Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part conversation with Paul McGarr. Read the first part here.
Intelligence plays a critical role in shaping security and politics in South Asia. On January 8, South Asian Voices spoke with Dr. Paul McGarr about the past and present of intelligence in the region; the second part of the conversation covered the development of intelligence architectures and cultures in independent India and Pakistan, as well as the growing importance of intelligence amid heightened India-Pakistan tensions. Dr. McGarr is Lecturer in Intelligence Studies at King’s College London, an expert on intelligence outside the Anglosphere, and the author of Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India’s Secret Cold War and The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965.
Why was India reluctant to pursue overseas clandestine operations in the first decades after independence? What motivated the establishment of India’s Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW)?
Multiple factors come into play here. One, there’s a philosophical reluctance to engage with intelligence generally, and particularly with covert action. Because of his experience at the hands of colonial intelligence, Jawaharlal Nehru is often quite cynical about intelligence, and also morally challenged by it. If you look at his selected writings in the 1950s and 1960s, he’s a tough customer for these intelligence agencies. Partly, that’s because he says, “look, I know you guys fabricate things. I know you guys make things up. I know you misreport, because I’ve experienced it firsthand. I’ve been the victim. I’ve been on the other side of what intelligence agencies do. So, I know that sometimes you’re great and you get things right, but often you don’t.”
He’s a hard taskmaster: he pragmatically recognizes that India’s security concerns, particularly vis-a-vis Pakistan and China, necessitate an effective intelligence service. He’s really disappointed in 1962, for example, that Indian intelligence fails to anticipate the Chinese attack. It reinforces the need for good intelligence when you’re surrounded by adversaries that have hostile intentions against you.
But Nehru is also conflicted because he doesn’t fundamentally like the idea of intelligence. He’s constantly challenging the Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB), for example, not to spy on Indian citizens. He’s worried about a creeping intelligence and security state, which is fundamentally anti-democratic, which is problematic to him. Covert action epitomizes that for Nehru. So, he understands the need to spy, although he’s not particularly comfortable with it. He understands the need to collect intelligence, but he’s much less comfortable with covert action, particularly when it’s to undermine other countries or even Indian domestic politics. So, he’s sort of reluctant to sanction the IB to carry out those sorts of operations on a moral-philosophical basis.
That’s also driven by what he sees in the developing world. He sees, for example, what happens in Guatemala. He sees that use of covert action to undermine a legitimate political project in various countries and finds that quite challenging. So, at the very pinnacle of the Indian state, there’s a sort of aversion to covert action.
Partly, it’s also to do with pragmatism and resources. After Partition in 1947, India is—economically, politically, and strategically—extremely stretched. So, the priority is not, in Nehru’s mind, to invest resources and manpower in covert action.
To him, it seems like a luxury that India cannot afford in the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s. There’s this sense in which India’s got so many pressing domestic security threats, and in its immediate neighborhood, that the prospect of mounting covert action elsewhere just seems fanciful to Nehru: “we haven’t got the resources, the capacity, or the intelligence infrastructure to play that sort of game, so let’s not play it.”
A classic example is that India doesn’t post any intelligence officers in Beijing until the late 1950s. Nehru goes to the intelligence group and says, “maybe we should put some intelligence officers into the Beijing embassy.” They say, “actually, we haven’t got many Chinese speakers. I think we’ve got one or two, and we don’t really know much about China.” So, there’s a sense of insularity as well, which is problematic for India in terms of having the capacity to mount covert action abroad. So there’s an intellectual-philosophical reluctance and also a resource issue in terms of what India is willing to do.
“Intelligence failures always promote intelligence reform. One of the reasons R&AW is formed in September 1968 under Indira Gandhi is off the back of perceived intelligence failures by the Indian intelligence community in 1962 in the Sino-Indian War and in the 1965 war with Pakistan.”
