Overawed by RAWR. Sreekumar By Asoka Raina Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1981, pp. 114, Rs. 35.00 VOLUME V NUMBER 3 November/December 1980 The
introductory chapter of this book starts with a comparison—no other intelligence organization has been
subjected to such tumultous criticism as RAW in such a short span of its
existence. Having thus elevated his subject, the author states the purpose: ‘A
flood of 'misinformation' has poured out to the public ... giving a distorted
picture.’ So Asoka Raina, who pursued a man-eater in the Garhwal hills and
trekked in the Chambal ravines to meet the dacoits, sets out, this time, to inform the public the
truth about RAW.
RAW is indeed tumultous. In the melee of slapping and counter-slapping,
and noise of stringent actions, successes seem a far cry. ‘No government, not
even our own (Why, is
our government a no-government?), will tolerate for long a costly
agency that has more failures than successes’. Right now, men of India's
Foreign Intelligence Agency, of the Cabinet Secretariat, are busy shouting
slogans, besides dharna, gherao and satyagraha.
The author says that he could not have put more aptly
what his ten-year old son remarked to a friend: ‘My father is writing
about RAW. It is
a spy story which the adults don't seem to understand and he is trying to make them see what it is all
about.’ It's generation gap. Adults just do not seem to understand what kids
are upto.
Through Sun Tzu whose ‘Principles of War’ is regarded
the earliest document on war and espionage, and Kautilya's Arthasasthra, Raina
puts us on to the ‘Beginning’ of RAW: Ghana-returned Kao and Sankaran Nair
build it all up from scratch. Then we have the special ops and other stories.
The emergence of Bangladesh is portrayed
lavishly, the role of RA W in it
being also lavish (the people of that country seem to have had no role). Grand
success story, that.
While history goes thus, the only relief for the yawning
'public' comes in the
form of a comic interlude, the Morarji-Sankaran Nair confrontation: With
saintly Desai's 'nothing to do with immoral things' attitude (though his
RAW-arranged meeting with Moshe Dayan was strictly moral) and the need for
India's Foreign Intelligence Agency being a subject quite 'phoren' to the moral
visionary, Nair's was an exercise in futility,
trying to drive home such a point.
Raina is so desperate to convince the reader about RAW's
non-involvement in internal
espionage that he frantically quotes ... Table of Contents >> |