As mentioned in the earlier chapter, Kao was unperturbed about the criticism. It is true that after the sudden death of PN Banerjee alias Nath Babu in a Dhaka Hotel in July 1974, R&AW had lost contact with the deep and wide network that Banerjee had built in Bangladesh; but it is equally true that Mujib had been dismissive of warnings given to him by R&AW and conveyed to him personally by Kao at least twice and through an intermediary carrying specific inputs from Mrs Gandhi herself. Raman in fact quotes Kao telling him in Paris, ‘How can the R&AW be held responsible if Mujib won’t take our warnings seriously?’4 Pupul Jayakar, a close friend of Mrs Gandhi, also quotes RNK in her biography of the late Prime Minister, ‘We were walking in the Garden. I told Mujib that we had information about a plot against him. But he was in a state of euphoria. “Nothing can happen to me,” he (Mujib) said. “They are my people.” This was even though I gave him details of the definite information we had received.’5
There was an unexpected fallout after the Mujib assassination in India. Mrs Gandhi, ill-advised by her younger son Sanjay and his cohorts, had declared an internal Emergency in the country after an adverse judgement by the Allahabad High Court declaring her election to Lok Sabha as null and void. Even Kao was unaware of her decision as it was declared all of a sudden. Most Opposition leaders, lawyers and activists were jailed. Mrs Gandhi became paranoid about her own safety. She assumed that the CIA was out to harm her and her family. So, the moment the news of Mujib’s assassination came in, Mrs Gandhi was distraught especially because Mujib’s nine-year-old son, Russell, was ruthlessly killed too. This affected Mrs Gandhi more.
Jayakar writes, ‘I went to her house on the evening of 15 August 1975, to find that a great fear had taken her over. Threshold of her insecurity had dropped precipitously. She told me that the assassination of Mujib was the first event in the plot that would submerge the subcontinent. Mujib was the first to go. The next target, she was convinced, would be herself…all manner of primal fears had been aroused.’ ‘I have disregarded intelligence reports, but I cannot do so any longer,’ Mrs Gandhi told Jayakar. ‘Rahul (her grandson) was about the same age as Mujib’s son. It could be him tomorrow. They would like to destroy my family,’ Mrs Gandhi felt.6 Kao agreed partly. He told Jayakar, years later, ‘Mrs Gandhi was the target of attack, not by agents of foreign powers but by Indian recruits who are likely to act as stooges of foreign powers and she was quite right in her suspicion.’7
The Emergency, which suspended the Constitution and gave a free rein to Sanjay Gandhi and his supporters to run riot in administration, also created problems for RNK, R&AW and Sankaran Nair. Sanjay Gandhi wanted to see all appointment files, an unconstitutional act in itself since he did not hold any official position in the government.
Just before the proclamation of the Emergency, Mrs Gandhi mentioned to RNK that she wanted to appoint his number two (Nair) as Director, IB. Kao told her that twice previously Nair had refused that post since he was happy being in R&AW. But Mrs Gandhi stuck to her guns. Nair was appointed as DIB, days before the Emergency was imposed. Sanjay Gandhi, who had started going through all the files with the help of Mrs Gandhi’s Personal Assistant, RK Dhawan, posed a question: Will the DIB-designate be loyal and carry out all directions implicitly and unquestioningly? Nair wrote: ‘Late in the evening, I was summoned to the PM’s residence. I refused to go as I had seen her only in office and that too seldom, since she mostly dealt with Ramji. Later, I learnt that Sanjay was extremely annoyed at my refusal to turn up. He had wanted to make sure of my loyalty and pliability, since he was on the verge of getting his mother to declare the Emergency. He took my file to the PM and had her cancel my promotion to DIB. The next day Ramji told me that he was not sure whether to console with me or congratulate me. I said congratulations were in order.’8
Throughout the Emergency period, RNK and Nair kept the organisation away from the caucus that had come to rule India in Mrs Gandhi’s name, but they could not escape being blamed when the next government came, sweeping Mrs Gandhi aside, electorally. In March 1977, Morarji Desai, became the Prime Minister of the newly-elected Janata Party government. For R&AW and especially RNK, it was the beginning of difficult times.