But that does change when we get to the 1960s, particularly after the wars of the 1960s—intelligence failures always promote intelligence reform. One of the reasons R&AW is formed in September 1968 under Indira Gandhi is off the back of perceived intelligence failures by the Indian intelligence community in 1962 in the Sino-Indian War and in the 1965 war with Pakistan. The extent to which intelligence hasn’t performed as the government expected it to, or hasn’t given the forewarning or the strategic advantage on the battlefield that it hoped to have, leads to this notion that we need to reform intelligence. That leads to the bifurcation of the IB into a domestic service and a foreign service. Up until that point, the IB had been a combined domestic and foreign intelligence service, but with very little emphasis or resources placed on the foreign and much more on the domestic. That’s seen as a mistake, so R&AW is formed in 1968 to try and correct that imbalance and for India to get much better at scanning the horizon to see what China and Pakistan are doing as a strategic defensive measure.
I think it’s also interesting that it comes in 1968. The timing is significant. Nehru dies in May 1964. Nehru had never really been comfortable with intelligence, but he’s gone by that point. Indira Gandhi is in power by 1968, and she has a much more pragmatic approach to intelligence. She’s willing to contemplate intelligence reform in ways perhaps Nehru was not.
Also, Gandhi’s quite keen, particularly after the events of 1966, when she has to deal with a syndicate and people in Indian politics who are trying to undermine her, both because of her gender and her experience, and she has to fight for political survival. I think she sees intelligence as a way of consolidating her power bureaucratically. It’s no accident that R&AW reports through the cabinet secretariat directly into the Indian prime minister and the IB before that reported through the home ministry to the home minister. So, it’s a bit of a power grab by Gandhi, to some extent, to have this new powerful intelligence organization that’s going to be the apex of Indian intelligence, and it will be a service that she controls directly. It’s a real means of consolidating her domestic and foreign policy power base. There’s the pragmatic security reason for R&AW coming into place in 1968, but I think there’s a more complicated domestic political reason related to Indira Gandhi as well.
How would you compare and contrast the development of Indian and Pakistani intelligence, including factors like intelligence culture, relationship to political leadership, operational scope, etc.? How would you extrapolate those trajectories to the present day?
It’s quite an interesting story. Obviously, they started from a common origin: both Pakistani and Indian intelligence are descended from colonial British intelligence. In the colonial Intelligence Bureau, they followed a very police-driven approach to intelligence practice, and are especially focused on suppressing nationalism. In 1947, as Partition bifurcates everything in India economically, politically, and bureaucratically, this gets bifurcated into the Intelligence Bureau for Pakistan and the Intelligence Bureau for India. That then leads to them going along separate paths, but, up until that point, it’s a very similar path.
The biggest shift, perhaps, is that India continues to have intelligence as a domestic service which is governed by politicians, so it becomes something that is under relatively strong political control. The Indian IB is overseen by the Home Minister, initially Sardar Patel, and has strong domestic political oversight by elected politicians.
Furthermore, it’s really based on a police service, because the colonial intelligence service in India was essentially a glorified police service. That continues to be the case in India. Indeed, one of the reasons R&AW was created in 1968 is that Indira Gandhi believes she’s got a police service in the IB, rather than an effective modern intelligence service. She’s constantly complaining that these are just policemen running around pretending to be intelligence officers, and they’re not a modern intelligence service. Most intelligence officers are seconded to the Indian IB from the police service, and it becomes very domestic-focused and under quite strong political control.
Pakistan follows a very different path. Interestingly, one of the architects of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), its apex intelligence service, is the Australian military officer Bill Cawthorn, who is also instrumental in the development of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. So, it has that colonial influence, but it has a much stronger military flavor. There aren’t military officers guiding and shaping Indian intelligence after 1947, but in Pakistan, there are Western intelligence officers like Bill Cawthorn guiding the Pakistani military to take control of the intelligence architecture and community in Pakistan.
There are reasons for that, I think: because Pakistan feels that India might be an irredentist state, that Pakistan is under immediate security threat with the war in Kashmir almost immediately. So, there’s a sense that it’s really the military that have to take charge of intelligence, because the greatest threat to Pakistan is going to come from India, and that the need to safeguard the Pakistani state is a military project, which requires strong military intelligence.
