It is a sad day for all of us who have known Bahukutumbi Raman for some years now. He passed away yesterday after valiantly fighting Cancer. A bachelor, his only passion was intelligence. To me he was Mr Intelligence - the very best in intelligence community. He had phenomenal memory and prodigious energy. His blogs and twitter avidly read the world over by analysts provided unusual insights. I reproduce here a moving write up on who Raman was in The Hindu (courtesy: The Hindu)
A Kao-boy till the end
Special Correspondent
The Hindu
B.
Raman, one of India’s first external intelligence agents, died here on
Sunday after a battle with cancer. He was 77. Raman served for 26 years
in the Research and Analysis wing, right from the day it was carved out
of the Intelligence Bureau in September 1968 on Indira Gandhi’s orders,
until his retirement in 1994.
An IPS officer
of the 1961 Madhya Pradesh cadre, Raman was on deputation to the
Intelligence Bureau when he was handpicked by Rameshwar Nath Kao to join
R&AW, set up in the aftermath of the wars with China and Pakistan.
He retired as
Additional Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat. In the last six years
of his career, he headed R&AW’s counter-terrorism unit. Throughout
his career, he was, in his own words, known “as a man with a poker face.
As someone who showed no emotion or passion on his face.”
The first
assignment that Kao, who headed R&AW, gave him was to be in charge
of the agency’s Burma branch. He was there for five years handling
analysis as well as clandestine operations, an early phase in his career
that earned him the sobriquet ‘Burma Raman’.
In his book, The Kao-boys of R&AW – Down Memory Lane (2007),
Raman gave a detailed account of the external intelligence agency’s
work that contributed to the liberation of Bangladesh. Kao had given the
agency’s operatives two priority tasks — “to strengthen its capability
for the collection of intelligence about Pakistan and China and for
covert action in East Pakistan.”
In a rare
foray by a “spook” into writing about field operations, Raman disclosed
that providing intelligence to policy makers and the armed forces, to
train Bengali freedom fighters in clandestine camps, to network with
Bengali public servants from East Pakistan posted in West Pakistan and
in Pakistan’s diplomatic missions abroad to persuade them to cooperate
with the freedom fighters and mount a special operation in the
Chittagong Hill Tracts where Naga and Mizo hostiles had sanctuaries and
training camps.
He recorded
the secret negotiations Rajiv Gandhi had on behalf of Indira Gandhi with
Sikh leaders before Operation Bluestar in 1984. Indira Gandhi was keen
that these be recorded so that posterity would know how she tried in
vain for a negotiated solution before she sent the Army into the Golden
Temple. Raman was entrusted with this task. He says he had the
negotiations secretly recorded and spent endless hours transcribing
them. These records were handed over to the organisation’s archives, but
nobody knows where these are now.
Raman strongly
believed that covert capability was an indispensable tool for any state
that had external adversaries. He served as the head of RAW’s
counter-terrorism division from 1988 to 1994. He declined an offer by
the Narasimha Rao government to be the intelligence coordinator for the
north-east after his retirement, preferring to return Chennai.
He was a
member of the special task force appointed by the government in 2000 to
revamp the intelligence apparatus and a member of the National Security
Advisory Board. He was also a member of the committee set up to examine
the intelligence failure that led to the Kargil incursion.
In his
retirement, especially in the last 10 years, he was active in writing
about strategic affairs, touching on a range of internal and external
issues. He spoke with precision and clarity. He was quick to respond to
sudden and developing events such as terror attacks, posting his
perspective and preliminary views on anti-terrorism portals and social
media sites. He believed that all strategic thinking and discussion
should have the national interests in mind, even though his analysis
always took into account the political and social underpinnings of
conflicts and crises.
He was active
on Twitter as @sorbonne75, and despite his illness, continued to post
messages on his timeline on issues of current national interest. In the
last week of May, he tweeted that “Ind-Japan shd make China’s seeming
strengths into strategic vulnerabilities.”
He also talked
about his illness on Twitter, saying he wanted to create awareness of
cancer and its treatment. In his very last tweet, on May 31, he spoke
optimistically about returning from hospital soon.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/
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