I put the book down in disgust. Not disgusted with the book or With B Raman. I had read B Raman’s articles on Chinese; I expectantly purchased the book in order to find what Raman and R&AW managed to get on Chinese. Instead what I found that R&AW is unimportant, they just did what normally IB could have done. Nothing on US, nothing on China, nothing on Russia,…. All that Raman writes is the R&AW and its whine stories.

Raman is politically correct on all subjects.

Often P V Narasimha Rao, ex Indian Prime Minister, is criticized about China policy. When Narasimha Rao had invited the Tibetan Head Dalai Lama, R&AW faxed a permission letter from China. How can a leader conduct a foreign policy when its instruments of foreign policy like R&AW have nothing to show on China? This subject will be dealt in a paragraphs below. In spite of Raman’s political correctness, P V Narasimha Rao and Indira Gandhi seem to be only prime ministers who ran foreign policy as a strategy; using the instruments in a manner it should be used.

R&AW seem to be has misplaced priorities. CIA did not give cooperation on Pakistan. CIA was all for joint operations with India on China, North Korea and countries of same region. R&AW decided to not bite it. R&AW missed significant opportunity for utilizing the CIA resources to penetrate these countries. This is relevant especially today when North Korea has supplied long range missile technology to Pakistan.

Raman description of R&AW’s cooperation with the Chinese intelligence agency called Ministry of State Security (MSS) is disturbing. R&AW dutifully reminded them that China was supplying weapons to Pakistan and when MSS told them that Chinese were supplying weapons that would not harm India, R&AW dutifully reported back. R&AW had nothing substantial to report on China. Bulk of it was from open source. As Raman mentions it, that R&AW was asked not to report on China any more. R&AW couldn’t even estimate the total deployments of China against India. Local Army commanders did better job on assessing the realistic China scenario. R&AW should have considered CIA offer on South East and Eastern Asia. One wonders what would be the cooperation with the Chinese agency Raman talks about. Chinese are all over the neighborhood and internationally trying to contain India. What has R&AW achieved with cooperating with MSS? While China has direct and indirect destabilization activities in India, there is no evidence that India has similar activities for Chinese mainland. A little bit what R&AW does in Tibet and Xingjian region has only irritating value to Beijing with no direct threat to the Chinese Mainland.

Not withstanding Raman’s clouded emotional claims on the relevance of R&AW, R&AW is effectively a south Asian intelligence agency with a marginal role of liaison and listening post in other countries. By Raman’s writing, there is a clear need for a external intelligence agency which has far reach, whether R&AW should be merged with IB or retained as South Asian agency is political decision, based on the budgets. Another point is R&AW takes research and analysis too seriously but lacks on action. 1971 is more of IB influence on R&AW.

“The Kaboys of R&AW – Down the Memory lane” by B. Raman is a good read. It does manage to capture most of events of its time in Raman’s perspective. Most of it is generally know, just that we get to know about R&AW’s role in it.

An area of disappointment in the book is the Sri Lankan description. The 1971, Indian intervention in the island state needed to be better expanded. Raman has clearly avoided mentioning if R&AW aided LTTE against IPKF or why the IPKF was supplied with poor intelligence. Or was it the colossal failure of R&AW. Another important area where Raman has avoided is fate of Netaji Subash chandra Bose or Raman does not know about it.

The book gives good insight of the life of a field agent of R&AW.

The book is intended to bring out Raman’s experiences in R&AW or a clever way to bring to notice of R&AW’s maladies to open debate or justification of existence of R&AW, only B Raman can tell.

However the book is highly recommended for reading.