BackTiger, Tiger, Burning Raw
If only we had the Khans, those lethal shaven-chested six-packed supermen, working for our secret service!
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Ek Tha Tiger, starring Salman Khan as a globe-trotting Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) agent, is breaking records at the box office faster than a speeding bullet. I haven’t seen Tiger, since I discovered many years ago that watching Salman Khan films gave me attacks of trigeminal neuralgia, the painful facial nerve disorder that the star suffers from. But I did watch the trailer. I can also proudly claim to have seen Agent Vinod, Saif Ali Khan’s turn as one-man RAW army, and almost surely the first Indian film to be shot in Latvia.
The most interesting aspect of both these films, to some people, would be that the heroine (in the case of Tiger, I am relying on reviews) is a Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agent, and RAW and ISI end up working together to save the world (or at least part of it, since our RAW guys are less ambitious than James Bond). Apparently, the chaps heading ISI are as much for Indo-Pak amity as any of the peace activists (almost solely Indian) who used to turn up with lighted candles at the Wagah border on 14 August midnight. It’s only some rogue elements who want strife. Of course, this is the film makers’ attempt to satisfy the large Pakistani population across the world, which loves Bollywood fare. Unfortunately, the Pakistani government seems immune to such subtleties of bilateral trade and diplomacy. Both films have been banned in Pakistan. Maybe ISI doesn’t like others fiddling with its image.
If only we had the Khans, those lethal shaven-chested six-packed supermen, working for our secret service!
Now, RAW suffers from the disadvantages that any intelligence agency does. That is, its successes cannot be made public. And the failures often find a way into the media. However, the media gets this sort of news invariably through leaks, and these leaks invariably come from officials who have their own axes to grind inside their organizations.
Even then, when the leak names the officer involved, it breaches every tenet of the intelligence profession. A few days before Tiger roared onto screens, “official sources" revealed to the media the name of the chief of RAW’s Beijing station, and that he had been called back to India and dismissed. The identity of a very senior officer at an extremely key post, was exposed, and not only that, even his former assignments! This would horrify the chief of any intelligence agency which takes its job seriously, and would certainly result in a massive internal investigation into who could have been the “official sources". One can only hope that such an inquiry is on. Meanwhile, the Chinese must be laughing themselves silly.
Some years ago, senior RAW official Rabinder Singh flew to Kathmandu with his wife, apparently on holiday, walked into the US embassy, and defected. It later came to light that Singh had been suspected of being a CIA mole, and was under surveillance. Obviously, the surveillance was not tight enough.
In the early 1990s, a young Indian Police Service officer friend of mine, had been sent to Delhi for field training at RAW. He was given the address of a secret RAW training school that masqueraded as a business establishment, on a scrap of paper, which he was asked to memorise and destroy. The scales fell from his eyes—they went into free fall—when, as his car neared his destination, he noticed a film poster on a wall, which, under the name of the cinema hall, gave directions: “Next to RAW Building".
Some years later, an uncle of mine took me along to a retirement party being thrown for him by his colleagues in the government department he had spent his life in. I wandered around, since I knew no one, and got chatting with a young man who seemed as lost as I was. He had come down to Delhi from Hyderabad for a couple of job interviews, and been selected by both organizations. “One is the Geological Survey of India (GSI), and the other is RAW," he told me, and asked for impartial advice. “Which do you think has better prospects?" I decided that as a patriotic Indian, it was my duty to convince him to join the GSI, since I didn’t want sensitive national security issues to be passing through the hands of a man who was blabbing even before he had joined RAW. I did my bit, and I sincerely hope that man is today happily absorbed in the geological netherworld rather than the geopolitical.
When a magazine I once worked for did an interview of Dawood Ibrahim, then hiding in plain sight in the United Arab Emirates, the relevant journalist got a call from RAW. When the official learnt that the interview had been done over fax, he was crestfallen, but not for long. “Can you give me his fax number then?" he asked.
And all of us know about the inter-agency rivalries, the bureaucratic games, the misuse of the intelligence agencies’ services by their political masters. About two decades ago, I read a rare interview of R.N. Kao, the man who set up RAW. When asked about the world of espionage as depicted in the novels of John le Carre, he replied in three words: “They have verisimilitude." (I had to look that word up; it means appearance or semblance of truth) I have wondered ever since: was he referring to the authentic spycraft, or the bureaucracy, office politics, the cynical use of innocent human beings in half-baked schemes with total disregard for their lives, that characterize le Carre’s bleak fiction? One will never know.
In the meantime, we can console ourselves with—it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a nuclear missile, No! It’s Salman Khan!
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