrey was a political victory as well,” the

security analyst Bharat Karnad wrote in 2016, as it
“enabled the Centre to subsequently hold the Assembly
elections in Jammu and Kashmir in 1996.” Kashmir had
been under president’s rule since 1990. The election,
accompanied by a massive deployment of Indian
security forces given a free hand under the Armed
Forces (Special Powers) Act, returned Abdullah to
power, and is considered to have been a major step in
subduing the insurgency.

As Dulat recalled it in Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years, the

cultivation of Parrey and the creation of his unit was
not the work of Doval and the IB alone. Abdullah
“introduced to the Rashtriya Ri es a rural folk-singer
named Kuka Parrey,” Dulat wrote, “who went on to lead
a force of counter-insurgents … which was one of
army’s successes.” Liaqat Ali Khan, who commanded
the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen in south Kashmir, told me
when I interviewed him in 2015 that it was EN
Rammohan, the inspector general of the Border
Security Force, who had introduced Parrey to the army.

According to Aasha Khosa, a veteran of Kashmir

reporting, Doval and the army general Shantanu
Chaudhary were instrumental in convincing Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his home minister, LK
Advani, to raise a Territorial Army battalion of former
insurgents in Kashmir. This became part of a larger
understanding. Khan and other members of the
Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen brie y joined the BJP in 1998.
The following year, Khan told me, the government and
all the security forces backed the formation of the
Peoples Democratic Party, which advocated a high
degree of autonomy for Kashmir within India in place
of outright secession. Numerous former separatists
joined the party. Ajit Doval, who was the IB’s point man
in Kashmir, helped in the process. In 2002, the PDP
won power in Jammu and Kashmir for the rst time.

AFTER THE KARGIL WAR in the summer of 1999, an

o cial report on the performance of Indian forces
pointed to failures in intelligence operations. The
government, under Vajpayee, set up a Multi Agency
Centre to coordinate the e orts of various intelligence
organisations. Doval, by then a special director of the
IB, was chosen to lead it.

A RAW o cer who knew Doval at this time told me,

without further details, that the IB man “was very clear
and determined in the manner in which he wanted to
go about the setting up of the organisation.” Several
people who have worked closely with Doval told me
that he works very long hours and is highly competitive.
A former RAW o cer told me of a general impression
within the organisation that Doval “used to try and
divert our sources over to his side, telling them we are
not good enough, and the sources would come and tell
us. He wanted to one-up everybody else, and he was
always miles ahead of us.”

“I used to wonder what drives him,” a senior IB o cial

said. “Doval didn’t have monetary weakness. It was
either fame or glory, always feeling that he is the best.
He used to love telling people that he is the best.” The
o cial recalled that when Doval was posted in London,
he bypassed other o cials to try and establish a direct
line with British intelligence. The RAW o cer stationed
there alerted the British to the transgression, and
complained to Indian authorities as well, although
nothing came of it.

In early 2003, there were rumours that LK Advani

wanted Doval to replace the serving director of the IB,
whose tenure was only due to end in August the
following year. Doval and Advani, with their shared
hawkishness, had grown close by then. Advani, as the
home minister between 1998 and 2004, was the man
Doval had ultimately answered to over the last half
decade.
Advani later wrote in his autobiography,

One day, early in my stint in the Home Ministry,

Ajit Doval, a senior IB o cer who had a great
reputation as an “operations man” … came to me
and said, “Sir, we have been able to bust an ISI
module in Orissa’s Balasore district.” The details
he mentioned to me were frightening. … In the
years ahead, I would hear scores of such accounts
of the ISI penetration in India … I told Doval, “I
want the busting of these modules to become the
IB’s topmost priority. The agency will get
whatever support or resources it needs for this
purpose.”

The rumours of Advani’s support for Doval’s promotion

came with suggestions of political, and not purely
professional, motivation. “The IB is expected to play a
crucial role in the next couple of years in view of some
crucial polls, including the general elections in April
next year,” the journalist Josy Joseph wrote at the time.
“Doval’s name is also doing the rounds for the RAW
chief’s post, but his appointment could create much
heartburn because the other contenders are senior to
him.” Joseph reported that Doval’s elevation was also
opposed by Brajesh Mishra, the serving NSA. The idea
was set aside.

In June 2004—the month after a Congress-led alliance

came to national power, toppling all predictions of a
return for the incumbent Vajpayee regime—three
Muslim men and a young woman named Ishrat Jahan
were gunned down on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in a
joint operation between Gujarat police and the
Ahmedabad unit of the IB. O cials said that the four
were operatives of the extremist group Lashkar-e-Taiba
out on a mission to assassinate Narendra Modi, then
the chief minister of the state. They also said the four
had been killed after a car chase. Many questioned this
version of events.

A decade later, after an investigation by the Central

Bureau of Investigation, several of the o cers involved
were charged with the extrajudicial killing of the four
victims in a staged encounter. They included Rajendra
Kumar, the head of the Gujarat SIB at the time of the
killings, and three other IB o cers. In 2013, while the
case was being built, Doval came out in vociferous
defence of his former colleague, and o ered a glimpse
of his understanding of intelligence work in the
process. “You cannot destroy the nation just because
someone has been indiscreet,” he told an interviewer.
“Otherwise the consequences will follow in many ways.
The IB people will then draw their salary and sit idle. …
If you are trying to nd out anything, in any way, by any
process through which you collect intelligence which
does not fall within the ambit of the law, the IB guy will
not do it.”

In a 2013 piece titled “Ishrat Jahan case: Intelligence

won’t survive the investigation,” Praveen Swami
recalled the story of Doval’s actions at the Golden
Temple in 1988 and his subsequent decoration with the
Kirti Chakra, India’s second-highest award for
peacetime gallantry. Then he wrote, “He won that
medal for unspeakable crimes. Like many former
intelligence o cials, Doval considers himself bound not
to discuss past operations. I have his permission,
though, to speculate that it may have involved the cold-
blooded execution of a Pakistani intelligence o cer, the
illegal detention of terrorism suspects, torture, the
smuggling of arms and explosives across India’s borders,
and the use of false identities.”

Writing in 2014, Swami again returned to Doval’s

actions in 1988, and added,

Now, as former Intelligence Bureau (IB) special

director Rajinder Kumar faces trial for the extra-
judicial execution of Mumbai college student
Ishrat Jehan Raza and three others, Mr. Doval’s
story tells us something important. The Ishrat
case is just part of a culture of killing. That
culture is, in turn, a symptom of a much larger
dysfunction. For decades now, India’s government
has dodged a serious debate what a viable legal
framework for counterinsurgency and counter-
terrorism might look like, how it is to be
administered and who will make sure it isn’t
abused. It has simply ignored hard questions of
capacity-building and accountability.

After Vajpayee’s government fell to the Congress-led

alliance in the 2004 general election, Doval, perceived
to be close to Advani and the BJP, was at some risk of
being passed over for the IB director’s job. But his
seniority and record weighed in his favour, and Doval
won allies in the new government too. The new NSA
was JN Dixit. A former IB o cial told me that as soon as
Dixit took the job, Doval “was on great terms with him.
Like all ambitious people he knows how to move on.” In
July 2004, with eight months to go before his
superannuation, Doval became the director of the IB.

Dixit passed away in January 2005, and was replaced by

MK Narayanan, who had twice been the IB director in
the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Doval was one of
Narayanan’s protégés. “MK used to say ‘If I have to
dangle a carrot I use Dulat, and if I have to wield the
stick I use Doval,’” the former IB o cer told me.
Narayanan could have granted Doval an extension of
service to allow him a full two-year term, but he did
not. Doval retired in January 2005. Narayanan chose
ESL Narasimhan, a batchmate of Doval’s, as his
replacement, and allowed him a full tenure of two
years.

III | THE CIVILIAN YEARS

DOVAL WAS ANYTHING but quiet in retirement.

In July 2005, o cers from the Mumbai police branch

travelled to Delhi on a mission to arrest Vicky Malhotra,
an associate of the underworld boss Chhota Rajan, who
was wanted on multiple counts of extortion and
murder. Malhotra was apprehended in the centre of the
city, in a car leaving a luxury hotel. To the o cers’
surprise, Doval was in the vehicle with him.

The Times of India carried a front-page report titled “IB

ex-chief’s gangster friend arrested.” It said that the “ex-
IB chief made calls from his phone and was allowed to
leave. … Malhotra later revealed to the police that he
had come to Delhi on the o cial’s invitation. The two
had breakfast in the hotel, after which the o cial took
him in his car to drop him at some place. Malhotra is
also said to have told the police Chhota Rajan knew
about this meeting.”