After 1947, Nehru is much more concerned about using his intelligence arm to combat communism in Kerala, Telangana, and elsewhere, and communalism as well, which he saw as a big threat to the Indian state.
Ultimately, different threats lead to different intelligence services. That does have significant implications later down the line, because elected Pakistani politicians since 1947 always struggled to maintain any sort of semblance of control or authority over the Pakistani army and ISI. When Benazir Bhutto tried to assert greater control of ISI, that ended badly for her. Imran Khan also tried to clip the wings of ISI, and that did not go very well for Imran Khan. So, there are periodic incidents where Pakistani politicians have tried to push back, but they have very little success in doing so.
There were different approaches driven by different threats perceived by India and Pakistan, and these have developed different cultures now as well. The Indian intelligence architecture still has very little input from the Indian military; it remains governed by civilian politicians and civilian intelligence officers. India has its own military Joint Intelligence Committee, which controls military intelligence, but it is by no means the most powerful element in intelligence terms within the Indian state and Indian intelligence architecture—whereas exactly the reverse is true in Pakistan.
In recent years, Indian intelligence appears to have shifted toward the more assertive use of covert action, leading to high-profile incidents in countries like the United States, Canada, and Pakistan. How would you characterize this shift? What may be motivating it?
This has been one of the fundamental inflection points in Indian intelligence, which came with the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014. Under people like former PM Manmohan Singh, who was in power from 2004 to 2014, India was quite careful about using covert action. That’s not to say that India didn’t use covert action outside of its local and regional domain, it did. It was active in Ghana and South Africa at certain points in time, but for quite discrete, time limited projects.
But after 2014, Modi certainly, and I think Ajit Doval, Modi’s National Security Advisor, as well, felt that India hadn’t used covert action in a way that was helpful for the Indian state and for wider Indian strategic interests, both in the region and beyond. Doval was the head of the IB briefly before becoming NSA under Modi, but he writes quite prolifically when he’s not in power. In his writings from around 2011 or 2012, he argues that India should become much more active in covert action, take many more risks, engage in kinetic activity to advance its national interests using covert action in ways it hasn’t done before. He points to the United States, and to a state like Israel, and says, “this can work for nation states, if they use covert action effectively.” These writings were almost a preview of what was to happen under Modi.
I think Modi also, to some extent, likes the idea of being represented as a strong man and the image of an assertive Hindu nationalism. So, this shift plays into that notion of, “we are going to take the fight to our enemies, both domestically and abroad, and covert action enables us to do that short of engaging in full-scale conflict.” From 2014, there’s a much higher risk appetite on the part of the Indian state to engage in kinetic covert actions, both at home and on a much wider geographical scale as well, in the United States, in Canada, or elsewhere.
But I think there has been a miscalculation in how that might play out. Doval’s statements claimed that there’s a really low risk involved in these sorts of operations. I think the failed assassination of Pannun in the United States and the successful assassination of Nijjar in Canada showed it’s actually much more complicated terrain to engage in.
It doesn’t just come down to the kinetic action, whether it’s successful or unsuccessful. There was a very different reaction from the Biden administration in the United States and the Trudeau administration in Canada. The Biden administration tended to play the incident down and follow a legalistic route; the Pannun case is now going through the courts in New York. Some have said that’s because the United States, at that point, wanted to use India as a strategic counterbalance to China, so it didn’t want to disrupt that relationship.
But former Prime Minister Trudeau stands up in the Canadian parliament and takes exactly the opposite approach, literally denouncing India from the floor of the Canadian parliament, which was a highly incendiary development. Indian diplomats were expelled from Ottawa and Canadian diplomats were expelled from Delhi, and it caused serious damage to the relationship between India and Canada. Some have pointed to the domestic politics around that, because of the Sikh population in marginal constituencies in Canada and how that plays with Trudeau, and there have been a succession of ministers in the Canadian government with Sikh heritage. So, it’s a much bigger political issue in Canada than it is in the United States.
