The secret architecture of Indian power: inside the world of RAW

There is a certain kind of institution that grows more powerful the less it is understood. India’s Research and Analysis Wing, known simply as RAW, belongs to that rare category. It has no public website, no listed budget, no officer whose face regularly appears on television explaining a decision. And yet almost every major turn in South Asian history since 1968, the birth of Bangladesh, the war against Khalistani militancy, the standoff with Pakistan over Kashmir, the quiet contest with China across the Himalayas, carries its fingerprints somewhere in the story. To understand RAW is to understand a large part of how modern India actually makes decisions about war, peace, and survival.

This is an attempt to lay out that story honestly, from the agency’s uncertain birth to the controversies now shaking its reputation on foreign soil, without inventing details that cannot be verified and without pretending that an organisation built on secrecy can ever be fully known.

A Nation Humiliated, and an Agency Born from That Humiliation

To understand why RAW exists at all, you have to go back to two military defeats that shook the confidence of a young republic. In 1962, India fought a short and painful war against China along the Himalayan frontier and lost badly. Indian troops were pushed back, positions were overrun, and the political establishment in New Delhi was left asking a hard question. How had the country been caught so unprepared. Part of the answer pointed at intelligence failure. India’s only intelligence body at the time, the Intelligence Bureau, was responsible for both domestic policing intelligence and foreign espionage, and it simply did not have the tools, the reach, or the singular focus required to track a rival superpower’s military build-up.

Three years later, in 1965, India and Pakistan went to war again, and once more questions were raised about whether Indian intelligence agencies had understood Pakistani intentions and capabilities early enough. Around the same time, an insurgency in Mizoram in India’s northeast added further pressure, showing that even within India’s own borders foreign hands were suspected of stirring unrest. The Army chief of the period, General Joyanto Nath Chaudhuri, openly called for a stronger and more dedicated intelligence gathering apparatus.

By late 1966, the idea of carving out a separate foreign intelligence service, distinct from the domestically focused Intelligence Bureau, had begun to take shape inside the government. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s administration decided that India needed what almost every major power already had: an agency whose entire purpose was to look outward, to understand the world beyond India’s borders, and to act there when Indian interests demanded it. On 21 September 1968, that agency was formally created. It was named, deliberately blandly, the Research and Analysis Wing, a label chosen in part because it sounded bureaucratic and unthreatening rather than because it described anything close to the agency’s real mission.

The Man Who Built It: R N Kao and the Kaoboys

Every institution has a founding figure whose personality shapes it long after he is gone, and for RAW that figure was Rameshwar Nath Kao. Kao was already a trusted hand in Indian security circles, having served as personal security chief to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru earlier in his career. When Indira Gandhi handed him the task of building India’s first dedicated foreign intelligence service almost from nothing, Kao approached it with a mixture of discipline, secrecy, and old-fashioned tradecraft that would define RAW’s culture for decades.

He recruited a close circle of officers who would go on to become legendary inside Indian intelligence folklore, informally remembered as the Kaoboys, a nod to the American CIA’s own nickname culture. Kao led the organisation from its founding in 1968 until his retirement in 1977, the longest tenure of any chief in the agency’s history, and he is still regarded inside India’s security establishment as the founding father of the service.

Unlike most government departments, RAW was never created through an Act of Parliament. Instead, it was set up as a wing operating directly under the Cabinet Secretariat, reporting to the Prime Minister rather than to any parliamentary committee. This structural choice, made in 1968, still shapes the agency today. Because it was never established through a specific law, RAW sits outside the ordinary reporting requirements that apply to most government bodies, and it is formally exempted from India’s Right to Information Act under a provision that shields security and intelligence organisations from public disclosure. In practice this means that outsiders, journalists, historians, even most Indian lawmakers, have almost no formal window into what the agency does day to day.

Its Baptism by Fire: The Birth of Bangladesh

RAW’s first great test came remarkably early, only three years after its founding, and it happened in the same region many readers of this feature will recognise most closely. In 1971, as political tensions in East Pakistan exploded into a brutal crackdown by the Pakistani military and millions of refugees fled across the border into India, RAW is widely credited with providing intelligence support that shaped India’s approach to the crisis. Indian intelligence-maintained contact with Bengali nationalist networks, tracked Pakistani troop movements, and fed assessments to the political and military leadership in New Delhi as the situation moved toward open war.

When the Indo Pakistani War of December 1971 finally arrived, it ended within thirteen days with the surrender of Pakistani forces in Dhaka and the emergence of an independent Bangladesh. For an agency barely three years old, this was an extraordinary vindication of the decision to build a dedicated external intelligence service. It is important to be careful here and not overstate the case. Much of what RAW specifically did during those months remains classified or disputed, and its precise contribution alongside the Indian Army, the Border Security Force, and other actors is not something that can be laid out with full documentary certainty from open sources. What can be said honestly is that the 1971 war cemented RAW’s institutional reputation inside India as an agency that had proven its worth almost immediately, and it remains one of the most frequently cited chapters in accounts of the organisation’s early years.

