Seven RAW officials go on protest leave

RPK

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Seven RAW officials go on protest leave

New Delhi: The external Intelligence gathering agency--RAW--is in the news again but for wrong reasons as seven of its Additional Secretaries have gone on protest leave after they were superseded by an IPS officer junior to them from the Intelligence Bureau.


The mass protest leave by the senior officials prompted the Cabinet Secretariat to issue an urgent order to hold a Departmental Promotional Committee (DPC) process by next week itself for the seven officials who were ranked as Additional Secretaries in the external spy agency, sources in the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) agency said today.

The trouble began when the Government cleared A B Mathur, a 1975 batch IPS officer from Manipur cadre, for promotion as Special Director General and posted in RAW as Special Secretary. Among those who had been superseded were P M Hablikar and Chakru Sinha, who were from the 1973 batch of the RAW Allied Services (RAS) cadre.

The officers approached RAW Chief K C Verma who briefed the Cabinet Secretariat prompting it to hold a DPC meeting by next week, the sources said.

RAS cadre officials traditionally have an upper hand over officials from the IPS and IAS joining their service. Any official joining the RAW is usually placed at the bottom of the service with no seniority benefits.

The issue of outsiders has been a problem with the RAW ever since A S Dulat joined the agency as its Chief. He was Special Director in the Intelligence Bureau.

The UPA government brought Director General of Kerala Police P K Hormese Tharakan as new chief of RAW in 2005 superseding Special Secretary J K Sinha, who had resigned.

This was followed by an ugly episode of fleeing of a RAW Director, Rabinder Singh, during the same time which prompted the government to examine the rules of the external intelligence agency.

After Tharakan, it was an insider Ashok Chaturvedi, a 1970 bacth IAS officer, was appointed as next chief of RAW. His appointment sidelined Amber Sen, who had been made Special Director in RAW months ahead of him.
 

RPK

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The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | RAW ‘protest’ at merger whiff

New Delhi, Sept. 6: Four additional secretaries at the Research and Analysis Wing have gone on protest leave amid suspicion that plans are afoot to merge India’s external spy agency with its parent, the Intelligence Bureau.

The show of discontent comes after a 1975-batch IPS officer, Avdhesh Mathur, was recommended for the rank of director-general, superseding seven senior officers of the Research and Analysis Service, RAW’s own cadre.

Sources said the superseded officers belonged to the 1973, 1974 and 1975 batches. The four disgruntled officers, they added, had conveyed their disappointment to Verma and cabinet secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar.

Mathur had been transferred to RAW in 2007 from the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the country’s highest agency for internal intelligence. After his promotion, he would become the second-highest ranked officer in the spy agency.

Although current RAW chief (secretary) K.C. Verma retires only in January 2011, sources speculated that the process of succession had already begun, with Mathur being promoted to clear the decks for him to become the next secretary. They said the promotion was ordered by the Union cabinet’s appointments committee.

Many see a pattern in this. Verma himself had been in the IB for 30 years, and had been promoted as RAW secretary over the then senior-most officer in the spy agency, P.V. Kumar. That move, some feared, reflected a policy to gradually change the culture of RAW, paving the way for a merger.

But never before had seven RAW officers been superseded at one go, the sources said, or the agency seen such a protest.

The development, sources said, was almost a throwback to the Janata government days of the late 1970s, when Prime Minister Morarji Desai had clipped RAW’s wings, slashing its funds and ending its plans to expand its sphere of influence to Africa. It was only after the return of Indira Gandhi in 1980 that the agency regained its strength and stature.

RAW had been carved out of the IB in September 1968 and given the primary functions of collecting external intelligence related to counter-terrorism and conducting covert operations. Till then, the IB had handled both internal and external intelligence.

It was an IB officer, R.N. Kao, RAW’s first chief, who expanded the organisation to what it is today.

A former RAW secretary said that “from time to time there is this sort of talk” about a merger. Many senior members of various governments have apparently felt that having one agency would streamline intelligence-gathering, avoiding co-ordination problems and needless rivalry. “But it would be a retrograde step,” he said.

Some sources warned that it was “premature” to conclude that a merger had already been decided, or that Mathur was bound to be made RAW secretary.

They, however, added that the four officers’ decision to go on leave was being discussed at the highest level of the government, and the officers would get a hearing in mid-September.
 

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