What Doval was doing with Malhotra has never been

made clear.

A former IB o cial told me that Doval, after his

retirement, “tried for six months for the post of deputy
NSA, but Narayanan didn’t give him that.” He said that
Narayanan might have used the embarrassment with
Malhotra as a reason for denying Doval a post-
retirement appointment—something two other former
IB o cials told me as well. One of these former o cials
added that Doval never forgave Narayanan for that. The
following year, Narayanan began getting bad press over
the failure to prevent a spate of bomb attacks. For
instance, after a series of blasts on Mumbai commuter
trains in July 2006, the weekend edition of a leading
English-language daily carried a story blaming
Narayanan. It quoted an unnamed “retired intelligence
chief.”

Frozen out by the Congress, Doval turned again to his

old patrons in the BJP. The electoral defeat in 2004
precipitated a contest for the party leadership. The old
guard, led by Advani, was gradually pushed aside by a
new one. Doval chose to position himself behind the
rising star, Narendra Modi.

Nitin Gokhale told me that Modi, then still the chief

minister of Gujarat, invited Doval to set up a university
in his state sometime around 2008. Raksha Shakti
University opened the following year, and o ers courses
in “police science and internal security.” Doval is on its
board of governors.

In 2009, the Vivekananda Kendra, founded by an RSS

leader in the 1970s, set up a think tank named the
Vivekananda International Foundation. Doval was
appointed its founding director. According to the VIF
website, he spoke at the inauguration of bringing “the
intellectual community in consonance with the spirit of
nationalism,” and of encouraging “young, talented
research scholars to probe the depths of research in
various genre of topics which are very vital to the
national interests … so as to elevate India to her right
place in the world.” That declaration notwithstanding,
Doval went on to ll the organisation largely with
retired security bureaucrats and diplomats. The VIF’s
employees have also included the journalist Rajeev
Sharma. Nitin Gokhale is currently one of its visiting
fellows.

The VIF declares itself an “independent, non-partisan

institution,” but its links with the RSS are an open
secret. A political activist associated with the RSS told
me the organisation is “emotionally linked with the
Sangh Parivar.” He added that Swaminathan
Gurumurthy, a leader of the RSS-a liated Swadeshi
Jagaran Manch, was a major force behind the VIF’s
creation. Doval was a natural choice to lead it. “When
Doval was in the IB, all of us were concerned about the
cross-border terrorism,” the political activist told me.
“Slowly, that bond of association found a structure.
Familiarity of goal and thinking was always there.”
An investigation into the deaths of Ishrat Jahan and three Muslim men
in Gujarat culminated in several IB officers being charged for
extrajudicial killing. Doval came out in loud opposition to the
investigation and prosecution. PTI

At around the time that the VIF was established, Doval’s

son, Shaurya, returned to India after a career as an
investment banker abroad. Soon he became a director
of a think tank of his own—the India Foundation. His
main partner in this was Ram Madhav, then a national
spokesperson for the RSS. The organisation set to work
behind the scenes in Delhi and elsewhere in support of
Modi’s prime ministerial campaign.

In late 2010, the RSS was forced onto the defensive after
one of its leaders, Indresh Kumar, was charged as a
conspirator in the 2007 bombing of a Su shrine in
Ajmer. The organisation responded with massive
protests in defence of Kumar, and also of Pragya Singh
and Aseemanand, two RSS-linked activists charged in
relation to the Ajmer blast and two other bomb attacks
between 2007 and 2008.

In April 2011, the VIF organised a two-day seminar on

“black money.” The attendees included Doval and
Gurumurthy, the god-man Baba Ramdev, the social
activist Anna Hazare, the anti-corruption campaigner
Arvind Kejriwal, the politician Subramanian Swamy, the
retired police o cer Kiran Bedi and the RSS pracharak
KN Govindacharya. Soon afterwards, Hazare and
Ramdev began much-publicised fasts against
corruption, accusing the ruling government of having
abetted it. These sparked a massive protest movement
that proved disastrous for the government, and
provided the BJP, the RSS’s electoral o spring, with a
crucial platform for its successful 2014 election
campaign. Kejriwal, Swamy, Bedi and Govindacharya
were all among the movement’s leadership.

When questioned about links between the movement

and the VIF, Doval told the Indian Express that “we had
no role” in the agitation. But, he said, “Corruption and
black money are draining India. We not at all feel
defensive about talking about these issues.” Doval
denied that the organisation was connected to the RSS.
A two-day conference on "black money" at the Vivekananda
International Foundation in April 2011 brought together Anna Hazare
and Ramdev, and other stalwarts of what became a mass movement
against corruption in the run-up to the 2014 general election. K
ASIF/INDIA TODAY GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

Around this time, media reports mentioned that Doval

was under IB surveillance. In an interview with Outlook,
he said that he knew nothing about it, and that the IB
“is only doing its duty if it’s watching me—it’s the eyes
and ears of the government.” Asked of the Congress’s
assertions that he was in cahoots with the BJP, he
responded, How can I be in cahoots with the BJP? One
can be in cahoots with the ISI or CIA. BJP is a
mainstream party like the Congress or SP. … The level
public discourse has sunk to is disturbing. Don’t forget
I’m the highest decorated o cer.”

In April 2011, a delegation led by a senior RSS leader

from Punjab, set up by a former Congress MP from the
state, met the editor of a leading newspaper, an old
friend of Gurumurthy’s who had not been enthusiastic
about the anti-corruption protests. Describing this
meeting to me, the editor said that the delegation told
him, “Look, the cases against Indresh-ji and others are
reaching a conclusive point. You have to support us
editorially with this agitation to push back.” When he
refused, the editor said, “they started a whisper
campaign to malign me.”

The editor described the anti-corruption protests as an

operation run from the VIF. “Some of the senior
bureaucrats from home ministry and intelligence
o cials were also clandestinely part of it,” he said.
“Doval was leading it, and probably this was his most
successful operation.”

DOVAL BECAME AN INCREASINGLY visible gure in

retirement, particularly after joining the VIF. He
delivered lectures, granted interviews and wrote op-eds,
airing his views on India’s domestic and foreign policies.
The media accounts of his old exploits proliferated
alongside these, and many of these were republished on
Doval’s personal blog. This is when his public persona
and his hard-line views began to take popular root.

His attention to image helped. Several people who

know Doval described him as someone who enjoys
worldly pleasures—smoking, chewing paan masala,
having friends and journalists over for drinks at his
home. A former intelligence o cial told me he “has a
huge house in the suburbs,” with large gardens and a
drawing room with “photographs of him shaking hands
with all prime ministers of the day.” A senior security
journalist who has known him for a long time said that
Doval “is highly conscious of what he is wearing, just
the way he decked up his house.”

Many of Doval’s public statements echo the draconian

majoritarianism of the BJP and the RSS, often in
euphemistic security jargon. “India’s internal
vulnerabilities are much higher than its external
vulnerabilities,” he said in an interview in 2006 where
he identi ed “in ltration of Bangladeshis”—the
disputed notion, fanned by the BJP and the wider Sangh
Parivar, of an ongoing invasion of illegal Bangladeshi
immigrants—as “the biggest internal security problem.”
He continued,

India has got all the fault lines—ethnic, religious,

cultural, linguistic and caste. The synthesis is on
but there has yet to be amalgamation. … India’s
internal vulnerability is also because of political
factors. … To get the vote of a particular
community I’ll need to accentuate their favours. If
the minority or majority are not afraid of each
other then there is no vote bank. So politicians
have to give voters an imaginary or real
perception of fear. The genius of politics lies in
the exploitation of fears and the invention of new
ones.

In an opinion piece published that same year, he wrote

about the reservations of seats in education and
government employment for disadvantaged social
groups. “The reservation issue,” he said,

is an expression of anger and frustration in some

of India’s bright youth against what they perceive
as denial of justice and equality. … How many of
us are brave enough to concede that what
beleaguered Punjab, J&K, Northeast and now left-
wing extremist areas was to some extent a
consequence of divisive politics providing
openings to our external adversaries? … From a
security point of view the reservation issue,
 particularly the way it has been handled, militates
against India’s interest. … It has to be substituted
by the strategy of consolidation and integration of
as many segments and interests groups as possible
till one acquires the critical mass that gives
legitimacy to rule.

In a speech at a BJP event in 2013, Doval said that the

party is the only one that promotes an Indian identity
over other identities. “We cannot base our nation-
building on diversity. A nation can’t be strengthened on
the basis of weakening the forces of unity and
strengthening of the forces of diversity because we have
a diverse culture.”

