Former IB and RAW officer AS Dulat’s memoir reveals his abiding passion for troubled Kashmir

It was in 1991 that Amarjit Singh Dulat was first assigned the job of talking to Kashmiri separatists. As a plethora of people started arriving to meet him, some of them insincere, the wily spook developed a habit of saying directly: “Baat karni hai, toh sachhi baat karo (If you want to speak, speak the truth.)” The one impression that you end up after reading his latest book, A Life in the Shadows: A Memoir is that he is speaking the truth. Or what he knows or believes to be the truth. It is unlikely to win him any popularity awards among his tribe of spooks. But the significance of Dulat’s account goes well beyond that.

Life in the Intelligence Bureau

There are no great secrets spilled out in the book, although there are enough juicy titbits there to keep the reader hooked. You would learn that during the Vajpayee government, Natwar Singh, and Brajesh Mishra kept a line of communication between the Congress and the BJP going. The cold relationship between LK Advani and Mishra, or how Jaswant Singh often cut a lonely figure in that government. Or that the previous King of Bhutan would directly ask for the R&AW chief. As did Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina and the then Sri Lanka President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who would hold personal meetings with the R&AW chief. In her meeting with Dulat, Kumaratunga unrolled a map in front of him and without any preamble, asked “Tell me, where is Prabhakaran?”

The book has numerous anecdotes about Giani Zail Singh when he was the President of India and insisted on taking Dulat as his security officer on all his official trips abroad. Dulat believes that Giani got disillusioned with Indira Gandhi after Operation Blue Star and took out his anger on Rajiv Gandhi. He had made up his mind to resign as President in protest after Blue Star, Dulat reveals, but was convinced by godman Yogi Bhajan against doing so. Formerly a customs officer in India, Bhajan started a flourishing ashram in New Mexico for curing addiction and was recognised by the Akal Takht. He was later disgraced and accused of emotional, sexual and physical abuse in the US. As PM, Rajiv Gandhi banned the entry of Bhajan into India.

It is 1984, the anti-Sikh violence that took place after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, that deliver the most moving paragraph of the book. As head of the IB station in Bhopal, Dulat was heading from Delhi to the capital of Madhya Pradesh in the Tamil Nadu Express. The train was forcibly stopped in Dholpur by anti-Sikh rioters who were shouting “Maaro saalon ko (kill the bastards)” and swarmed the compartments, looking for Sikhs. Dulat somehow escaped unhurt but two Sikhs found on the train were murdered in cold blood.

“I got off the train, shaken to my soul,” writes Dulat. “To be honest with you, I have often thought that this – the autumn of 1984 – was the first time that I began truly thinking of myself in terms of my identity: as a Sikh. If I was anything first, I realised, I was a Sikh. Until all this had happened, I never thought of myself as anything but an Indian. Now, as I watched Sikhs across the north of India being murdered ruthlessly, I shared their fear and helpless anger.”

This was not his first experience of communal violence either. As a young boy in Rawalpindi and Delhi, he was a witness to the horrific madness that had gripped religious communities in north India during India’s partition. Even his father’s official residence, an ICS officer, was not spared after bullets were fired upon it by the local Muslim SHO whose family had been murdered in Pakistan. He witnessed what was to become a routine event during those months, a single passenger slitting the throat of a Tonga driver, who happened to be a Muslim.

His privileged background was of tremendous help as an intelligence official. He dealt with officials, bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians, who came from a similar socio-economic stratum, and this made it easier for him to be accepted as one of their own and be trusted. Dulat’s easy-going and amiable personality was an asset too, although many would have wondered what was hidden behind that charm and good-humoured facade. Nevertheless, he was a successful intelligence official, rising to the top to be the Number 2 in Intelligence Bureau where he spent most of his career before taking over as head of the Research and Analysis Wing. After his retirement, he was brought in as advisor on Kashmir affairs in Vajpayee’s PMO from January 2001 to May 2004.

The Kashmir episode

The book is at its most powerful when talking of Kashmir – it runs throughout the narrative and is the abiding passion of his life. He has understood the Kashmiri psyche and empathises with them, like no other government official. He comes across as not merely a problem-solving official but as a genuine well-wisher of all the people concerned, including separatists, militants, and Pakistanis.

That association began in 1988, when he was first posted to Srinagar. With candour rarely found in books like these, he blames himself for the failures of intelligence that couldn’t prevent Kashmir from going up in flames of separatism in those years. But he is clear-eyed enough to point to bigger mistakes made over the years. He worries that the separatism and militancy in Kashmir is now very different. It is now no longer about joining Pakistan or seeking Azadi but has acquired a radical flavour in response to harsh majoritarian policies of the current regime.

His attempt to get Shabir Shah to fight the 1996 assembly elections, as directed by the government, did not bear fruit. He reveals that in 2002, after the National Conference lost the elections, the Vajpayee PMO conveyed to the Congress party that it didn’t want Mufti as CM and Congress should form the state government instead. Sonia Gandhi didn’t agree. Abdul Ghani Lone makes an appearance, as does Yasin Malik.

But the central character of his Kashmir story, to no one’s surprise, is Farooq Abdullah who, he contends, has been misunderstood and therefore given short shrift by New Delhi. He has seen the senior Abdullah change after 2019, and believes that there can be no forward movement in the Valley without an active role for him. Because of Ajit Doval’s alleged role in creating the PDP, he remains sceptical of Mehbooba Mufti: “We will only know for sure [which side she is on] once elections are held again in Kashmir some day.

Several readers may wonder on the need for a full chapter on Doval, and if it was thought to be included to serve as click-bait and help the book make newspaper headlines. But the book is anyway engrossing, though the Doval chapter does the readability quotient no harm. Kashmir remains the biggest theatre “where Doval’s ideas of muscular power are playing out.” As he (Doval) told Dulat, “There has been enough talking. Now, we are no longer going to talk.”

Despite this official position, Dulat repeatedly stresses on engaging all shades of Kashmiris in a proactive and open conversation. He is relentless and untiring, reminding of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, condemned by the Gods for eternity to repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again once he gets it to the top. In his essay on Sisyphus, Albert Camus saw it as a metaphor for the individual’s persistent struggle against the essential absurdity of life. There can be no place more replete with the essential absurdity of life than today’s Kashmir. In making a sensible and humane case in this theatre of the absurd lies the significance of Dulat and his new book.