The Cold War Decades: Sikkim, Punjab, and a Widening Mandate

Through the 1970s and 1980s, RAW’s mandate steadily expanded beyond pure military intelligence into the broader architecture of Indian strategic policy. One often cited episode from this period is Sikkim’s merger with India in 1975, when the small Himalayan kingdom’s monarchy was dissolved and the territory became an Indian state, a process in which Indian intelligence involvement has long been discussed in historical and journalistic accounts, though again the full details remain guarded.

The 1980s brought a different and darker challenge. Punjab descended into a violent insurgency led by Sikh separatists demanding an independent state of Khalistan. Indian intelligence agencies, RAW among them, were drawn into a long and bloody counter insurgency effort that stretched across the decade and into the early 1990s. By the time the movement was largely suppressed inside India, thanks in significant part to aggressive policing under officials such as KPS Gill, Khalistani separatism appeared to many observers to have been reduced to a diaspora phenomenon with little remaining traction inside Punjab itself. As later sections of this feature will show, that assessment turned out to be premature, and the ghosts of that era would return to trouble RAW’s international reputation decades later.

Throughout this period RAW also built-up specialised units that still exist in some form today, including the Aviation Research Centre, which handles aerial surveillance and signals intelligence, and the Special Frontier Force, a covert paramilitary formation originally raised in the aftermath of the 1962 war with China and staffed heavily by Tibetan personnel.

How RAW Is Built: Secrecy as Architecture

To understand how RAW actually functions, it helps to picture its place inside the Indian government rather than imagining it as a freestanding agency like many national police forces. RAW operates as part of India’s Cabinet Secretariat, and its head carries the formal title of Secretary, Research, commonly shortened to Secretary R. That secretary reports directly to the Prime Minister, bypassing the normal ministerial chain that governs most departments. The position is usually held by a senior officer drawn from the Indian Police Service, appointed by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet for an initial term, most recently around two years, with the possibility of extension.

Beneath the Secretary sit a range of specialised directorates and technical wings. Electronics and Technical Services handles signals collection. The Aviation Research Centre, mentioned earlier, provides aerial reconnaissance. The Radio Research Centre focuses on communications intercepts. A Special Group and the Special Frontier Force provide paramilitary and covert action capability when required. RAW headquarters sits at the CGO Complex on Lodhi Road in New Delhi, though for obvious reasons very little about the internal geography of the building or its staff numbers has ever been made public. Total personnel figures, annual budget allocations, and organisational charts remain officially classified, and estimates that circulate in journalistic accounts should be read with appropriate caution since they cannot be independently confirmed.

The agency’s motto, rendered in Sanskrit as Dharmo Rakshati Rakshitah, translates roughly as the principle that protects its protector, a phrase meant to capture the idea that dutiful service to the nation is itself a form of moral protection for those who provide it.

A Long Line of Chiefs

After Kao’s departure in 1977, a succession of officers has led the agency, each associated in the historical record with different chapters of Indian security policy. K Sankaran Nair briefly succeeded Kao and had earlier assisted in setting up Ghana’s foreign intelligence service alongside Kao himself, an interesting reminder that RAW’s early years also involved quiet cooperation with newly independent states elsewhere in the world. N F Suntook, credited as founder of the Radio Research Centre, oversaw operations including what has been referred to in various accounts as Operation Lal Dora. Girish Chandra Saxena worked to build cooperation with intelligence services in the United States and the erstwhile Soviet Union during the final stretch of the Cold War. Later chiefs including A K Verma presided over periods that included Operation Cactus, India’s 1988 intervention to reverse a coup attempt in the Maldives, and the deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka.

In more recent years the post has been held by officers such as Samant Kumar Goel, a Punjab cadre IPS officer who served as chief from June 2019 until June 2023, a tenure that included two one-year extensions, and Ravi Sinha, a Chhattisgarh cadre officer whose term ran until the end of June 2025.

The Present Day: Operation Sindoor and a New Chief

As of the middle of 2026, RAW is led by Parag Jain, a 1989 batch Indian Police Service officer of the Punjab cadre who took charge as Secretary R on 1 July 2025 for a two-year term, succeeding Ravi Sinha. Jain’s rise to the top of Indian intelligence was closely tied to a period of intense confrontation with Pakistan. Before becoming chief he headed the Aviation Research Centre, and in that role, he is widely reported to have supplied the targeting intelligence behind Operation Sindoor, a series of Indian strikes on what New Delhi described as terror infrastructure inside Pakistan and Pakistan administered Kashmir.