In an article published on the VIF website in 2011, Doval

criticised liberal democracies for their tendency to treat
“acts of violence (no matter how gruesome) as normal
crimes, punishable through due process of law, and not
as acts of war. This jurisprudence is heavily weighed in
favour of the wrong doer and is practically inoperable
against those who operate from foreign lands.
Instruments of state, its laws, police, judicial systems
and even militaries, nd themselves grossly inadequate
to prevent, protect and penalize the wrong doers.”

After his retirement, Doval came out strongly against

the Congress-led government’s repeal, in 2004, of the
Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002. POTA, as it was
known, had been passed by the Vajpayee government,
and gave security agencies the discretion to identify and
detain “terrorists.” In the 2011 article for the VIF
website, he wrote that in India, “soft governance,
political factor and corruption have further eaten into
the vitals of state power. Political factor has started
casting its ominous shadow, both over enactment of
right laws and their enforcement with full political will.
The withdrawal of Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act
(POTA), Centre’s reluctance to approve Special Acts
against organized crimes in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh
etc. are illustrative of politicization of internal security
management.”

How can I be in cahoots

with the BJP? … The
level public discourse
has sunk to is disturbing.
Don’t forget I’m the
highest decorated
o cer.

Doval also o ered his views on the rule of law in

defending intelligence and security o cers charged
with extrajudicial killings in Gujarat—in the Ishrat
Jahan case from 2004, and also in the death of
Sohrabuddin Sheikh while in the custody of Gujarat
police the following year. Commenting on the
prosecution of the latter case, Doval wrote in 2010,
“There are many who feel that there is a higher
rationale for such actions in compelling circumstances.”
To support “their argument, that the rule of law is a
means to an end and not an end in itself,” he cited an
earlier Supreme Court judgment on “the doctrine that
welfare of an individual must yield to that of the
community.”

In a 2015 lecture, Doval said, “Individual morality

cannot be in icted on the larger interest of the society
and the nation. … And, therefore, the nation will have
to take recourse to all means which are necessary to
protect itself not only for the present generation but for
the coming generation.” He supplemented this with an
example of his sacri ce in the service of the state. “I
come from a family of Brahmins from Uttarakhand, and
my family conventionally was a vegetarian family,” he
said. “And I happened to be posted in the north-east for
seven years, and then in Pakistan for seven years. … I
didn’t like being a non-vegetarian. In any case, not that I
didn’t take non-vegetarian food, but then I wasn’t very
fond of it. But there was a time when I only took non-
vegetarian food, nothing else. … When you come to the
question of the larger societal values, it is sel ess.”

Doval’s speeches are jumbled at full length, but o er

plenty of shareable, fervent short-takes. There are
hundreds of these on platforms such as YouTube. In
one, taken from an address delivered at an event to
mark “Universal Brotherhood Day” in 2010 and
uploaded under the title “Ajit Doval on Muslims
Mentality,” he says,

If India stopped preaching … universal

brotherhood—we have done it too long, for too
many centuries—and if we had been strong
enough, probably there would have been a much
greater peace. We provoked our enemies. …
Weakness is the greatest provocation for violence.
… Universal brotherhood will be butchered
because you are weak. … Dharma will be
conquered because you are weak.

This brand of nationalism, with Doval as with the RSS,

comes with plenty of sabre-rattling at Pakistan. In a
speech in 2014, later excerpted widely on YouTube, he
said,
 So how to tackle Pakistan? … You know, we
engage an enemy in three modes. One is a
defensive mode. … That is, if somebody comes
here we will prevent him, we will defend this. One
is the defensive-o ensive. That is, to defend
ourselves, we will go to the place from where the
o ence is coming. And third is the o ensive
mode, where you go outright. … We are working
today only in the defensive mode. Now, when we
come into the defensive-o ense, then we start
working on the vulnerabilities of Pakistan. …
Pakistan’s vulnerability is many, many times
higher than of India. Once they know that India
has shifted its gear from the defensive mode to
defensive-o ense, they will nd that it is
una ordable for them.

Doval ended the passage with one of his most quoted

lines to date. Referring to the 2008 attacks on Mumbai
and the ongoing separatist insurgency in Balochistan,
he warned Pakistan, “You can do one Mumbai—you
may lose Balochistan.”

All of this adds up to what is increasingly being called

the “Doval doctrine.” The lawyer and political
commentator AG Noorani, in an essay analysing Doval’s
worldview in 2015, wrote, “The three themes of the
Doval doctrine are irrelevance of morality, extremism
freed from calculation or calibration, and reliance on
military might.”

An o cer who worked in the IB for over a decade told

me that Doval “practically nurtures a feeling that
Hindus have been su ering for almost thousand years.
… He used to tell me that I have a typical leftist
European view of secularism.” The o cer described
Doval as “a hundred-percent careerist with high
e ciency.”

The IB has always had a strong right-wing lobby. Maloy

Krishna Dhar, after his retirement as the organisation’s
joint director, made a candid declaration of support for
the RSS and the BJP in Open Secrets. Even against this
backdrop, two former IB o cers—one who served
above Doval in the hierarchy, and one who served below
him—expressed surprise at Doval’s public statements
since his retirement. Both told me he had been
“rational” when they worked together. “Once, after
watching him speak on some terrorism-related issue on
TV, I told myself ‘Ajit, what happened to you? We
agreed on most issues,’” Doval’s former senior said.
Doval’s former junior, who spent three decades in the
IB, believed that his rabble-rousing was a calculated
operational move, intended to “pin down” the
Congress-led government.

An analyst who worked with Doval at VIF, however, said

that Doval does not subscribe to the RSS’s ideology. “He
just uses them,” he told me. “It’s convenient for him
because there is an overlapping of ideas.” To back up his
statement, he added, “Do you know non-vegetarian
food is served at the conferences and seminars of the
VIF?”

IV | DAYS WITH MODI

IN AN INTERVIEW in January 2014, when asked of his

rumoured connections to the BJP, Doval responded, “I
am not a member of any political party, have never
been. I don’t think I’d like to accept any position in any
government.”
After the BJP-led coalition won the general election a
few months later, speculation about the NSA post
settled on a handful of candidates: Kanwal Sibal, the
former foreign secretary; Subrahmanyam Jaishankar,
India’s ambassador to the United States; Hardeep Singh
Puri, formerly India’s representative to the United
Nations; and Doval, acknowledged as the favourite.

Weakness is the greatest

provocation for violence.
… Universal
brotherhood will be
butchered because you
are weak. … Dharma will
be conquered because
you are weak.

A former IB chief told me that it came down to Doval

and Puri, a friend of the soon-to-be cabinet minister
Arun Jaitley. “Hardeep might have a better sense of
humour and likes to laugh at himself,” he said. “I don’t
think Doval likes to do that. Both have very strong
lobbies in the newspapers too. If you are looking to
impress and in uence people, then Hardeep is the man.
Doval is a doer.”

Doval assumed o ce in late May. Shishir Gupta,

reporting the appointment, wrote, “Trusted by Sangh
Parivar, nance minister Arun Jaitley and home
minister Rajnath Singh, Doval has also worked behind
the scenes for Modi and the BJP since his retirement
from IB.” Swaminathan Gurumurthy tweeted that
Doval “is the contemporary version of chatrapati shivaji
and [Bhagat] Singh”—both beloved of Hindu
nationalists.
Two other members of the VIF were appointed to serve
under Modi too. The retired civil servant Nripendra
Misra became the principal secretary, and PK Mishra, a
principal secretary to Modi during his reign in Gujarat,
became an additional principal secretary. Between
them, the former VIF men now occupy three of the
highest positions in the prime minister’s o ce.

Doval maintained a connection with the VIF. “At some

point in 2014, one of the senior members at the VIF was
being badly treated” by his peers in the BJP, a security
analyst familiar with the think tank told me. “He kept
complaining to Doval. And one ne day, Doval landed
up at his o ce and sat there for an hour or so. ‘These
guys watching you and troubling, they will get the
message that you are close to the PMO,’ he told the
person. The harassing did stop after that.” The episode
reinforced Doval’s reputation for loyalty to those close
to him. A former ambassador also told me that Doval is
known as a “doston ka dost”—a true friend.

“In theory it has a hotline to the NSA,” a strategic

analyst at a Delhi think tank told me of the VIF, adding
that the organisation is a port of call for many foreign
delegations.