Senior Ministers in the Janata Party government and the Prime Minister himself had pre-conceived ideas about R&AW. They believed that the organisation was used as a private militia by Mrs Gandhi. Kao was to become the first victim of this mistaken belief.
As Nair writes, ‘After Morarji Desai became the Prime Minister, he was bent on getting rid of Kao, as head of what he considered R&AW to be Mrs Gandhi’s Gestapo. He tried to humiliate Kao every time he went to see him, by mentioning that he had no trust in him. On the third occasion, Kao said he would like to retire prematurely and quit his office. Morarji identified me too, as one of Mrs Gandhi’s agents in R&AW. But the Cabinet Secretary, persuaded him to promote me as Secretary R&AW by pointing out that I was one of the founding fathers of the Department. Actually, I was at best, the midwife at the birth of our R&AW.’9
But Nair too resigned in less than three months on a matter of principle. The new government wanted to re-designate the Head of R&AW as Director, R&AW instead of Secretary, R&AW. Nair felt this would reduce the importance and influence of the organisation and its chief. Although the Morarji Desai PMO tried to persuade him not to resign, and assured Nair that only the designation was being changed, and that the power and status would remain the same, Nair was not convinced.
With the abrupt departure of the founding fathers, as it were, in close succession, the R&AW in its 10th year of existence, suddenly felt orphaned. ‘The entire officer class off the R&AW was saddened by the departure of Shankar Nair. He was a legendary operational officer—totally professional and apolitical, who kept away from all politicians. He was nobody’s man. He was a leading expert on the intelligence community of Pakistan and the rest of the Islamic world,’ Raman has noted in his book.10
However, R&AW was lucky that Kao had groomed others down the line who could become leaders in their own right. One of them was NF Suntook, a naval officer, a policeman, an administrator-turned-spook. Suntook had earlier been shifted to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) from the R&AW by Mrs Gandhi. R&AW was fortunate to have Suntook, as the new chief.
A Parsi from Bombay, Suntook, was initially an emergency commissioned officer in the Indian Navy. After a short stint there, he joined the IPS, shifted to the now defunct Indian Frontier Administrative Service (IFAS)—meant to train and groom administrators for India’s northeast—before Kao, who had known about his excellent work in the tribal areas of the north-east persuaded him to join the R&AW at its inception. RNK had made Suntook in-charge of the organisation’s Africa Division. He excelled in his work and rose to become number 3 in the organisation before he was deputed to the JIC.
Prime Minister Desai, who had known Suntook in Bombay Police when he was the chief minister of that state, had made a wise choice. Suntook not only steadied the ship but also shielded R&AW from the vendetta that some of the ministers wanted to wreak on the organisation. Old-timers remember Suntook as a low-profile but very effective leader, discreet and polite to a fault. ‘Suntook was a man of many endearing qualities. He never bragged about himself … he never talked ill of predecessors … there was nothing mean about him … he could have ingratiated himself with Morarji Desai by carrying tales about Kao and Indira Gandhi to him or let himself be used by the new government to witch-hunt Kao or Indira Gandhi or both … he maintained his personal loyalty to Kao and protected him from possible acts of humiliation …’ B. Raman, then still a serving R&AW officer remembers.11
Not that Kao needed protection. Two important ministers in the Morarji government—Home Minister Charan Singh and External Affairs Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee—had a negative impression about Kao when they took office; but first Charan Singh and then Vajpayee reversed their opinion after a thorough enquiry by the Home Ministry convinced them that Kao had no role to play in the excesses comm
itted during the Emergency. Prime Minister Desai nevertheless imposed a 50 per cent budget cut on the R&AW but Suntook took it in his stride and ran a tight ship.
Kao, reserved and reticent by nature, withdrew from the limelight thrust upon him but he was not out of touch or without influence.
