Indian Defence Review

The “Frontier Post” of Peshawar came out with a humorous editorial which made the following appeal to the R&AW: “ Why this partiality to the Punjabis? Why send your attractive women only to them? We Pashtuns also like attractive women. Send us at least 10. Many of us are dying to be honey-trapped by attractive Indian women.”

Sharad Pawar, who was then the Defence Minister, told a woman journalist working for a Delhi paper that the R&AW was tapping the telephone conversations of Nawaz Sharif with the sister of the actor and that it had secret recordings of Nawaz sharif singing love songs to her over telephone. Greatly excited that she got a scoop, she promptly carried it in her paper. A couple of days later, she got a defamation notice from the sister of the actor. She rushed to Sharad Pawar and sought his assistance for challenging the defamation notice. She wanted somebody in the Government of India to give her a letter that what she reported was correct. Sharad Pawar totally denied ever having told her anything about the relationship of this woman with Nawaz Sharif. “ I don’t even know who she is. Where is the question of my talking to you about her?”

In utter panic, she approached the late Amitabha Chakravarthi of the Indian Information Service, who was then on deputation to the R&AW, and sought our help to enable her to reply to the defamation notice. I asked Amitabha to tell her that the question did not arise since we were not aware of any relationship between the sister of the actor and Nawaz Sharif.

Such lighter moments were more an exception than the rule. Most of the time, the Indian and Pakistani agencies were brutal towards each other. Very often, it was the R&AW officers posted in Pakistan, who had to bear the brunt of the ISI’s brutality in retaliation for what they alleged was the IB’s brutality towards their diplomats in New Delhi. Such instances of mutual brutality increased under Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan and Rajiv Gandhi in India.In 1988, the IB trapped Brig.Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi, a suspected ISI officer posted as Military Attache in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi, and had him thoroughly beaten up.

The ISI retaliated in their usual manner against an Indian diplomat in Islamabad whom they suspected to be from the R&AW. The R&AW strongly protested to the IB against such actions being taken in New Delhi without even alerting it beforehand. The IB rejected the protest. The practice of ill-treatment of suspected intelligence officers posted in the capital of each other has continued till today. This needs to be stopped since it serves no purpose. It only adds to the mutual bitterness.

The R&AW played an important role in the normalization of relations between India and China for which it received high praise from Rajiv Gandhi. Before the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Yugoslav intelligence, with which the R&AW had an excellent liaison relationship, had organized an invitation for Kao from China’s external intelligence agency, known as the Ministry of State Security (MSS). Kao flew to Beijing via Tokyo. He was accompanied by G.S.Mishra, one of the R&AW’s leading experts on China who had served in Beijing for some years, Dr.S.K.Chaturvedi, who used to be the head of the Economic Intelligence Division of the R&AW, and B.K.Ratnakar Rao, an IPS officer from the Tamil Nadu cadre, who had served for many years as the Staff Officer of Kao.The visit had two objectives— to lay the foundation for a liaison relationship between the R&AW and the MSS and to test the waters in China for a possible visit by Indira Gandhi to mark the normalization of the relations between the two countries. Two days after their arrival, as his talks with the Chinese political leaders as an emissary of Indira Gandhi and with senior Chinese intelligence officials were proceeding smoothly, Indira Gandhi was assassinated. He had to cut short the visit and return to Delhi via Hong Kong.

After Rajiv Gandhi took over as the Prime Minister, the R&AW briefed him on the visit of Kao to Beijing and its purpose. He was appreciative of the initiative taken by Kao and the R&AW and wanted the R&AW to pursue its efforts to set up a liaison relationship with the MSS and to pave the way for a visit by him to Beijing. The R&AW succeeded in establishing a liaison relationship with its Chinese counterpart. Not only that. Even a hotline was established between the chiefs of the two services so that not only the two chiefs, but also the Prime Ministers of the two countries could use this for the exchange of sensitive communications for which they wanted to avoid using the normal diplomatic channel between the Foreign Offices of the two countries.

Rajiv Gandhi accepted an invitation from the Chinese leadership to visit China in 1988. Much of the preparatory work for this visit, including the mutual consultations on the joint statement on the border dispute between the two countries to be issued at the end of the visit, was done through this hotline. Rajiv Gandhi also sent A.K.Verma on a top secret visit to China to ensure that his own visit and talks with the Chinese leaders would be successful. Rajiv Gandhi prepared himself thoroughly for the visit. He read diligently all the background notes on Sino-Indian relations prepared by the MEA and the R&AW. He also had discussions with some of the Indian experts on China. At his request, the R&AW arranged a secret visit to New Delhi by two China experts of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to brief Rajiv Gandhi on the Chinese negotiating techniques and other matters of relevance.

The visit of Rajiv Gandhi to China in December,1988, was highly successful and marked the culmination of the process of normalization of the diplomatic relations between the two countries. The high point of his visit was his very warm meeting with Deng Xiao-ping, which sent a significant message across to the people of the two countries and to the international community regarding the determination of the two countries to strengthen their mutual friendship and co-operation. On his return to India, Rajiv Gandhi had nothing but the highest praise for the role of the R&AW and Verma in contributing to the success of his visit.