Doval is only the fth NSA in Indian history. The post,

modelled on a parallel one in the United States, was
created in 1998, under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The former
diplomat Brajesh Mishra was the rst to ll it, and
remained in the position until 2004. While the NSA
role combines defence, intelligence and diplomatic
work, three of those to have held it have come from the
diplomatic corps. Before Doval, MK Narayanan was the
only intelligence o cer to ll the NSA seat.
Narayanan was highly regarded as the director of the IB,
but he did not distinguish himself as the NSA,
particularly because of failures to prevent multiple
high-pro le terror attacks. Most of the people I spoke to
agreed that Mishra set the standard for the position. He
and Vajpayee were close friends, and Mishra also served
as the prime minister’s principal secretary while he was
NSA. “By combining the jobs of Principal Secretary and
NSA, Brajesh was able to interact with the big powers
and very e ectively projected India’s image as a major
power,” the strategic analyst K Subrahmanyam, who
served as the head of a national security advisory board
under Vajpayee, said in an interview in 2010. AS Dulat,
who also served on Vajpayee’s sta , told a news channel
in 2014 that Mishra had been “a perfect” choice, and
that, “in a way, he was running the country under Atal-
ji’s guidance.”

“Doval doesn’t have unlimited powers like Brajesh

Mishra,” an analyst who worked with Doval at the VIF
told me. “Modi abhors consensus and unilaterally
decides everything. He wants yes-men. He doesn’t trust
politicians, so he is closer to the bureaucrats. It’s a
master-servant relationship with everybody. Doval is
not exempted from this.”

An o cer who worked with Doval in the IB told me,

“He will go by his master’s voice. All of us bureaucrats
are mercenaries. We work for various things like money,
power and facilities.”

When, following one of his speeches in 2014, an

audience member asked Doval what it takes to be a
good follower, he responded, “Never try to compete or
outdo your superior. Never give him a sense of
insecurity.”
A senior journalist covering the prime minister’s o ce
told me, “When Doval is with the PM, nobody can
enter. Not even the principal secretary, Nripendra
Misra. Not even a call can be transferred.” Media
coverage has played up Modi and Doval’s closeness. Five
months into the NSA’s tenure, Rajeev Sharma wrote,
“Ever since his Gujarat days Modi has a penchant for
trusting o cials more rather than politicians and
ministers. … Modi nds Doval to be a perfect person
whom he can trust completely and who can carry out
his covert strategic and even political missions perfectly
well.”

The general consensus—among those in the

government, think tanks and the media—is that Doval
has a hold over the home ministry, defence ministry
and the ministry of external a airs. Rajnath Singh, the
home minister, has accepted a more limited role than
his position traditionally accords. The defence ministry
has lacked stable ministerial leadership, with two
changes of minister already in Modi’s term. A high-
ranking former cabinet bureaucrat told me that
although “Sushma Swaraj is a competent person,” as the
minister of external a airs she “has been made more or
less a cipher.”

Doval’s sphere of in uence is enhanced by his links to

the VIF, and also to the India Foundation. In 2015, the
Economic Times reported that the India Foundation
hosts weekly “closed door sessions on high policy
issues.” The organisation has arranged gatherings of
foreign ambassadors, hosted foreign dignitaries, and
helped organise events on Modi’s foreign visits,
including his rally in New York’s Madison Square
Garden in 2014. One bureaucrat I spoke to compared
the foundation with the National Advisory Council of
the previous government.

Shaurya Doval remains one of the India Foundation’s

directors, even as he leads Indian operations for Gemini
Financial Services, an investment fund chaired by a
Saudi prince. The Economic Times report called him “an
increasingly in uential player in shaping Modi Sarkar’s
policy thinking.” Ram Madhav, also an India
Foundation director, is now the BJP’s national general
secretary. On the list of directors alongside Shaurya and
Madhav are the cabinet minister Suresh Prabhu, the
ministers of state Nirmala Sitharaman, Jayant Sinha and
MJ Akbar, and other heavyweights linked to the BJP and
the RSS.

Brajesh Mishra, India's first NSA, was a close friend of Vajpayee's, and
the prime minister's principal secretary. Many consider him to have set
the benchmark for the NSA post. T NARAYAN/OUTLOOK

When I visited the India Foundation’s address on

Delhi’s prestigious Hailey Road in July, I did not nd a
nameplate on the door. A former o cial of the ministry
of external a airs who is familiar with the foundation
told me it is opaque about its nances. The organisation
mentions income from subscriptions to its publications,
the former o cial said, “but nobody knows about the
India Foundation journals to fetch them so much
funding. … I haven’t seen any evidence of good research
yet. What they have is the ability to organise big
events.” When I put this to Ram Madhav, he responded
that the organisation has nothing to hide, and is funded
“through sponsorships of corporates for the events.”

The former cabinet bureaucrat said that the NSA has

become the dwarpal, or gatekeeper, to the prime
minister. “The heads of intelligence agencies earlier had
access to the PM,” he said. “After the creation of NSA,
access to the PM, which is important, has been
curtailed.” This, he continued, has been “more so under
Doval. The NSA should be objective and not get into
the nitty-gritty. What happened with MK is also
happening with Doval. They will directly call up the
person who has to do the job or deliver, bypassing their
chiefs.”

Ravi Nair, the human-rights lawyer, told me, “Doval is

extremely challenged when it comes to democratic
behavior. He is a product of the lack of institutional
accountability.”

Some argue that Doval’s style is an advantage. Rajeev

Sharma wrote in 2014, “while Rajnath Singh is the
supreme boss of the IB, Doval continues to have direct
and real-time access to IB and its reports. In many ways,
Doval is the rst NSA who has unbridled access to all
dozen-odd Indian intelligence agencies—civil as well as
military. He talks to chiefs of IB, RAW and MI”—
military intelligence—“ten times a day.”
“There is much more synergy among various
intelligence agencies, defence forces and central armed
police forces,” Nitin Gokhale told me. “There is much
more coordination at the top. … If you are a critic, you
may call it centralisation of power. But the truth is, you
have an NSA who has been an operative. He commands
more respect from security forces. You can call it fear.
But the results are good.”

Doval’s power on questions of internal security is

undisputed. But his in uence on other aspects of
Modi’s domestic policy might not be as great as media
characterisations suggest. This July, the magazine
Bureaucracy Today, popular among government
administrators, conducted a survey to ask “Who is the
most powerful bureaucrat in the Modi regime?” Over
80 percent of the 16,000 respondents—12,000 of them
government employees—picked PK Mishra, Modi’s
additional principal secretary. Less than a tenth of them
picked Doval.

On foreign policy, a de ning factor in Doval’s reach has

been the equation between him and the foreign
secretary, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. As the
ambassador to China and then the United States,
Jaishankar received Modi on several o cial trips,
including his rst visit to the United States as prime
minister. Modi removed the incumbent foreign
secretary to make room for Jaishankar in January 2015,
and granted him a year-long extension on his two-year
term early this year. Numerous people familiar with the
ministry of external a airs told me that Modi’s great
con dence in Jaishankar makes him the most powerful
foreign secretary in a long time. Some of Doval’s
detractors told me Jaishankar might replace him as the
NSA if Modi is re-elected in 2019.
Doval, who holds the rank of a minister of state, is
o cially a superior of Jaishankar’s, a ministry secretary.
But while Doval is Modi’s NSA, “it is his lack of foreign
policy experience and his inability to move beyond the
‘tactical’ that had created a void which Jaishankar will
now ll,” the journalist Siddharth Varadarajan wrote at
the time of the foreign secretary’s appointment. In
government circles, Doval has been nicknamed the
daroga, or station-house o cer, of South Block—the
premises of the ministry of external a airs and the
prime minister’s o ce. Another nickname making the
rounds is “National Security Advisor (Pakistan)”—an
insinuation that Doval’s understanding of other
countries is non-existent.

There have been occasional suggestions of friction

between the NSA and the foreign secretary in the jostle
for in uence. However, a former o cial of the ministry
of external a airs who knows Jaishankar well said that
these were overblown. He summarised Jaishankar’s
approach to his work as “You tell me a desired solution,
I will try to nd a way to get there.” That, he continued,
allowed the foreign secretary and the NSA to establish
“a good modus vivendi.”

But the former o cial did cite one point on which the
two have di ered. The government, he said, has started
to directly sponsor think tanks, and Doval and
Jaishankar disagreed on which ones should qualify for
funds. “Doval and MJ Akbar believe only right-wing
think tanks like the VIF and India Foundation should
get the funding,” the former o cial said. “The foreign
secretary thinks there should be a wide array. … But
there is a broad agreement that the think tanks need to
be cultivated.”
After the attack on the Pathankot Air Force Base, numerous defence
experts criticised Doval's response to the crisis. NARINDER NANU/AFP/GETTY
IMAGES

The journalist Uday Mahurkar, who is considered close

to Modi, pointed to a division of turf between Doval
and Jaishankar in a recent book on the prime minister’s
administration. “The roadmap for Modi’s global
initiatives was prepared by Foreign Secretary S.
Jaishankar,” he wrote, “with the national security focus
coming from Ajit Doval in the case of countries in
India’s immediate neighbourhood, particularly
Pakistan.”