Sometime in 1977, Suntook came to know that attempts were being made in some quarters of the MEA bureaucracy to let India join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was against India’s interest. Suntook fell back on Kao for help. As it happened, Suntook knew that Dr Homi Sethna, an eminent nuclear scientist based in Bombay, was the only person whose advice Prime Minister Desai would possibly agree to. And the only person who could persuade Dr Sethna to talk to Desai was RNK. Kao and Sethna had worked closely in the late 1960s and early 1970s, throughout Mrs Gandhi’s tenure as prime minister, and had struck a great friendship and had high professional respect for one another.
Kao, master at choosing the right person for the right job, sent for Balachandran, who, as mentioned elsewhere in the book, had joined the R&AW in 1975. Kao had noticed his work; he knew that Balachandran during his stint in Maharashtra Police had managed Dr Sethna’s security, in the wake of the Pokhran-I period and knew the nuclear scientist well. ‘So I was—a relative fresher—sent to Bombay to request Dr Sethna to dissuade the Janata Government from signing the NPT,’ Balachandran recounted to me in a conversation in July 2019 at his lovely flat in Mumbai. What transpired between the nuclear scientist and the prime minister is not known but the fact is India did not succumb to international pressure to sign the NPT. And the rest is history. India never signed the NPT. Suntook, Kao and Sethna had saved India from a potential catastrophe. Had India signed the NPT, there would have been no Pokhran II, no nuclear weapons and no nuclear deal with the United States.
Morarji Desai, as prime minister, finally realised the importance of R&AW and strategic Intelligence it provided. But by the time he could start using its expertise, Morarji was ousted after dissensions in the government. However, Desai inflicted a major damage to India’s national interest, even if inadvertently.
The story actually goes back to the early 1970s—after the dismemberment of Pakistan—when R&AW picked up fragments of information about Pakistan’s attempt to build what it called an ‘Islamic bomb’. Kao, in the early years of R&AW, had already set up a Science and Technology Division. By 1977, K ‘Sandy’ Santhanam, who had joined the R&AW from the Atomic Energy Commission, had concluded, based on several inputs and imagery analysis, that Pakistan was pursuing a military nuclear programme. He was the first to assess that Pakistan had built a uranium enrichment plant at Kahuta. Santhanam and his team kept a close watch on the entire procurement process. Suntook briefed Desai about the development in Pakistan.
The Prime Minister however let it slip in one of his occasional conversations with General Zia-ul-Haq—who had taken over in 1977 as a military dictator after a coup and hanging Bhutto—that India knew of its clandestine nuclear programme. The surprise was lost. Indiscreet political leaders are indeed a bane of intelligence agencies.
Final Innings
Mrs Indira Gandhi, taking advantage of infighting in the Janata Party and its over-ambitious leaders, stormed back to power, and once again became Prime Minister in 1980. Despite a vindictive streak that her son and she displayed in replacing top officials in agencies such as the CBI and IB, she did not remove Suntook as R&AW chief. It was as much a tribute to Suntook’s personality and leadership style as his closeness to Kao, who was once again back in favour. Mrs Gandhi had started consulting RNK—albeit informally—immediately after becoming Prime Minister again, but it was not until 1981 that she appointed him formally as Senior Adviser in the Cabinet Secretariat. Kao made sure that Suntook, who had shielded him from a witch hunt in the Janata Party regime, continued as R&AW Chief. However, according to Raman, neither RNK nor Suntook, could prevent four senior officers of the organisations from being victimised for perceived and imaginary sins of commission and omission.
According to Balachandran, Mrs Gandhi appointed Kao as Senior Adviser after ACN Nambiar—journalist, freedom fighter, close friend and associate of Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose—advised her in 1981 during their meeting in Zurich to do so. Nambiar, who doted on Mrs Gandhi, was worried about her security and wanted Kao back as her adviser. Balachandran, then posted in Paris, was specifically instructed to look after Nambiar—‘Nanu’ to everyone—and make sure he was comfortable in the twilight of his life.12
Kao was back on a salary of Re 1 (see photo of his appointment letter). It helped that Suntook was still heading the R&AW. Their rapport was intact. After taking over as Senior Adviser, Kao, resumed some of the half-done tasks during his tenure as the founding Chief of R&AW. The first was to revive RAS. To get the recruitment right, Kao asked Sankaran Nair, his former number two to recommend how to fix the inter-se seniority of officers from different services and the direct recruits in the RAS. Nair’s recommendations were accepted and the RAS was reconstituted.
