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situation is easy, but unless the political and diplomatic side got equal prominence, mere military action would not succeed in ensuring victory. Under Rajiv Gandhi, RAW was given the same importance that it had under Indira Gandhi. The PM used to meet with RAW officers regularly, and even used to visit the organisation s office. Both S G Joshi and A K Verma (whose designation Secretary R indicated that they headed RAW) ensured that the organisation developed numerous contacts in target countries. The negative effects of the 1977-79 Morarji Desai period, when RAW was almost disbanded, were overcome. In those days, a comparison between RAW and ISI would not have been as inaccurate as it became afterwards, beginning with the period when P V Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister in 1991. Under his Principal Secretary, Amar Nath Verma, RAW lost its earlier importance, and began to report to him rather than to the PM. This was also the period when the Indian Police Service established its supremacy over RAW, edging out the Research & Analysis Service inductees. The RAS had been conceptualised as intelligence professionals by Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, and given parity with the Indian Foreign Service (IFS),the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and the Indian Police Service (IPS),the successors to the British administrative wings, and which were closely modelled on them, because of Jawaharlal Nehru s immense faith in the colonial administrative structure and his belief that these could serve a free India as well as they had their British masters for nearly a century. Amar Nath Verma soon put an end to this, placing the RAS far below the IFS and the IAS. Indeed, he ensured that RAW would henceforward be dominated by the police, just as the Intelligence Bureau was. This merging of both via a common police link was to have major consequences. There is a huge difference between the military mind - which is strategic and in most cases free of politics - and the police mind, which focuses on the tactical and on the political. The Indian Police Service is a first-rate group of officers, but to have taken them away from police functions to managing the arcane world of the intelligence specialist was akin to playing cricket with a hockey stick. Worse, many of the police officers serving in RAW returned to their parent cadres regularly, thereby losing their link with specialised intelligence gathering and plunging once again into the hurly-burly of law and order issues. In India, neither the Defense Ministry nor the National Security setup has a dedicated and permanent cadre of officials trained in the field. This is unlike the Finance Ministry, which has greater specialisation than most other ministries, although such expertise does not reach the level of the External Affairs Ministry, which is 100% specialised in diplomacy. In the US, the CIA may be led by a boss without an intelligence training, but each echelon of that organisation is staffed with intelligence specialists, unlike the FBI, which is more into policing. In India, because of the colonial heritage that regarded the British as a master race capable of undertaking any task, the dominance of the generalist has continued, including the police generalists in RAW. After Rajiv Gandhi, no Prime Minister has bothered to exercise personal oversight of RAW. In the Vajpayee era, control was exercised by the National Security Advisor to the PM, Brajesh Mishra. Since Manmohan Singh took charge of the government in 2004, RAW has been under the effective superintendence of not only the NSA, but often the Principal Secretary to the PM, the Cabinet Secretary and on occasion even the Home Secretary. The separation of RAW from the fountainhead of authority has cost it salience and effectiveness. As for expertise, while there are dozens of experts on India in the various national security agencies of China, in India, their counterparts have much fewer experts on the country that is of such overpowering importance in India s security calculus, the Peoples Republic of China. If the world s biggest democracy nevertheless ambles along, the credit goes not to those managing its affairs but to the Almighty. To compare RAW with the ISI is to compare a horse with a tiger. The writer is Vice-Chair, Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair & Professor of Geopolitics, Manipal University, Haryana State, India.