I approached Doval’s o ce in the third week of August

to ask for an interview. A member of his sta called to
say the NSA was very busy and would not be able to
speak to me.

THE NSA’S FIRST VISIBLE ACTION came in October

2014, when two suspected Islamist militants died in an
accidental explosion in a house in Bardhaman, West
Bengal. Police arrived to nd a large quantity of
explosives. Doval headed to Bardhaman under the full
glare of the media, arriving at the blast site on a
helicopter. Television channels showed him in a dark
blue suit and dark glasses, surveying the scene from
atop a nearby building.

Doval then met with the state’s chief minister, Mamata

Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress. The building
where the blast occurred had also housed the party’s
local o ce. Media reports stated that the NSA
expressed displeasure at a terror network apparently
having come up without the knowledge of the state
government. The BJP, looking for an advantage ahead of
an upcoming state election and fending o attacks by
Banerjee on a national level, accused Banerjee of going
soft on terrorism. The incident made Doval perhaps the
rst NSA to wade so openly into domestic politics.

In early 2016, the Modi government faced a major

political crisis following the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a
Dalit scholar at the University of Hyderabad. Vemula
had been suspended after a complaint from the campus
chapter of the RSS’s student wing, which was forwarded
to the government by a BJP leader. As accusations of
casteism escalated into nationwide protests, the Times
of India published a story headlined “Ajit Doval gets
report saying Rohith Vemula was not a dalit.” Its author,
the journalist Bharti Jain, is best known for covering
security. She wrote, “A secret intelligence report has
claimed that both the grandmother and mother of
Rohith Vemula … have declared the family’s caste as
Vaddera, which is a backward caste and not part of the
‘Dalit’ fold.” This controversial claim was used to shield
the university’s vice chancellor and senior BJP and
government gures from charges under the stringent
Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of
Atrocities) Act.

Later that year, in April, Doval addressed the judges of

the Supreme Court in a closed-door session. According
to media reports, he listed threats to the country, and
said that all the pillars of democracy need to work in
tandem to improve internal and external security.

But Doval’s strongest and most contentious in uences

on domestic policy have come, unsurprisingly, in the
area of security. Some of these relate to the handling of
personnel. There has been much speculation about his
role in the allegedly preferential treatment given to
o cers from his home state: among them the army
chief, Bipin Rawat, promoted late last year; the RAW
chief, Anil Dhasmana; AK Bhatt, the director general of
military operations; and Alok Joshi, the head of the
National Technical Research Organisation.

The most important testing ground of Doval’s policies

has been Kashmir. In Doval’s time as NSA, security in
the valley has deteriorated rapidly. In early 2015, the BJP
formed a coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir
with the Peoples Democratic Party, which Doval had
helped form in the 1990s. The following year, the valley
exploded in protest after security forces killed the
militant leader Burhan Wani. Police and paramilitary
personnel responded with shocking brutality, leaving
about a hundred civilians dead and hundreds more
blinded by pellet guns. The government imposed a
weeks-long curfew and a media blackout. There was
virtually no attempt to address the discontent through
political means. The deaths of militants since then have
been met with massive funeral processions, and reports
indicate that a growing number of young Kashmiris are
resorting to arms.
Doval o ered a glimpse of his thinking on Kashmir in
2010, after over a hundred people were killed in protests
that followed the extrajudicial killing of three Kashmiri
civilians by security personnel who claimed that they
were militants. “Don’t overreact. Don’t give in. Don’t
follow appeasement,” Doval said in a speech. There was
no political question to be solved, he added, after the
Indian parliament’s 1994 resolution on Kashmir, which
stated that “Jammu & Kashmir has been, is and shall be
an integral part of India and any attempts to separate it
from the rest of the country will be resisted by all
necessary means.”

“Even at the heights of militancy in the 1990s I have not

seen the restlessness that is visible now at the funerals
of militants,” a senior police o cer who served in
Kashmir told me. “Now militants have become saviours.
You put pressure from outside, they feel under siege and
they get united. If you allow freedom, internal
di erences prop up. In our time they used to ght
among themselves.” The o cer criticised the current
government for treating everything as only a law-and-
order problem. “Militants? Fire at them. Stone pelters?
Fire at them.”

“Stone-pelters are put in the same jails as militants and

hardliners and they become radicalised inside,” a former
special director of the IB said. “When we don’t talk to
anybody, Pakistan bene ts. We are providing more and
more space to Pakistan.”

MK Narayanan, the former NSA and Doval’s one-time

mentor, wrote in an article last year that treating the
new turmoil “as an extension of the earlier spells of
unrest could be highly simplistic,” and that “no
meaningful attempt has been made to understand what
is happening beneath the surface.” In his assessment,
“India has decisively won the battle against the foreign-
based militants and terror out ts from Pakistan, but it
now confronts a far graver problem of winning over the
youth of Kashmir before an entire generation gets
detached from India, a most frightening prospect.”

A specialist on security in Kashmir spoke of what he

termed the “Doval Paradox.” He said that the harsh
approach to counter-insurgency in the 1990s, including
the use of ex-insurgents as militias, helped the
government to regain control, but the fact that Kashmir
is still far from peaceful calls for a reassessment of what
such tactics actually achieved. “The renegades did a lot
of the heavy lifting that the Jammu and Kashmir police
refused to do,” the specialist said, but soon the
renegades broke free of government control too. Their
brutality and lawlessness “galvanised opposition to
them and to India.” Renegade leaders were killed, and
their strongholds fell into the hands of insurgents or
pro-independence forces.

Doval, the specialist continued, lacks the re nement to

see how the blowback from using proxy forces can be
“far more profound than the success the operation
initially engendered.” As an example, he pointed to how
US-supported mujahideen from the Afghan–Soviet War
later fuelled the rise of Islamist terrorism. Doval, he
said, “is a shark and with that comes the knowledge that
he will eat the enemy, but also his own,” he continued.
“He will create terror but may not increase the peace.”

“A lot of killings were done by the renegades in Punjab

and Kashmir, and political processes got delayed,” a
security analyst who has followed Doval’s career told
me. “Every fake encounter creates more militants and
eventually undermines democracy in a big way.”
A senior police o cer who served in Kashmir argued
that the hard-line approach in the valley is part of a
strategy to cement the BJP’s nationalist base elsewhere
in India. “The only di erence between the approach of
Congress and the BJP in Kashmir is that the Congress
never thought Kashmir could be used for political
purposes outside Kashmir,” he said.

Besides the popular uprising in the valley, a big test of

Doval’s leadership has come via a series of attacks on
military and security installations in Kashmir and near
the India–Pakistan border. One of the most prominent
incidents occurred when militants attacked Pathankot
Air Force Station, in northern Punjab, before dawn on 2
January 2016. Intelligence received the previous day had
raised the alarm about an attack in the area, yet the
attackers penetrated the base without detection or
challenge. According to the defence analyst and former
colonel Ajai Shukla, the NSA had ordered precautions
on 1 January to protect potential targets, but initially
only asked for about 50 army troops to be moved to the
base. “Intent on directly controlling what he anticipated
would be a walk in the park,” Shukla wrote in an article
a few days after the attack, “and without anticipating
that there might be more than one group of terrorists,
Mr Doval led with his trump card—he ordered 150-160
National Security Guard (NSG) troopers to be own
down immediately from New Delhi. The army was
placed on the side-lines.”
Unrest in Kashmir has increased dramatically under Doval's watch.
Funeral processions for killed militants have become a form of mass
protest against Indian rule. DANISH ISMAIL/REUTERS

Another defence analyst, Rahul Bedi, wrote, “In what

appeared to be an obvious desire to control the
operation, Mr Doval ignored the presence of some
50,000 army troops in the Pathankot region, possibly
the highest such concentration in the country.”

The initial attack left numerous defence personnel

dead. A counter-operation through the day eliminated
four attackers. By evening, the episode was deemed
successfully closed.

