FFrom his pitiful throne on an open toilet a few dozen meters from a Border Security Force outpost – guarded by three armed guards in case an enemy patrol strayed into the wheat fields – the Tamil-speaking intelligence officer considered his mission. Later that night, as the moon rose, he shook hands with the agent he had trained undercover in Pakistan and wished him well. Then, once the man has disappeared into the shadows, head back to Amritsar, hoping the RAW station’s famously-asthmatic jeep doesn’t break down.
The most epic tales of espionage in South Asia are hidden in dust, diesel fumes and flies. They are also stories of brave men who were left to die in the heat of Pakistani jails, which were not recognized by subsequent governments.
Today, Ravindra Kaushik – the famous Black Tiger of RAW who died in Pakistan’s Mianwali jail, and the man sent across the border that night in November 1975 – would have turned 71. story of kaushik books have inspired And a movie too,
However, there has been little unbiased account of what Project X spies actually achieved—and at what cost—the super-secret RAW effort to plant long-term resident agents at the heart of Pakistan’s establishment.
Project X was shut down by the R&AW 20 years ago after its assets and their military-intelligence missions were made redundant by sensors on aircraft and satellites. There is no memorial to the agents who gave their lives.
spy on
Even as she worked her way through an accountancy degree at the Seth GL Bihani SD Post Graduate College in Sri Ganganagar, Rajasthan, Kaushik developed an interest in theatre. Kaushik, the son of a civilian who served in the Indian Air Force, is also known to be steeped in war stories. Sri Ganganagar was one of the centers of the gray world of smugglers, who also worked as part-time spies for the Intelligence Bureau and Military Intelligence; Kaushik would almost certainly have heard their stories.
The case files have not been made public, but a RAW official familiar with his case said the 1952-born student came in contact with officials at the agency’s Sri Ganganagar station and volunteered for service.
Recruited in 1973 after two years of rigorous training. Kaushik was schooled in Urdu, Islamic religious practices and circumcised, officials who taught Project X recruits told ThePrint, among other things. They were taught how to maintain a fiction—the kind that intelligence officers use for a cover identity—and to defeat surveillance.
since 1975, Historian Hamish Telford Let us remind, politics in Punjab had become even more volatile, with Akali political groups rising against the Emergency, and rebel cleric Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale gaining increasing power.
General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had taken power in a 1977 coup, hoped to use the chaos to his advantage—and India feared he might go to war.
Project X, which was designed to detect early signs of Pakistani military mobilization, became a major weapon in India’s intelligence arsenal.
Read also:From Pathan to Mission Majnu, no one knows RAW agents better than Pakistanis
a hot script
In early 1975, R&AW officials say, Kaushik received a novel complete with a birth certificate and Class X matriculation certificate, identifying him as Nabi Ahmad Shakir, a resident of Islamabad. Officials said the agent thought he should apply for the Pakistan Army’s officer-recruitment examinations. The idea was rejected by R&AW officials on the grounds that their documents and imagery would not survive verification. Thus the college graduate applied for and secured a clerical job in the Pakistan Army.
The material coming out of this office was a gold mine for the agency. From his position in Pakistan’s Military Accounts Service, Kaushik was able to report on the movements of military units, the postings of key officers, and even the movement of trains with war material.
Like other agents in Pakistan, a senior R&AW official recalls, Kaushik relied on the postal system to send intelligence back – recording his information over long periods of time in invisible ink and then sending the notes to addresses in Kuwait or Dubai . “Those were more lax times, and it was not unusual for information to appear a month or six weeks after Kaushik sent it,” the official says.
Kaushik’s files reviewed by the R&AW in the mid-1990s—still taught at its training academy—do not provide conclusive evidence of how Pakistani counter-intelligence identified him. Part of the story, said an official familiar with the review, was the arrest in 1983 of R&AW agent Inayat Masih, who was sent as part of a mission to bring Kaushik home for a short break.
Kaushik was married to Amanat Nabi, the daughter of a soldier in his division, and had a child. The absence of relatives in the spy’s life, some RAW officers claim, led the Pakistani counter-intelligence to begin surveillance on the agent. Kaushik was sentenced to death in 1985, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. The agent died in Mianwali jail in 2001 due to illness.
Even though Kaushik’s family lobbied Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee relentlessly for his return, Journalist Dalip Singh Reportedly, New Delhi refused to accept that he was a spy. His brother RN Kaushik said, ‘We don’t want money, we want recognition from the government.
tales of betrayal
No one can tell how Kaushik’s life would have been if his family had been successful. Karamat Rahi, who conducted several cross-border missions for the Indian intelligence services from 1983 to 1988, spying on activities in the cantonments, ended up selling tea outside Gurdaspur after serving an eighteen-year prison sentence. The detective fought long and unsuccessfully fight for compensation before his death in 2016.
Surjit Singh, a former military intelligence agent who says he carried out dozens of cross-border espionage missions, spent thirty years in prison after being arrested in 1981. Journalist Geeta Pandey Told that during this period his family got a pension of Rs 150 per month.
R&AW agent Roop Lal Sahria, who spent 26 years in prison in Pakistan before being sent home in 2001, was promised a petrol pump on his return – but he litigation in courts to get it. Paralyzed by the beatings he received during interrogation, Sahriya also lost his family in India after his wife remarried.
Later reduced to selling wooden handicrafts on a Kolkata street, Mehboob Elahi Shamsi, a former Pakistani army soldier, was recruited by the Intelligence Bureau while visiting relatives in India. In August 1980, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Pakistan, and then quietly pushed across the border near Barmer in a 1996 prisoner exchange. This time, until his story, he was held in an Indian prison finally confirmed,
Among the Indian spies Shamsi spent time with in Kot Lakhpat Jail was Sarabjit Singh – who was killed in a jail-house riot in 2013. , “Role of our covert action capability in ending ISI interference in Punjab,” ex-RAW officer written by B Raman In 2002, “little is known to make such interventions prohibitively expensive”.
“Even if you escape death,” former Indian military intelligence agent Kishori Lal Sharma recalled bitterly, “You die a slow death because no one is your own.” Lal, who operated undercover as a small businessman in Lahore, led a group of former agents demanding a pension similar to that given to soldiers. However, the effort went nowhere.
For Indians schooled by reel life, The Detective ends its story in Venice, Cape Town, Zurich and London, and Punishment reunites with Katrina Kaif. Real life endings are grim.
The writer is National Security Editor with ThePrint. He tweeted @praveenswami. Thoughts are personal.
(Editing by Therese Sudip)