Jan Sharma

Rashid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Saleem’s RAW: Global and Regional Ambitions made an illuminating reading as Girija Prasad Koirala, Baburam Bhattarai and Surya Bahadur Thapa end their political pilgrimages to New Delhi.

The 85-page volume was published this year by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute, which undertakes analysis and evaluation of strategic issues affecting Pakistan.

There are certain issues that affect more than Pakistan. Obviously, these include activities of foreign intelligence agencies. The volume gives new insights into regional “diplomacy.”

The activities of RAW (Research and Analysis Wing)—the external intelligence agency of India– in Nepal have long been an open secret. Khan and Saleem review its overt and covert operations in Pakistan and elsewhere in the region, including Nepal.

RAW is modeled after Britain’s MI 6 and the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency. But unlike its Western cuisines, RAW has often a decisive say in the “world’s largest democracy.”

For example, Indira Gandhi used RAW to persecute and repress her political opponents during her 1975-77 iron rule. Yet, the agency could not save her from a humiliating defeat in the 1977 parliamentary elections.

While RAW chief R. N. Kao and his deputy were forced to retire, one of its agents Rabinder Singh – allegedly “cultivated” by the Americans – abruptly showed up in Kathmandu to defect to the United States.

The authors describe the origin and development of RAW, its structure and organization and how it functions to help achieve India’s strategic and foreign policy objectives in South Asia.

In Bangladesh, 10 RAW agents had infiltrated into the army, including the Military Intelligence Directorate. They were subsequently apprehended.

RAW “is also involved in the political and military movements that aim at destabilising Bangladesh, like the Shanti Bahini and Chakma tribals. RAW has also been accused of sponsoring opposition political parties, especially pro-India parties and groups.”

In Sri Lanka, RAW was instrumental in securing Indian support for the 1983 Tamil insurgency and then to send the Indian Peace Keeping Force to “enforce peace” in the northeast.

Both Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv patronized LTTE so as to “prevent the Tamil struggle from becoming a challenge to the nation-state system in South Asia, and to pressurise the Sri Lankan government to recognize India as the regional super power.”

India first supplied, through RAW, the Tamil guerrillas with arms, ammunitions and training “only to intervene to police a peace settlement.”

Reading the reference on Sikkim in 1970s is like reading something on Nepal today. RAW prepared necessary grounds for India’s direct military intervention in the former Himalayan kingdom.

RAW agents established “a close liaison with men, who, in the words of the Indians, could help in establishing a democratic government in the state.” Indian military intervention came in April 1973 “to protect the Chogyal.”

That year on May 8, Chogyal was forced to sign an agreement providing for a new constitutional arrangement to install a “popular government.” The rest is history.

The authors, for curious reasons, put Nepal in the same chapter as Sikkim. They see RAW hand behind the June 1985 bombings in Kathmandu and elsewhere.

However, they are conspicuously silent on its role in the Khampa insurgency smashed by the Royal Nepal Army on the eve of late King Birendra’s February 1975 coronation.

The authors blame RAW for helping carry out the royal palace massacre on June 1, 2001 because “King Birendra was once again trying to move closer to the West and China.” They provide no details.

“There is enough evidence to show that India is inciting a situation of full-scale civil war. The motive behind these actions seems to be the Indian plan to undertake a military invasion of Nepal on the pretext of resorting peace as it had earlier done in Sri Lanka,” the authors conclude.

RAW is also helping, they say, the Maoist insurgency to build pressure on Nepal. They endorse the unstated official Nepali position that the Maoist insurgency is not capable of sustaining itself without the support it gets from its sanctuaries across the border in India.

The next moves by Koirala, Thapa and Bhattarai after they settle down from their Indian pilgrimage and begin to translate the blessings would indeed be interesting.