These covert actions trying to eliminate, for want of a better word, a couple of activists involved with the Khalistani movement appear quite small scale and high risk compared to the diplomatic and strategic fallout. But there does appear to be a willingness on the part of the Indian state under Modi to run those risks. He’s likely calculating that this will all blow over and it won’t be too much of an issue. And the new Canadian PM Carney has tried to repair the relationship with India to some extent.
But I think the legacy of these actions lingers in multiple ways, not least because it damages the global reputation of Indian intelligence. Up until this point, R&AW has had a relatively good reputation as being an effective, efficient, and competent intelligence service. Then, you look at what happened in the United States and Canada, and lots of stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, most recently, just laying bare a catalogue of incompetence, mismanagement, and clumsy tradecraft where the links back to Amit Shah, the Indian government, and the Bishnoi gang have been exposed. The diplomatic blowback from these sorts of operations can be really substantial for relatively low reward.
So, it’s an interesting inflection point, where India under Modi was convinced that more assertive covert action made a lot of sense in strategic terms. I’m not sure that’s been validated by events as they panned out.
Let’s end by looking ahead: amid heightened India-Pakistan tensions following the May 2025 crisis, what role do you foresee intelligence playing in South Asian security in the coming years?
I think it’s likely to play an increasingly important role for three reasons. One of them is deterrence. The better intelligence can get at attributing state-driven support for sub-state actors in terrorism, the more intelligence can act as a means of deterring such attacks. India was frustrated because it didn’t seem to win the public relations argument in the United States about definitively proving that Pakistan was linked to the attack in Pahalgam and state-sponsored terrorism more generally. What to Indians seemed glaringly obvious seemed a much more ambiguous state of affairs to the international community. I think there will be pressure on India particularly to make sure that they are much better at attribution.
Importantly, attribution comes down to not only proving that point but proving it in a timeframe that makes it effective in the international community. A huge amount of work was done after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, for example, which forensically traced the links to the Pakistani state and elements within ISI, but it took a huge amount of time to do it. The news cycle had moved on at that point, so very few people outside of South Asia were engaged by that story. Attribution needs to be immediate, in that sense.
“The better intelligence can get at attributing state-driven support for sub-state actors in terrorism, the more intelligence can act as a means of deterring such attacks.”
One of the key things that’s also going to be important is intelligence diplomacy. Both India and Pakistan have a rich history of intelligence diplomacy. One example that I mentioned in the book was about R.N. Kao—who at this point is head of Indian intelligence and goes on to be first head of R&AW—who performs a really important diplomatic role for India, particularly with China in the 1950s, acting as a sort of back-channel conduit between the Indian government and the Chinese government at a time when relations are strained.
Indian intelligence is going to be an important mediator between what happens with India and not only Pakistan, but also perhaps China as well. Ajit Doval has been prominent in this throughout his career. When both states take a maximalist approach at the political level, it leaves very little room for open diplomatic negotiation or constructive dialogue. Intelligence will increasingly play an important part in back-channel diplomacy in such an environment.
The other thing which will be important, which is not so historical, is disinformation. I was really struck by, for example, the extent to which the information space was really a critical part of the May 2025 conflict. I was fortunate to go to the Indian Military History Festival in New Delhi in November of last year, and the Indian chief of defense staff was talking about Operation Sindoor. Remarkably, in that fifteen- or twenty-minute speech, he devoted probably ten or twelve minutes of it to disinformation operations and management of the media space. I can’t conceive of that happening five or ten years ago. He was discussing the fact that, just from a military perspective, something like 15 percent of the military effort during Sindoor on the Indian side was devoted to debunking disinformation and managing the information space, because lots of things were going on in South Asian social media: all sorts of stories were appearing, deepfakes were being recycled.
What that conflict showed was that actually neither side really managed to dominate the information space in the way that they would have wanted to. I think intelligence agencies on both sides are going to be very interested in how they use social media and those communication spaces to try and win the information war. That’s going to be an interesting development as we go through the next few years.
Views expressed are the interviewee’s own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of South Asian Voices, the Stimson Center, or our supporters.
Also Read: SAV Q&A with Paul McGarr: Cold War Intelligence in South Asia
***
Image 1: Indira Gandhi via Facebook
