Doval Recalls A Border Operation That Went Wrong And The Question It Left Him With

India's national security adviser, Ajit Doval, drew on an obscured operation early in his intelligence career to tell graduating students at IIT Roorkee that the most important thing a person can know is where they stand, and that the answer keeps moving.

Doval was the chief guest at the institute's convocation on Saturday, where 2,701 students received degrees over a two-day ceremony. He was conferred an honorary degree, Honoris Causa. The chief of defence staff, General NS Raja Subramani, attended as guest of honour.

File Photo: @EOIBeijing

Doval described himself as a young Indian Police Service officer in his twenties, new to intelligence work, when he was put in charge of intelligence in Sikkim. Sikkim was not then part of India, he said, and he was part of the process by which the merger took place. His responsibilities included the border areas and collecting intelligence on the movements of China's People's Liberation Army.

A team he had sent across the border failed to return. They were due back in five days, he said, and by the tenth or eleventh day there was still no word. The terrain was at about 14,000 to 15,000 feet. He said the silence worried him not only professionally but in human terms, because no one knew whether the men were dead or alive, and no avalanche had been reported too.

Then a call came from headquarters. His superior asked whether he had sent people across, and told him the men were in Chinese custody. They had been caught and interrogated. They were eventually returned, Doval said, after what he assumed were talks or a negotiation at a senior level. They came back, in his words, shattered.

An inquiry followed. Doval said he assumed at the time that his career was over, and told himself that he was still in his twenties and could begin another one. The inquiry found he had done everything right. The fault, he said, lay in defects in the sketches and maps.

He was cleared ultimately but not consoled enough to let it go. He described it as one of those phases in life when a person feels low. Until then his career had gone well as he had already received the Indian Police Medal for meritorious service as one of the youngest officers to do so, the record he said still stands.

What changed his thinking, he said, was a remark from a colleague in the intelligence service, a mountaineer who worked under the cover of foreign expeditions. Some people get their map reading right, the colleague told him, and others get it wrong.

That observation, Doval said, sent him back to philosophy. The entire philosophical enterprise, from metaphysics to modern thinkers, was an attempt to answer the same set of questions: who you are, where you are, what your potential and capabilities are, and where you are heading.

The first of those, he told the graduates, is the one to get right. Knowing where you are now matters most. The older metaphysics, he said, treated that position as fixed. "It is not a static point," he said. "It is a dynamic point."

Doval, 81, is a 1968-batch IPS officer of the Kerala cadre who spent much of his career in the Intelligence Bureau, serving as its director until his retirement in January 2005. He was the first police officer to receive the Kirti Chakra, India's second-highest peacetime gallantry award, in 1989. He has been national security adviser since May 2014, the longest tenure in the post.