Introduction 

“It’s not a shooting war anymore, George. That’s the trouble. It’s grey. Half-angels fighting half-devils. No one knows where the lines are. No bang-bangs.”

Perhaps Connie Sachs—the eccentric intelligence analyst and Soviet expert from British spy writer John Le Carré’s 1970s oeuvre, and the source of the above observation—would see vignettes of her era in our own. Yet despite the echoes of moral greyness that contours much of modern geopolitics, much has also changed. Today, data pervades nearly every aspect of daily life. Normative divisions between human and state security are actively erased. The bipolarity of the Cold War has, in the interceding half-century, given way twice: first to the so-called ‘unipolarity’ enjoyed by the United States following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and now, to our present-day ‘unbalanced multipolarity’. And perhaps as a combined result of all three aspects, the primary custodians of global intelligence—Connie Sachs’ own profession—no longer operate solely from Langley, Whitehall, or Yasenevo, but also from Zhongnanhai, Herzliya, and indeed, South Block.

This edited work is an attempt to reflect some of these changes, particularly in view of the multipolar world order that we now inhabit. It is the first instalment in a three-part series that will be published by the Observer Research Foundation, exploring the role that India, with its growing heft, plays within the global intelligence landscape of the 2020s. The three reports in the series will examine, respectively, Indian intelligence history and culture, contemporary challenges and opportunities for Indian intelligence, and its future.

This volume outlines the historical and cultural moorings of Indian intelligence through a bifurcated assessment of the pre-modern era (from antiquity to the 19^th century) and the modern era (from the 19^th century to the 1990s).

Part One opens with Kajari Kamal’s examination of “The Cultural Origins of Indian Intelligence”. The article provides an illuminating account of India’s rich history and culture of intelligence discourse, from Vedic roots, to the origins of its intelligence culture in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the operationalisation of these varied influences in Kautilyan assessments of intelligence as indispensable to statecraft and governance.

Uttara Sahasrabuddhe follows with a discussion on “Asymmetric Warfare and Deception Under the Marathas”. Providing new insights into the Marathas’ successful use of what we would today refer to as ‘special operations’ against a far larger military power—the Mughal Empire—in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, Sahasrabuddhe centres speed, deception, and the overlapping intelligence and governance structures developed by the Maratha Empires during their territorial expansion as key to this strategy.

Part Two opens with Jyoti Atwal’s essay, “Colonial Intelligence: The Raj and the Revolutionary Movement”. Burrowing into the roots of modern India’s intelligence structures, Atwal studies the British Raj’s use of consolidated intelligence agencies such as the fledgling Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Indian Political Intelligence to target the Independence movement and especially the revolutionary organisations operating both within India and overseas.

DP Chaya then provides a fascinating account of postcolonial India’s approach to intelligence in his essay, “Adrift, not Allied: The Intelligence Bureau and Indian Foreign Policymaking (1947-1968)”. In its first two decades of independence, India’s foreign intelligence was conducted by its domestic intelligence agency, the IB. Chaya dissects the strain caused by the Nehru government’s suspicion of intelligence, and the strategic demands of a newly independent India that necessitated its development to provide an incisive account of the troubled evolution of Indian intelligence in the first two decades post-1947.

The volume closes with Prem Mahadevan’s work on “The Changing Realities and Perceptions of R&AW”. The establishment of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) as India’s foreign intelligence service in the late 1960s was accompanied by varied perceptions of its mandate. Mahadevan expands on these changing perceptions, discussing aspects such as the R&AW’s culture of militarism, its operations along the Sino-Indian frontier, and the nature of its liaison arrangements with foreign services.

We are immensely grateful to our writers for their stellar contributions to this publication. At a time when India’s global profile is on the rise, and the world looks to new Delhi as a strategic alternative, discourse about our intelligence capacities as a component of national power must be actively encouraged. Through this volume, we hope to encourage this debate across the country’s strategic community.

Read the report here.

All views expressed in this publication are solely those of the authors, and do not represent the Observer Research Foundation, either in its entirety or its officials and personnel.

Harsh V. Pant is Vice President, ORF. 

Archishman Ray Goswami is Non-Resident Junior Fellow, ORF, and a DPhil International Relations candidate at the University of Oxford.

• International Affairs
• Defence and Security
• Internal Security
• India
• india foreign intelligence
• indian intelligence agency
• intelligence bureau
• intelligence in national security
• r&aw
• raw formation

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