STRATEGIC AFFAIRS : MYOPIA
Not low 'i.q'... but lowest!
An inept external security agency reflects India’s visionless polity

For any country of some relevance, its external intelligence agency plays an extremely crucial role in not just executing the foreign policy but also the vision of that country. So while for Israel, its external intelligence agency, the Mossad, always have had a clear mandate – not just to keep an eye over its perennial enemies like Iran, Egypt, Syria and Palestine – but also do everything possible to neutralise any military or political edge they have over Israel. Likewise, while during the Cold War era the CIA had a clear mandate to keep the communists and Soviet Union at bay, in the aftermath of the disintegration of the USSR and the 9/11, the mandate was clearly to spearhead the USA’s ‘War on Terror’. In the same league, whether one likes it or not, for long the mandate of the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan was to aid Taliban rule in Afghanistan, as well as to fuel terrorism in India. But the question which one needs to ask today is whether India’s external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), has any mandate or not. Honestly, after its incredible feat during the 1971 war, when it was given much credit for India’s victory over Pakistan and the subsequent creation of Bangladesh, one is yet to witness any real-time credible achievement of RAW. Not only did it fail to anticipate the enormity of the intrusions in the winters of 1999, which led to the Kargil War, it has over the time lost its edge to keep Pakistan at bay.

Times changed fast in the last two decades, but RAW unfortunately didn’t change. Its ambiguity today is nothing but the ramification of the visionless approach of India’s political leadership at large. During the days of Cold War, India was unofficially a Soviet ally and it was a foregone conclusion that the US would side with Pakistan in case of any friction with India. But today things have changed. So for RAW, would it consider CIA a friend or an adversary? For RAW, is SVR, the new avatar of KGB of Russia, an ally or an adversary? In the aftermath of 9/11, now that Pakistan is equally reeling under the onslaught of terrorism, should RAW be happy or try to salvage Pakistan from this predicament, as doing so would not just increase the trust factor between the two nations but would also help India in the long run? One has to remember that a collapsed and disintegrated Pakistan is worse than in its present form, as the ripple effect would directly come to India. If that isn’t enough, RAW's Pakistan-centric approach has been responsible to see the emergence of China as a much bigger threat to India’s future. SSB, which was an elite intelligence gathering organisation with established fangs deep in China, was abruptly reduced to a ubiquitous border guarding organisation. The question remain how much

RAW has been able to replace SSB. One wonders if RAW or its political masters actually know who India's friends and enemies are!

For any external intelligence agency, the directions of long-term vision and the short term objective has to come from the political leadership. If RAW is increasingly becoming defunct then it’s purely because India’s political leadership runs this country literally on a day to day basis and from one crisis to another. Having a long term vision is a distant call. What Israel and US are today and the way Russia had a phoenix like resurgence from the dust of Soviet collapse, are nothing but culminations of what their great leaders envisioned years back. Its time that India has a Krishna rather than a Ram who would lead this country back to its glorious days, as in these days one needs a Poorna Purush (complete man) than an Uttam Purush (nobleman) to run India. Only then RAW would have some raw aspirations.

Pathikrit Payne