Shishir Gupta tweeted, “Ajit Doval take a bow. Superb

counter action, moved NSG on Fri brilliant synergy
with PP & agencies.” Numerous other security
journalists tweeted congratulations of their own. They
were joined by the home minister, Rajnath Singh, and
by Manohar Parrikar, then the defence minister. Modi
tweeted, “In Pathankot today, our security forces once
again demonstrated their valour. I salute their sacri ce.”
The next day, remaining militants launched fresh
attacks, and there were more casualties. After sweep
operations over several days, the last attacker was
reported killed on 5 January. The reported death toll
was seven Indian personnel, and six militants.

In a newspaper piece analysing the incident, the retired

general HS Panag wrote of a string of lapses. “No lead
agency was earmarked and no commander for
command and control was speci ed” in the early stages.
Although the top army o cer in the area would have
been the most sensible choice of commander, he wrote,
command was eventually assumed by the NSG. After
the initial ghting, “the area was not combed properly
… The NSG is not trained to comb a large area and
additional army troops had to be brought in.” Panag
concluded, “The NSA must refrain from
micromanaging operations in military domains. Broad
directives can be given but detailed planning should be
left to the armed forces.”

Ajai Shukla wrote, “Ajit Doval’s inept handling has

transformed what should have been a short,
intelligence-driven, counter-terrorist operation into
something that increasingly seems like a debacle.”

“Just a whi of a live operation, and he is back in the

eld, at least in his mind,” Shekhar Gupta wrote. “That
is why the immediate decision to send the NSG to
Pathankot. But there is a di erence between classical
intelligence or counter-terror operation and dealing
with a larger threat to a place as sensitive and sprawling
as an air force base. … This left Mr Doval no deniability
as he was widely seen to be controlling the operation.”

Another major militant attack followed in September,

and left 18 soldiers dead at an army camp in the town of
Uri, in Kashmir. Eleven days after it, the army
announced that it had in icted heavy casualties in
“surgical strikes” at several militant bases across the
Line of Control. Such raids had occurred before, but
had never been publicly aunted. Now the media hailed
Modi for the action. Defence journalists credited Doval
with planning it.

Sober scrutiny came from elsewhere. Some analysts

questioned the worth of bringing public one-
upmanship into an already di cult con ict. The
journalist Myra MacDonald noted in Defeat is an
Orphan, “The cross-LOC raids were a tactical rather
than strategic success, since the old rules stood.” Such
raids were unlikely to make Pakistan “abandon its
strategy of supporting some jihadis while ghting
others. … Inside the Kashmir valley, India still needed to
nd the political means of addressing Kashmiri
resentment.”

IN ITS ELECTION MANIFESTO for 2014, the BJP

declared that the Congress-led government had “failed
to establish enduring friendly and cooperative relations
with India’s neighbours. India’s relations with
traditional allies have turned cold. India and its
neighbours have drifted apart. Instead of clarity, we see
confusion. The absence of statecraft has never been felt
so acutely as today.”

Modi invited the heads of state of all the South Asian

countries to his swearing in. They all came, including
Nawaz Sharif, then the Pakistani prime minister. The
idea was reported to have come from Doval. Modi’s
supporters lauded the statesmanlike gesture, and
pundits dared hope for better India–Pakistan ties.

That is why the

 y
immediate decision to
send the NSG to
Pathankot. … This left
Mr Doval no deniability
as he was widely seen to
be controlling the
operation.

It was in vain. A few instances of cross-border re

served as a reminder of the tense status quo. Pakistan’s
high commissioner to India met with leaders of the
Hurriyat, a Kashmiri separatist coalition. The Indian
government and media berated Pakistan, and India
called o bilateral talks scheduled for August.

Doval was not shy with his opinion of dialogue with

Pakistan before he became the NSA. In 2013, he
spearheaded a call by a group of former diplomatic,
military and intelligence o cials for the prime minister,
Manmohan Singh, to cancel a planned meeting with
Sharif at the annual meeting of the UN General
Assembly. Instead, they demanded the creation of
measures “that will impose a cost on Pakistan.”

In December 2015, on the way home from a foreign

tour, Modi landed in Lahore to drop in on celebrations
of Sharif’s birthday and his granddaughter’s wedding.
Reuters reported, “A close aide to Modi said the visit
was a spontaneous decision by the prime minister and
National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, and that it should
not be seen as a sudden shift in India’s position.”

G Parthasarathy, the former diplomat, told me that

when Modi came to power, the impression was that
Doval would be very tough. “So he decided to reach out
to Pakistan,” he said. “He had to do that to show that
the stereotype of a hardliner is wrong.” But Modi’s
supporters in the RSS and the larger constellation of the
Sangh Parivar would not have it. “There was much
indignation,” a political activist associated with the RSS
told me.

Some analysts, going by past experience, predicted a

“spoiler” attack in reaction to Modi’s visit by elements
opposed to peace between the two countries. The
Pathankot attack came just days later. Pakistan
denounced it; Modi blamed it only on “enemies of
humanity.”

The Pew Research Centre conducted a survey in the

following months on the Indian public’s perception of
Modi. The prime minister got high marks on everything
except his dealings with Pakistan. The survey report
noted that the “disapproval is shared among supporters
of all parties, including Modi’s own BJP.”

Modi changed tack. He has since said that Pakistan

“bombs its own citizens using ghter planes,” and that
the “time has come that Pakistan shall have to answer
to the world for the atrocities committed by it against
people in Balochistan and PoK”—Pakistan-occupied
Kashmir. In his 2016 Independence Day speech, he
made a reference to Balochistan again. The media
dubbed it a “diplomatic strike.”

The Modi government had already made a signi cant

move on Balochistan the previous year. In October 2015,
a representative of the separatist Balochistan Liberation
Organisation called a press conference in Delhi to read
out a statement from the group’s leader, who was in
exile in London. Pakistan protested against the BLO
representative’s presence in the Indian capital. A report
in The Hindu had Indian o cials con rming “that both
PoK and Balochistan will be used more and more when
India faces allegations from Pakistan over Jammu and
Kashmir.” The BLO representative told the reporters he
had been in India since 2009, and that “he feels safe in
Delhi and has the support of a section of the BJP.”

Uday Mahurkar, in his book on the Modi

administration, wrote that the prime minister’s
“diplomatic strike in relation to Balochistan … was
taken after careful thought and a lot of groundwork and
planning by his national security advisor, Ajit Doval. As
it turned out, the move not only left Pakistan
dumbstruck but has also ba ed China. The reason: it is
directed as much against Pakistan as against China in
the context of the 3000-km-long economic corridor
that China is building from the Gwadar port on the
Makran coast in Balochistan to the Xinjiang province in
China.”

It is unclear if this “strike” served any purpose other

than provoking both of India’s largest neighbours.
Pakistan and China’s collaboration on the planned
economic corridor has continued unfazed. India’s main
geopolitical riposte to it has been to start negotiations
with Iran about developing a port in Chabahar, just
across the Iran–Pakistan border from Gwadar, to rival
the China-backed port. That project is still very far from
fruition.

Indian policy on Pakistan under Modi has su ered for a

lack of consistency. The government’s often
contradictory moves have seemed motivated by the
need of the hour rather than a coherent long-term
strategy. In part, this could have to do with uctuations
in the division of responsibility.
A veteran diplomatic correspondent said that “initially,
Modi trusted Jaishankar with Pakistan and Doval with
China.” The correspondent pointed out the irony in this
—Jaishankar is the better versed on China, having
served as ambassador there, and Doval the better versed
on Pakistan. “Doval was the special envoy to China.
Jaishankar was sent on a visit to SAARC capitals, a
thinly veiled cover for fresh talks with Pakistan, in
March 2015. But by the end of 2015, when Modi’s
approach to Pakistan had changed, Doval met the
Pakistan NSA in Bangkok … and became the face of
India’s Pakistan policy once again.”

Inconsistency has been a hallmark in the relationship

with Nepal, too. Modi headed to Kathmandu in August
2014, a few months into his tenure as prime minister.
There, he promised to increase development
cooperation, and to put the “neighbourhood rst.” But
the goodwill this earned was soon squandered.

In September 2015, Nepal was on the verge of adopting

a new constitution to cap an arduous transition away
from civil war. But anger over some of its provisions
had sparked protests, especially in the Madhes region
along the southern border, and scores of demonstrators
had died in the preceding months. India, long a
supporter of the new charter’s creation, had issued
notes of concern regarding the discontent, but nothing
that had been interpreted in Kathmandu as suggesting a
major change in the Indian stance. Two days before the
constitution was to be signed, Jaishankar landed in
Kathmandu to lobby for a postponement so that the
concerns of people in the Madhes could be addressed.