The second important decision Kao took was to constitute the Policy and Research Staff (PRS), which can rightly be called the forerunner to the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), formed in 1999. Three R&AW officers and one Indian Foreign Service Officer worked in PRS to give crucial inputs to the R&AW Chief and the Prime Minister.
One of the many security challenges that stared India in the face after Mrs Gandhi returned to power was the rising discontentment in Punjab fuelled by the pro-Khalistani elements. It did not help that Mrs Gandhi’s own Home Minister, Zail Singh, was playing games with the Punjab problem. Aware of the potential danger it posed to India, Kao advised Mrs Gandhi to initiate dialogue with the saner elements among the Punjab leadership but despite several rounds of talks at the political level between Rajiv Gandhi and his associates and Akali Dal leadership on the one hand, and Kao and some Khalistani elements abroad, on the other, the Punjab problem seemed intractable.
Eventually, Mrs Gandhi ordered the army into the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, triggering widespread anger among Sikhs worldwide—even among the moderate ones. She instantly became a target of the extremist elements in the Khalistani movement. Kao, aware of the potential danger, tried to strengthen her security. Sikh bodyguards in her security detail were removed; Kao ordered an ambulance to be part of her convoy and also requested her to wear a bullet proof vest. Inexplicably however, the instructions that no Sikh bodyguard should be part of her inner security ring, were disregarded. On 31 October 1984, two of her Sikh bodyguards shot Mrs Gandhi in her house, taking revenge for what they believed was her unpardonable act of sending the army into the Golden Temple and the desecration of the Akal Takht.
Mrs Gandhi’s brutal end was a big blow to Kao personally and professionally. RNK was, in fact, not in India the day Mrs Gandhi was killed. He was in Beijing—under Mrs Gandhi’s instructions—for a making secret overtures to the Chinese leadership in an attempt to normalise the relationship between India and China. When the Chinese heard of the assassination, they offered to place a special plane at Kao’s disposal for him to reach India as soon as possible. RNK’s standing with the Chinese enabled him to reach Hong Kong in the special aircraft and from there travel in a commercial flight to Delhi.
Kao must have returned to India a devastated man. He had failed to protect Mrs Gandhi—whom he had known closely for over three decades, initially as Nehru’s daughter, and later, as a prime minister who did not hesitate to take hard decisions—and, his own reputation as an intelligence Czar. But true to his style, RNK never spoke or wrote about his own feelings. He quietly faded away, leading a fully retired life, but never out of touch with contemporary issues in the field of intelligence as his correspondence with Balachandran in later years—1998 to 2000—showed. In one of the letters, RNK wrote to Balachandran on the need for better coordination and analysis, ‘…It is not enough either for the IB or the R&AW to send intelligence reports to the governmen
t. Someone with adequate experience has to interpret these reports to the government. In 1981, before I was appointed in the Cabinet Secretariat as Senior Adviser, in briefing me, the late Mrs Indira Gandhi, had said to me, amongst other things, that the intelligence organisations by themselves “did not see the wood for the trees”. I made a small beginning to remove this deficiency, but other events intervened, and the whole venture was aborted.’
The setback in his second innings notwithstanding, Rameshwar Nath Kao will forever be remembered as a colossus in the world of Indian intelligence, more an institutional builder than an operative, more of a spymaster than a spy. And a gentleman to the core.
1 B. Raman, The Kaoboys of the R&AW (New Delhi: Lancer Publications, 2007).
2 Ibid.
3 K. Sankaran Nair, Inside IB and RAW (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2019).
4 Ibid.
5 Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: A Biography (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992).
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 K. Sankaran Nair, Inside IB and RAW (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2019).
9 Ibid.
10 B. Raman, The Kaoboys of the R&AW (New Delhi: Lancer Publications, 2007).
11 Ibid.
12 Vappala Balachandran, A Life in Shadow: The Secret Story of ACN Nambiar, A Forgotten Anti-colonial Warrior (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2016).
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