Meet Modi’s 007: India’s greatest spy Ajit Doval spooks Pakistan’s ISI and more

Amid bitter accusations, violations at the border and breach of trust—the latest being Dawood Ibrahim’s hideout traced to Pakistan– India and Pakistan were supposed to exchange dialogues at the scheduled NSA-level talks in New Delhi on August 23.

The talks due to be held between Pakistan National Security Advisor Sartaj Aziz and his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval were called off after war of words between the two neighbours.

This reminds us of what Prime Minister Narendra Mod once said: “Terror and talks can’t go hand in hand. Can you hear each other over the sound of gunfire?”

A dialogue of the deaf, that is!

However, India had prepared a dossier of Pakistani complicity in terror attacks. Reports suggest that Doval had planned to confront Pakistan on its shoddy investigation in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks incident. His dossier for Pak too had details of the fugitive gangster Dawood living in Karachi’s upscale neighbourhood Clifton Road with his family on the basis of which Doval was to pull Aziz up.

Here are a few things about Modi’s 007 Ajit Doval that will have you in awe of this maverick spy:

If you mix James Bond and Henry Kissinger, what do you get? Ajit Doval.

That about sums up India’s National Security Advisor – arguably the country’s greatest spy, and now PM Modi’s most trusted aide.

He is the only police officer to be awarded the Kirti Chakra, India’s second highest peacetime gallantry award.

Operationally, and incredibly, he has been involved in every theatre of India’s security operations since the 1980s.

The legends around him are legion. Sample these:

• In the 1980s, when the Mizo National Front, led by Laldenga, was holding the nation to ransom with his insurgency, he suddenly found six of his seven commanders had deserted him, all won over by Ajit Doval.
• He was undercover in Pakistan for 7 years posing as a Pakistani Muslim in Lahore. (See video below for Doval’s retelling of how his cover was blown in Pakistan; and how the story had an amazing ending)

• He was in the Golden Temple in the days leading up to the India army’s Operation Bluestar, posing as a Pakistani spy, gaining the militants’ confidence, and then reconnoitering the militant’s preparations and fortifications in the holiest of Sikh shrines.
• In 1999, when the Indian Airlines flight IC-814 was hijacked from Kathmandu and flown to Kandahar with the passengers as hostages, Doval was India’s main negotiator with the hijackers.

• In Kashmir, he infiltrated the militant outfits and was able to turn militants into peacemakers. The transforming of rabid anti-India militant Kuka Parray into a pro-India peacenik was a notable triumph of Doval. Some of the credit for peace in Kashmir in the last decade should go to the current NSA.

Since his appointment as the NSA by PM Narendra Modi, the legend and efficacy of Doval’s operations, tactics and strategies has not gone unnoticed in the region, and elsewhere.

Pakistan has taken it particularly big. Other than Doval’s incandescent reputation as a pre-eminent spook, what particularly got the goat of the Pakistani establishment is the video below.

In this talk, he laid bare three postulates:

One, transforming India’s “defensive” posture, under the UPA,  to an “offensive-defensive” one. That is, from being in a passive mode of trying to prevent attacks, or acting after an attack has occurred, to one “of going to the place that the terror strikes originate and taking them out”.

Two, making it ‘unaffordable for Pakistan” to continue their proxy war by reversing the ‘bleeding India with a thousand cuts” on its head; by “making it unaffordable” for Pakistan to indulge in terror as a “war with other means”.

“If you (Pakistan) do a Mumbai, you will lose Baluchistan”, Doval thundered.

Three, using India’s new found economic and financial clout by “out-funding” Pakistan by “matching” and even “bettering” what the  ISI pays out to the Taliban. This, of course, premised on the assumption that the Taliban, for all its posturing, is a mercenary outfit than an “ideological” one.

So real was the consternation in the Pakistani secuity establishment after Doval’s appointmnt as the NSA that the ISI is known to have shifted Dawood Ibrahim, from a safe house in Karachi, to the Pak-Afghan border.

For a a reasoned Pakistani view on Doval and what it means for that country, see the video below of Najam Sethi, a leading commentator’s,  analysis.

If Pakistan is rattled, there is another leader in the sub continent who has been dead right centre of Doval’s methods – former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who just lost his presidency in the recently concluded elections in Sri Lanka in January to Maithripala Sirisena.

Seen to be playing the ‘China card’ against India, Rajapaksa was seen as a thorn in India’s side. He unexpectedly lost the election and there is enough evidence that India played a role in assisting his departure.

In fact, reports had it that a the Colombo station chief of RAW, India’s external intelligence agency, was asked to leave. Not before, he had, one, worked with Sri Lanka’s usually fractious opposition parties to agree on a joint contender for the election.

Two, facilitated Sirisena to defect from Rajapaksa’s party. And, three, convincing the leader of the opposition and former prime minister Ranil Wickremasinghe not to contest; and thereby consolidate the opposition against Rajapaksa,

A throwback to the era when the CIA would make and unmake governments, most notably, in Latin America. Pure Ajit Doval stuff.

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