Jain’s career path reads like a study of India’s most sensitive internal fault lines. He served in Bathinda, Mansa, and Hoshiarpur early in his career, later became Senior Superintendent of Police in Chandigarh and Deputy Inspector General in Ludhiana during the tense final years of the Khalistani insurgency in Punjab, and he was involved in security operations in Jammu and Kashmir around the period when Article 370, which had granted the region special constitutional status, was revoked. He is also reported to have served abroad, including postings connected to Canada and Sri Lanka. Colleagues and Indian media accounts describe him as an officer with particular strength in combining human intelligence gathered from informants and field sources with technical intelligence drawn from electronic surveillance, a blend often referred to in the trade as HUMINT and TECHINT.

His appointment was widely read by analysts as a signal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s harder line toward Pakistan, and as an indication that India intends to continue a more assertive, outward facing posture on transnational security threats in the years ahead.

The Shadow Falling Over RAW’s Reputation

For most of its history RAW operated in the deep background, discussed mainly in specialist journals, memoirs of retired officers, and the occasional investigative report. That changed dramatically in the past several years as RAW became the subject of open diplomatic disputes among major Western democracies, a level of public scrutiny the agency had rarely faced before.

The first major crack in RAW’s traditional invisibility involved Pakistan rather than the West. In March 2016, Pakistani security forces arrested Kulbhushan Jadhav, a former Indian Navy officer, in Balochistan, and later put him through a military court process on charges of espionage and sabotage, alleging he had been tasked by RAW with activities including violence targeting the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. Islamabad sentenced him to death in 2017. India rejected Pakistan’s account entirely, insisting Jadhav had retired from the Navy and was abducted from Iran rather than caught operating inside Pakistan, and New Delhi took the case to the International Court of Justice, which halted the planned execution pending its ruling. The dispute remains a lasting sore point in India Pakistan relations and a case study in how difficult it is for outside observers to establish the truth behind competing intelligence claims.

Far more damaging to RAW’s standing internationally has been a series of allegations emerging from North America. In June 2023, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh Canadian citizen and prominent advocate for the Khalistan movement whom India had designated a terrorist, was shot and killed outside a temple in a Vancouver suburb. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau later stood up in Parliament and publicly stated there were credible allegations linking agents of the Indian government to the killing, a claim New Delhi rejected as absurd.

Months later, in November 2023, the United States Department of Justice unsealed an indictment describing a separate and foiled plot to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist leader and American citizen based in New York, who is also designated a terrorist by India’s government. According to American court filings, an Indian government official directed an intermediary to arrange the killing, and prosecutors later connected this plot to the same broader campaign implicated in Nijjar’s murder in Canada. Subsequent investigative reporting, including detailed accounts published by major American outlets, named a specific RAW officer as allegedly central to the plot and suggested that the operation had received sanction from senior figures in India’s security establishment, allegations India’s Ministry of External Affairs has strongly disputed while confirming that a high level inquiry committee was formed to examine the concerns shared by Washington.

Together, these episodes have placed an agency built on invisibility squarely under an international spotlight, and have forced Indian policymakers into the uncomfortable position of publicly defending, or at least publicly declining to fully explain, the conduct of an organisation whose entire operating philosophy has always depended on never having to explain itself.

An Agency Caught Between Two Eras

What emerges from this history is an institution in genuine transition. For its first fifty years RAW’s central preoccupations were regional: Pakistan, China, the fragile states along India’s northern and eastern borders, and separatist movements operating largely within South Asia’s own geography. Its founding purpose, born out of the humiliations of 1962 and 1965, was to give India eyes and ears beyond its own frontiers so that the country would never again be caught by surprise the way it had been against China.

Today RAW is being asked to operate on a much larger stage, tracking and reportedly acting against diaspora activists thousands of miles away in Canada and the United States, even as it continues its traditional work along the Pakistani and Chinese frontiers, work most visibly demonstrated through operations such as Sindoor. That expansion has brought real capability, evident in the intelligence groundwork behind precision strikes and years long tracking of hostile networks, but it has also brought exposure of a kind the agency’s founders in 1968 never had to contend with, in an age of instant global media, court disclosures, and diaspora communities capable of mobilising foreign governments against India’s interests.

Whether RAW manages that transition without further damaging its international standing, or whether the controversies of the past three years mark the beginning of a longer reckoning, is a question that neither Indian officials nor outside analysts can answer with confidence today. What can be said is that an agency once defined almost entirely by its silence now finds itself, more often than at any point in its fifty-seven-year history, forced to speak, or at least to be spoken about, on the world stage.

For a region like South Asia, where the actions of intelligence services rarely stay confined within one country’s borders, that shift matters well beyond India’s own politics. It shapes how neighbours read Delhi’s intentions, how allies calculate the risks of cooperation, and how ordinary citizens across the region try to make sense of events whose real authors, as always with an agency like RAW, may never be fully known.