Many Nepalis read this as India meddling in their a airs

—a long-standing sore point. “It wasn’t just that the
message that Jaishankar brought was ill-timed and
inappropriate,” the Nepali journalist Ameet Dhakal
wrote, “the brute way of its delivery was equally
damning.” Dhakal likened Jaishankar’s demeanour to
that of the British viceroy George Nathanial Curzon.

“As matters reached a head,” the journalist Jyoti

Malhotra wrote, “Doval, who has been ‘handling’ Nepal
at this time, was forced to cede ground to foreign
secretary S Jaishankar.” An analyst familiar with the
ministry of external a airs told me Doval had been
reluctant to go to Kathmandu to deliver the message
himself, and had left the job to Jaishankar.

The constitution was adopted as scheduled, with India

and Nepal feeling mutually snubbed. The countries’
relationship has remained strained since. The signing of
the constitution was soon followed by a devastating
blockade of the two countries’ border as India and a
new Nepali government clashed over suggested
amendments to the document, and over increased
Chinese investment in Nepal. As anger against India
multiplied, China’s popularity shot up.

India’s recent dealings with Sri Lanka, like those with

Nepal, also suggest a tendency towards blunt reactions
to any cooperation between China and the smaller
South Asian states.

In October 2014, Doval visited Colombo. The

incumbent government there, under Mahinda
Rajapaksa, had actively courted China, to India’s
distaste. Now, with an election due in a few months,
Doval met with opposition leaders ahead of a meeting
with Rajapaksa. In December, Rajapaksa’s government
expelled the RAW station chief in Colombo—accusing
him, it later emerged, of aiding the opposition. The
following month, Rajapaksa lost the election to
Maithripala Sirisena, a last-minute defector to the
opposition from his own party.

The consensus in Sri Lanka was that Doval had plotted

to oust Rajapaksa, motivated largely by his antipathy
towards China. This March, the New Indian Express
reported comments by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Mahinda’s
brother and defence secretary, at a media event in
Colombo. “Gotabaya said that China has been a bee in
the bonnet for Doval since his early days in the
intelligence service,” the report said. It also stated
Gotabaya’s view that while Doval’s predecessor,
Shivshankar Menon, “looked at things as a diplomat,
Doval looked at them as an ‘intelligence man.’”

A veteran diplomatic
correspondent told me
that the issuance of the
Uighur leader Dolkun
Isa’s visa and its later
withdrawal showed a
disharmony between
Jaishankar’s and Doval’s
approaches.

The new Sri Lankan government has continued to

collaborate with China. Shivshankar Menon, in his 2016
memoir, wrote that it “would be unreasonable to expect
exclusivity. For Sri Lanka, as for India’s other smaller
neighbors, using China to get India to pay attention and
invest in the relationship and using India to get Chinese
investment and support is a productive strategy,
empirically proven in the past. For India not to
recognize and deal with this fact of international life
would be foolish.”
India’s relationship with Myanmar witnessed another
foreign-relations blunder. In June 2015, a rebel group
based across the India–Myanmar border attacked
Indian forces in Manipur. India retaliated with a cross-
border raid on the rebels’ camps. The action was
reportedly sanctioned by the Myanmar government on
the condition that it be kept secret. But when
government ministers in Delhi began boasting of it,
Myanmar, facing an apparent a ront to its sovereignty,
denied that the action had taken place. After another
cross-border raid, in September, Myanmar protested
the intrusion.

Doval’s main examination as a diplomat on the global

stage has been his handling of China. The Chinese
president, Xi Jinping, visited India in September 2014,
stirring hopes of progress on long-standing disputes
over the two countries’ border. When the time came to
talk, Modi appointed Doval his special envoy on the
issue over Jaishankar. A former o cial at the ministry of
external a airs and a former RAW o cer told me that
Doval speci cally asked for the job.

A round of talks in 2015 yielded little substance.

Another round followed in mid April 2016. Prior to this,
China had blocked Indian e orts at the UN to have
Masood Azhar—released by India to end the IC 814
hijacking, suspected of orchestrating the Pathankot
attack and now living in Pakistan—internationally
recognised as a terrorist. Doval raised this issue with his
Chinese counterpart.
A months-long blockade of the India-Nepal border swayed Nepali
popular opinion firmly against India and in favour of China. NG HAN
GUAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Days later, India granted a visa for Dolkun Isa, an exiled

leader of the Uighur ethnic group wanted by China, to
attend a conference in Dharamshala. China pointed out
that Isa was listed as a wanted fugitive by Interpol, and
reminded India of its resulting obligations. The
ministry of external a airs cancelled the visa.

“Dolkun Isa episode is a self-in icted humiliation.

Mercifully, wiser heads prevailed, not prickly &
immature new warriors of our diplomacy,” Shekhar
Gupta tweeted. A veteran diplomatic correspondent
told me that the impetuous issuance of Isa’s visa and its
later withdrawal showed a disharmony between
Jaishankar’s and Doval’s approaches.

Rajesh Rajagopalan, a professor of international

relations, wrote, “It is unclear how India expects putting
Masood Azhar on a UN terror list will stop his
depredations … the amount of diplomatic e ort that
India expends on these ventures is much too
disproportionate to any likely bene ts.”

In August 2016, The Telegraph reported, “Prime Minister

Narendra Modi has handed foreign secretary S.
Jaishankar charge of India’s diplomacy with China and
Pakistan, ending the near-complete control that
national security adviser Ajit Doval held over New
Delhi’s two toughest relationships. … Jaishankar will
from now on hold regular talks with his Chinese
counterpart … to manage a tricky bilateral relationship
threatened by a series of spats in recent months.”

“Doval’s wings have been clipped on China because

Jaishankar has been roped in,” an analyst who worked
with Doval at the VIF told me. “Because the things are
far more complicated, it requires delicate diplomacy.
With Pakistan there is mostly terrorism.”

Modi initially empowered Doval to spearhead India's relationship with

China. More recently, much of that responsibility has reportedly been
taken from the NSA, and given to the foreign secretary. NG HAN
GUAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
But Doval remained Modi’s special envoy for border
talks. This June, China attempted to extend a road into
Doklam, an area that it claims at the trijunction of the
Indian, Chinese and Bhutanese borders. India, in
keeping with existing treaty agreements with Bhutan
and its own strategic calculations, defended the
Bhutanese claim. Indian soldiers entered the territory
to confront Chinese troops, and a stando ensued. Just
before Doval visited China during the incident, the
Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese government,
carried an editorial titled “Doval visit won’t sway China
over border stando ,” which said the NSA “is believed
to be one of the main schemers behind the current
border stando .” After months of stalemate, in late
August both sides agreed to disengage.

A urry of articles put the resolution down to Doval

taking a tough stand. In a piece titled “How Doval and
team navigated the Doklam stand-o ,” Zee News
reported, “As diplomatic talks progressed, it was clear
New Delhi was negotiating from a position of strength
with Army Chief Bipin Rawat ‘extremely con dent of
ensuring maximum damage.’”

Meanwhile, R Prasannan, a veteran journalist on

defence and foreign a airs, wrote,

Clearly, Modi had been led up the mountain path

by his strategic managers. First, they failed to read
the Chinese mind, which had been made up to
slight India. The Chinese had noti ed their intent
to build a road to Doklam, but our diplomats did
nothing to dissuade them. When the Chinese
came in, India used the military rst and
diplomacy last. It should have been the other way
around. … Throughout the crisis, Bhutan didn’t
 utter a word. After it was di used, there was just a
“phew” statement. No “Thank You, India”. Pray,
why the silence?

During the stando , Tsering Shakya, a historian of the

Himalayan region, wrote, “The Indian media’s sabre-
rattling on defending Bhutan from Chinese
encroachment may be good for arousing nationalistic
sentiment but does not nd echoes in Bhutan. While
the Bhutanese don’t fear invasion from the north, an
increasing Indian presence will surely undermine its
sovereignty.”

“There has been no progress absolutely” on India–

China relations, a senior diplomatic correspondent told
me. After the initial meetings between India and China
after Modi took power, “Doval didn’t seem to have any
ideas to take the second step forward. The relationship
never really took o . Doval’s whole emphasis seemed to
be on border management. Three years later it is dead.
The problems are as alive as in 2014.”

