How NSA Ajit Doval is spearheading India’s parallel diplomacy

How NSA Ajit Doval is spearheading India’s parallel diplomacy

Some would say national security advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval is India’s most important public servant, and the man closest to prime minister Narendra Modi.

Undoubtedly, Doval is India’s intelligence and security czar, and the most hands-on one that the country has seen in recent times.
Intelligence, however, is just one of the hats Doval wears. What is new is that he is also, virtually, the boss of a parallel foreign office, whose diplomacy is creating waves, meeting the demands of a fast-emerging geopolitical entity like India.

In the last few months, his diplomatic sway has seen him in the thick of things on multiple fronts. Consider the following:

In April, on a visit to New Delhi, Emine Dzhaparova, Ukraine’s first deputy minister of foreign affairs, said that her country would like Indian officials like NSA Ajit Doval to visit Kyiv just as he had visited Moscow. “We expect the visit of Mr Ajit Doval…to coordinate a special security mechanism,” she said.

In March, Doval reminded the 18th meeting of the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) NSAs that the grouping’s “charter calls upon member states to have mutual respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity of states and inviolability of State borders, non-use of force or threat of its use in international relations and seeking no unilateral military superiority in adjacent areas.” This significantly came in the midst of a standoff with China.

In February, Russian president Vladimir Putin, no less, summoned Doval, then on a Russian visit, for a rare one-hour one-to-one meeting in Moscow to discuss global and bilateral issues. Doval also had a bilateral exchange with president Putin’s right-hand man and secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, the Russian NSA. Both Putin and Patrushev know Doval from earlier.

That same month, Doval met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington. They exchanged views on a wide range of global and regional issues and discussed deepening the bilateral strategic partnership. His delegation included five Union secretary-level officials and members of the Indian corporate sector from the hi-tech segment for the launch of the India-US initiative on critical and emerging technologies.
In February again, the Indian NSA met his UK counterpart, Tim Barrow, at the cabinet office in London. UK Prime minister Rishi Sunak joined the meeting, in what was described as a “special gesture” by the Indian high commission.

“Doval’s trips in February — Washington, London and Moscow (publicly known) and a couple of unannounced ones in the near neighbourhood — are indicative enough of the workload he carries in keeping [sic] India’s foreign policy and strategic affairs,” noted Nitin Gokhale in BharatShakti, a portal dedicated to the Indian defence industry.

Vajpayee’s brainchild

In November 1998, then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, took a decision that has impacted the course of India’s diplomacy in the quarter of a century since its inception. He created the post of an NSA, the principal counsellor to the Indian PM on national security policy and international affairs. The NSA is tasked with regularly advising the PM on all matters relating to internal and external threats and opportunities, and overseeing strategic and sensitive issues.

In doing what he did, Vajpayee helped set up two parallel foreign policy streams in the country, ensuring that diplomacy was no longer the sole preserve of the ministry of external affairs. It is an arrangement that successive governments have continued. Brajesh Mishra, the then Principal Secretary to the PM, was India’s first NSA.

So, how does this double pincer, the NSA and the foreign office embodied in the constitutionally-mandated ministry of external affairs (MEA), function? Do the functions overlap?
Yashwant Sinha, former external affairs minister in the Vajpayee government, who saw things first hand, told Moneycontrol: “When I was foreign minister, I had an excellent equation with NSA Brajesh Mishra; if he enjoyed the confidence of the PM, so did I.”
Sinha, though, belongs to the old school, and believes that the NSA ought to be a diplomat, not a policeman. “Personally, I don’t think policemen are exposed to international politics to do this job. The NSA, in my view, ought to be a foreign service officer,” he says.

In 2004, the Manmohan Singh government separated the office of NSA into a ‘foreign’ section headed by former foreign secretary JN Dixit, and an ‘internal’ section led by ex-director, Intelligence Bureau (IB), MK Narayanan. After Dixit’s death in 2005, the office was merged and Narayanan became the full-time NSA.
In 2010, he was then succeeded by another frontline diplomat, former foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon, who continued in office until the

Modi government appointed Doval, ex-director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), in 2014. Doval has continued to hold charge since then, becoming the longest-serving NSA that India has had.
In other words, three NSAs, Brajesh Mishra, JN Dixit and Shiv Shankar Menon, have been diplomats and two, MK Narayanan and Ajit Doval, are ex-cops.

Former Union minister and career diplomat Mani Shankar Aiyar says that Vajpayee, for the first time, tried to bridge the two positions, the NSA and the MEA. “It was a US-style arrangement. But since Brajesh Mishra was a man of immense calibre and he had held important positions, he was able to bring in a foreign policy perspective to the job of an NSA and it worked,” he told Moneycontrol.

In his view, a diplomat has a broad global perspective while an intelligence officer, by training, is a hawk. “The question to ask is what does a police officer have in his training that makes him fit to hold the job of overseeing diplomacy? An intelligence officer can have a significant role to play in diplomacy, but certainly not a decisive role,” he said.
Doval’s personal contacts and his chutzpah — years spent as an undercover agent in Pakistan, recruiting rebels in Kashmir and infiltrating a militant group inside India’s holiest Sikh temple at Amritsar — have given him a larger-than-life persona.

Former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal believes that the position of the NSA vis-a-vis the foreign office is the accepted norm globally. “It is not new.

There is a channel of diplomacy outside the foreign office and it is happening all over the world. In the US, there is significant competition between the state department and the NSA, with the latter being very powerful. In Russia, NSA Nikolai Patrushev is the real power centre as compared to foreign minister Sergey Lavrov,” he said. Lavrov has been Russia’s foreign minister since 2004, the longest-serving incumbent since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Above all, Sibal, who, too, worked closely with NSA Brajesh Mishra during Vajpayee’s premiership, notes that the NSA has personal proximity and works closely with the prime minister. “NSA Doval is very close to the prime minister and he keeps a close eye on terrorism; the Taliban and Afghanistan are next door and the NSA controls intelligence. In addition, the NSA also deals with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is very important. It also reflects the growing profile of India in international and regional affairs. Broad international issues have to be configured,” he told Moneycontrol.

The SCO is a Eurasian political, economic, international security and defence organisation. It currently comprises eight member states: China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in addition to Observer States and Dialogue Partners. India is the current chair of the SCO.

Sibal, who once headed the foreign office, says that the MEA knows it cannot become the country’s sole power centre in global diplomacy. “In addition, foreign diplomats also like to deal with important power centres in any country and here Doval scores over everyone else,” he explains.
Observers say that, typically, the MEA runs the country’s day-to-day diplomacy.

Moneycontrol requested Doval for an interview but did not get a response. That is perhaps not surprising — the NSA remains very low key, and is not known to give interviews or share his profile on social media. Maybe, that is why he has more irons in the fire than any other Indian official.