When Narasimha Rao visited China as the Prime Minister in September,1993, his programme as drawn up by the Chinese was almost a carbon copy of the programme for the visit of Rajiv Gandhi except for one difference. It did not provide for a meeting with Deng. Rao felt disappointed and was very keen to have a meeting, however brief, with Deng. The Chinese authorities expressed their inability to accommodate his request on the ground that Deng was not well. Rao, who was aware of the role of the R&AW in connection with the visit of Rajiv Gandhi to China, sought its help in arranging a courtesy call by him on Deng. The R&AW took up the matter with the MSS through the hotline. It replied that Deng had not received Russian President Boris Yeltsin due to indisposition and that if they made an exception in the case of Rao, their action could be misunderstood by Moscow. It was apparent that the Chinese treated the meeting between Rajiv Gandhi and Deng as a special gesture to the son of Indira Gandhi. They were not prepared to extend the same gesture to Rao.

In a gesture to India at the time of the first Gulf war of 1991, when Chandra Shekhar was the Prime Minister with the support of the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress (I), Chinese intelligence officials through the R&AW’s liaison representative in Beijing offered to recommend to their leadership the supply of oil to India to enable it to meet any shortages it might face due to the war. The Government of India did not avail of the offer.

During the periodic meetings of the officers of the R&AW and the MSS in New Delhi and Beijing, R&AW officers used to raise without fail China’s nuclear, missile and military supply relationship with Pakistan and point out how this was standing in the way of the full flowering of the bilateral relations, but their standard reply was that they were supplying only defensive equipment to Pakistan which would not pose a threat to India and that they would be happy to consider any request from India for the supply of defensive equipment, which would not pose a threat to Pakistan.

Developments in South-East and East Asia, the US relations with Japan and China’s relations with Pakistan used to figure on the agenda of all these discussions. In addition, they would invariably ask for a briefing on the activities of the Dalai Lama and his followers from the Indian territory. Despite our repeated assurances that the Tibetans living in the Indian territory would not be allowed to pose a threat to China and to Chinese leaders visiting India, they continued to express concern over their presence and activities in the Indian territory. However, they did not allow this to come in the way of the development of the bilateral relations.

While the liaison relationship between the R&AW and the MSS thus continued to develop satisfactorily and made an important contribution to the success of Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to China, the R&AW’s reporting on China—particularly in respect of military intelligence— was frequently criticized by the Indian Army. The R&AW had only two main sources of military intelligence about China—its Western liaison contacts and the trans-border sources from Tibet. Both these sources tended to exaggerate the over-all Chinese military capability and military deployments in Tibet. The Military Intelligence repeatedly challenged the R&AW’s estimate of the Chinese military deployments in Tibet as inflated. After having refuted the MI’s challenge for a long time, the R&AW had to admit that its estimate needed to be revised downwards.

There was similar criticism from the MEA of its political coverage as based largely, if not totally, on open information. Not only the MEA, but even some liaison agencies expressed the view that the weekly reports of the R&AW were nothing but a collation of open information from the Chinese media. Some of the liaison agencies even asked the R&AW to discontinue sharing such open information since it was of no use to them. The analytical reports and assessments prepared by the R&AW also came in for criticism that they lacked depth and insights.

Only the R&AW’s reports on the state of the Chinese economy came in for high praise from the Ministry of Finance and the Planning Commission. Though these were also based largely on open information, they found the reports more analytical. Moreover, in the 1980s, when the Chinese leadership had started opening up its economy, the R&AW was the only agency or department of the Government of India, which was systematically monitoring economic developments in China.

The sizable increase in investments for improving the intelligence collection capabilities of the R&AW under Rajiv Gandhi did not produce the same beneficial results in respect of China as they did in respect of Pakistan. The R&AW’s post-1968 renowned experts on China such as G.S.Mishra, S.N.Warty, Deepankar Sanyal, N.Narasimhan, etc were all of IB vintage hand-picked and got trained by Mallik. He also got trained a number of excellent linguists in India itself, Hong Kong and China. They served the organization with great distinction. The last of the IB-trained experts retired in January,2003. The China experts produced by the R&AW after its formation in 1968 were good, but the general impression was that they were not comparable to those of the IB vintage.

Unfortunately, human and material resources provided for strengthening the China expertise of the R&AW were not on par with those provided for the Pakistan division. The R&AW has had 16 chiefs since its formation in 1968. Of these, only one (N.Narasimhan—1991 to 93) could be described as a real China expert. This deficiency in respect of China continues. The Special Task Force for the Revamping of the Intelligence Apparatus set up by the Government of India in 2000 on the recommendation of the Kargil Review Committee (KRC) focused essentially on our intelligence capabilities relating to Pakistan and counter-terrorism. It also briefly dealt with economic intelligence and the security implications of the Internet. But, it paid inadequate attention to an examination of our intelligence collection and analysis capabilities with regard to China. It is time to have a comprehensive examination of our China-related inadequacies.

Continuity with innovative change was Rajiv Gandhi’s contribution to the operational policies of the R&AW relating to Pakistan, Afghanistan and China. These policies had been laid down by Indira Gandhi. After inheriting them, he imparted to them a vigour,a laser-sharp focus and a new dynamism, which they lacked before his taking-over as the Prime Minister. The biting power of the R&AW, which had weakened between 1977 and 1980, was restored. It once again became—as it was before 1977— an agency not only for the collection and analysis of intelligence, but also for the defence and enforcement of India’s national interests in its neighbourhood through covert non-diplomatic means, where diplomatic means were found inadequate or ineffective. While the covert action capability thus improved tremendously under Rajiv Gandhi, the improvement in its intelligence collection and analysis capability did not keep pace with the requirements of the nation and the time.