“Doval is a policeman, with a very law-and-order

approach, and doesn’t look at the long-term point of
view,” the correspondent said. Jaishankar, reportedly
with the greater say on China now, “looks at things like
a diplomat.” But, the correspondent told me, “Doval
and Jaishankar are both hardliners in terms of not
letting traditional forms and historical factors a ect
their interests. They share their worldview openly, and
it makes Modi comfortable. … The diplomats of other
countries in our neighbourhood, including China, don’t
really have any respect for Doval and Jaishankar as they
are seen not as diplomats with a vision but as
apparatchiks.”
V | A POLICEMAN’S WAR

IN HIS PUBLIC STATEMENTS, Doval has returned

repeatedly to the concept of fourth-generation warfare.
He wrote about it as early as in 2006, and spoke publicly
about it as late as in 2015. The concept builds upon the
traditional understanding of war as a violent con ict
between states, to describe, in its most simpli ed form,
warfare where at least one of the parties is an armed
non-state actor. It can be applied, for instance, to many
militant insurgencies and the battle against
transnational, decentralised extremist networks. One of
its recurring preoccupations is an “invisible,” often
internal, enemy.

Doval “cannot keep

quiet when the party
takes the wrong
approach while handling
security issues,” EN
Rammohan, a former
head of BSF said.

“The subversive and violent groups disguise themselves

as crusaders of disa ected or alienated sections of the
society and indulge in violence and other unlawful
activities,” Doval wrote in 2012. “Actions taken by the
government to protect law abiding citizens or to
enforce rule of law will be portrayed as persecution and
oppression further eroding government’s legitimacy.”

Speaking at the national police academy in Hyderabad

in 2015, he said, “This war can’t be won by armies. This
is the war of policemen. If you win, the country wins.”
Doval’s close associates in power seem to have imbibed
some of this thinking. Advani referred to the “invisible
enemy” in his autobiography. Modi told a conference of
military commanders in 2014, “Beyond the immediate,
we are facing a future where security challenges will be
less predictable, situations will evolve and change
swiftly, and technological changes will make responses
more di cult to keep pace with. The threats may be
known, but the enemy may be invisible.”

“This suits Doval because he is so comfortable in this

skin, because terrorism is his domain of expertise,”
Pravin Sawhney, the editor of the defence magazine
Force, told me. But, he said, “If the Indian army starts
parroting this line then they don’t have to prepare for
conventional warfare. How can terrorism be your
invisible threat when you have two clear military
lines”—one each with China and Pakistan, with the
former increasingly aiding the other. “Your biggest
threat is China, China, China.”

G Parthasarathy, the former diplomat, agreed that

India’s current foreign-policy focus is misplaced. “We
are too obsessed with Pakistan,” he said. “It is only an
instrument of Chinese containment of India. Under its
‘string of pearls’ strategy, the strategic containment of
India in the Indian Ocean is the primary goal of China.”

“You can’t have a great powerful country which can’t

manage its own internal security,” Doval said in 2015 at
the police academy. There have been multiple internal
security crises on his watch. Just this July, militants
killed seven people on the pilgrimage route to the
Amarnath Temple in Kashmir. The government faced
criticism from across party lines for not acting on prior
intelligence about the attack. In August, supporters of
the god-man Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, angered by
his conviction for rape, rampaged across parts of
Haryana, Punjab and the national capital region. More
than 30 people were left dead.

“Comprehensive national security is not just about

borders but in its broad terms includes military
security; economic security; energy, food and water and
health security; and social cohesion and harmony,” the
BJP’s election manifesto declared. Yet cow-protection
vigilantes have been allowed free rein, and have taken
several lives since 2014.

The BJP’s manifesto also talked about revamping India’s

intelligence operations and freeing them of political
interference. There have been no large reforms yet.
Doval has long backed the creation of a national
counter-terrorism centre to better consolidate and
analyse relevant intelligence. The move was mooted by
the previous government, but stalled after numerous
states, including Gujarat under Modi, declared it an
encroachment on their own intelligence operations.
The idea was revived last year, three years into Doval’s
time as NSA, but is far from realisation.
Doval's unstinting loyalty to Modi is a disquieting trait, in some eyes, in
a man expected to speak hard and sometimes unpalatable truths to the
prime minister. KAMAL KISHORE/PTI

“The NSA has to be scrupulously neutral but Doval is

favouring the rightist approach of the ruling party,” EN
Rammohan, the former head of the Border Security
Force, said in a newspaper interview this May. “He
cannot keep quiet when the party takes the wrong
approach while handling security issues. When the
party does something which is violating the
Constitution, the NSA should stand up and point out
that this is wrong.” Doval, Rammohan said, “is a
brilliant o cer but he is behaving like a sycophant to
the BJP.” This might be his legacy.

Addendum:

Doval responded to the interview request submitted to his

o ce on 18 August with a phone call to Praveen Donthi on
1 September, after the September 2017 issue, in which this
story appeared, had been closed. In a seven-minute
conversation, Doval said, “As far as the policies of national
security are concerned, that is the government’s policy and
Ajit Doval is only a part of the machine. You should be able
to study this thing as the performance of the government.
… Don’t over-credit me with something. … I am associated
in shaping it to some extent. I am also associated with
executing it. But I am not the only one. There is the army
chief, there is the navy chief, there are intelligence chiefs,
there is the ISRO, there is the DRDO, there is the foreign
secretary. There is everybody around. I am part of the team.
Maybe I lead the team, but I am part of the team. … Media
might be right, the media may not be very right. I do
whatever I know or whether I can do, I do my part.”

Corrections:

1. The print version of this story erroneously described

Narendra Modi’s visit to Nepal in August 2014 as his rst
foreign trip as prime minister.

2. Due to an editorial oversight, the following lines did not

appear in this story in the print issue:

Modi tweeted, “In Pathankot today, our security

forces once again demonstrated their valour. I
salute their sacri ce.”

The next day, remaining militants launched fresh

attacks, and there were more casualties.

This has been corrected online.

The Caravan regrets the errors.

PRAVEEN DONTHI  is a staff writer at The Caravan.

KEYWORDS: china Nepal Pakistan government Sri Lanka

Kashmir BJP Narendra Modi foreign policy South Asia

 Intelligence Bureau SAARC surgical strike National security

Bharatiya Janata Party Vivekananda Foundation

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Ajit Doval intelligence defence

Shaurya Doval NSA Doklam

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READER'S COMMENTS

Sudhir Great insights in to the mindset of a person in

07 Mar, 2018 such an important position! Humankind
evolved through collective wisdom and
actions. Tribalistic narrow mind, jaundiced and
myopic vision, exaggerated reflexes, and
overall primitive animal instincts are cardinal
signs of a sanghi that go against the natural,
progressive evolution precepts. They have
failed in battles of Pathankot and Uri and
failed in all gimmicks like surgical strikes, they
have failed in hugplomacy and have no clue
about our relationships with our neighbours
and other countries of the world. Hope not,
but I have no confidence that they will win
any war or diplomacy. The whole power today
is centralized with such arrogant, dimwit (in
sense of competency for the role), and trigger
happy people. On top of that, they have least
respect for democratic values and have no
accountability. With our large democracy,
diversity and a great pool of talent, there is
immense scope for harnessing potential of
citizens of this country. We should not be
limited to a vision of just one person in the
country of 1.3 billions.

Abhishek The report slips up on many fronts. The most

16 Oct, 2017 easiest of them is the following line- "India’s
relationship with many of its immediate
neighbours is worse now than when Doval
took office, in May 2014"
Those who say it have absolutely no clue
about geopolitics and foreign affairs- and
even less so about the psyche of our
 neighbours and in fact a large part of the
globe. India has in fact managed to
successfully push back against it neighbours.
Delihi/Mumbai bases elites had already
succumbed to pakistani propaganda (and
payroll, one sometimes wonders) and had
started indulging in a kind of victim blaming
(like telling a girl that her clothes were
responsible for her harassment), with India as
the victim.
With China, all are appeasement policies in
the last 2 decades (including under Vajpayee)
have failed. They keep smiling, keep nodding
and the keep pushing the boundaries.
"How can terrorism be your invisible threat
when you have two clear military lines"- the
reporter is clearly short on his homework (or
deliberately ignored them because they did
not concur with his agenda). The CoAS has
clearly talked about a war on "two and a half"
fronts.
Such articles look good, perhaps they also
clear the picture on a handful of issues.
However, the fundamental problem they have
is a gross misunderstanding of the outside
world and how it operates. Because of our
proficiency in English, we sometimes imagine
we are too close to the liberal
anglophone/anglo-saxon world. We are not.
We are too far away. And even the anglo-
saxon liberalism is only a facade. Their
conservatism is far too well entrenched in
their system. On the other hand, our
liberalism is far too well entrenched in our
system. It probably works for us but we still
need to tighten ourselves us for sure.

Ai Page turner and captivating article.

09 Oct, 2017

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का बिह कार sadhus boycott the against the BJP in
DHIRENDRA K JHA DHIRENDRA K JHA DHIRENDRA K JHA

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