66 highlights
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Appointed by and answerable only to the prime minister, he heads the National Security Council, an advisory body that includes the ministers of home, finance, defence and external affairs.
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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.
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Though he has shied away from public pronouncements since taking office, 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
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One common conceit, repeated often enough to have become cliche, is to call him “India’s James Bond.” Today, he has a higher profile in the media than any NSA had before him, and is far more prominent than any other bureaucrat in the government.
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Doval’s hawkishness, they say, is a symptom of this limitation—an example, as the metaphor goes, of how when all a man has is a hammer, everything in his eyes looks like a nail.
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The situation in Kashmir is now more volatile than it has been in decades, with militancy once again on the rise. India’s relationship with many of its immediate neighbours is worse now than when Doval took office, in May 2014.
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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.
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In 1966, rebellion flared 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.
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Doval did not stay in Aizawl long enough to witness the official end of the conflict, in 1986, with the signing of the Mizo Peace Accord, under which the government granted full statehood to Mizoram.
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As a mid-level Intelligence Bureau officer in the north-east, he infiltrated 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.
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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.”
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This narrative has often been reproduced in the media, though there is sufficient evidence to complicate it.
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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.
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In early 1972, India recognised Mizoram as a union territory, as a precursor to eventual statehood.
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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.”
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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.
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A former IB officer 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.”
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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!”
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It is also doubtful that Doval could have operated as a spy without the knowledge of his Pakistani counterparts—passing intelligence officers off as mid-ranking diplomats is an old trick in the business.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Trapped and demoralised, the rebels surrendered on 18 May, bringing Operation Black Thunder II, as it came to be known, to an end.
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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.
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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.
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On 27 December, an Indian delegation under Vivek Katju, a senior official from the ministry of external affairs, arrived in Kandahar with a team of negotiators. The team included two RAW officers, Nehchal Sandhu of the IB, and Doval.
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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.
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The hostages were exchanged on the last day of the millennium, and the hijackers disappeared into Afghanistan.
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The entire episode was a disaster for the Indian political and security establishment. The opposition at the time denounced the government’s “abject surrender.”
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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 briefing settings without a flicker of an eye.” The term referred, the expert continued, to how Doval “appeared to entertain no doubts, ever.”
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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Specifically, 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.
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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.
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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. Officials 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.
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“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,’”
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In July 2005, officers 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 officers’ surprise, Doval was in the vehicle with him.
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What Doval was doing with Malhotra has never been made clear.
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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.1
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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.”
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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.”2
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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.”
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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.”
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“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 fine day, Doval landed up at his office 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.
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When I visited the India Foundation’s address on Delhi’s prestigious Hailey Road in July, I did not find a nameplate on the door. A former official of the ministry of external affairs who is familiar with the foundation told me it is opaque about its finances.
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Doval’s power on questions of internal security is undisputed. But his influence on other aspects of Modi’s domestic policy might not be as great as media characterisations suggest.
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On foreign policy, a defining factor in Doval’s reach has been the equation between him and the foreign secretary, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
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Doval, who holds the rank of a minister of state, is officially 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 fill,” the journalist Siddharth Varadarajan wrote at the time of the foreign secretary’s appointment.
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Another nickname making the rounds is “National Security Advisor (Pakistan)“—an insinuation that Doval’s understanding of other countries is non-existent.
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He summarised Jaishankar’s approach to his work as “You tell me a desired solution, I will try to find a way to get there.” That, he continued, allowed the foreign secretary and the NSA to establish “a good modus vivendi.”
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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.”
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This controversial claim was used to shield the university’s vice chancellor and senior BJP and government figures from charges under the stringent Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
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“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 officer 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 differences prop up. In our time they used to fight among themselves.”
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Many Nepalis read this as India meddling in their affairs—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.”
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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.
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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.
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The consensus in Sri Lanka was that Doval had plotted to oust Rajapaksa, motivated largely by his antipathy towards China.
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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.
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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.
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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 affairs cancelled the visa.
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Doval, Rammohan said, “is a brilliant officer but he is behaving like a sycophant to the BJP.” This might be his legacy.