Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has chosen a daring former spy with years of experience in dealing with Pakistan, as his national security adviser, a move officials say signals a more muscular approach to New Delhi’s traditional enemy, Indian media reported on Sunday.
The choice of Ajit Doval, alongside former army chief General (r) VK Singh as a federal minister for the northeast region, underscores India’s plans to revamp national security that Modi says became weak under the outgoing government.
The two top-level appointments point to a desire to address what are arguably India’s two most pressing external security concerns-Pakistan and China, both of which, like India, have nuclear arms.
Doval, formerly head of the India’s Intelligence Bureau domestic spy agency, will be National Security Adviser, only the second officer from the intelligence community to hold the post.
Doval, renowned for his role in counter-insurgencies, has long advocated tough action against militant groups.
In the 1980s, he smuggled himself into the Golden Temple in India’s city, Amritsar, from where Sikh militants were later flushed out. He also infiltrated a powerful guerrilla group fighting for independence from India in the northeastern state of Mizoram. The group ultimately signed a peace accord.
Doval was also on the ground in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when an Indian Airlines plane from Kathmandu was hijacked by Pakistan-based militants in 1999. The crisis was resolved when top militants were freed in exchange for hostages.
Doval did not say what his priorities would be after his job was announced on Friday, but in conversations with British media previously as head of a right-wing think tank in New Delhi, he said the new government must lay down core security policies, one of which was “zero tolerance” for acts of violence.
He was referring to operations by militants who India says cross from Pakistan, like the gunmen who killed 166 people in Mumbai in 2008 in an assault that brought tentative peace talks between the South Asian rivals to a juddering halt.
Modi’s other key appointment, retired general Singh, may inject new urgency into India’s plan to establish a corps of 80,000 troops along its border with China in the northeast.
A massive programme to build roads and upgrade airfields in the remote area was also cleared by the ousted Congress party, but has stalled.
Singh has declared that his priority is to develop the northeast in order to narrow the gap with Chinese investment in roads and railways on its side of the frontier.
Singh, who won a parliamentary seat for the BJP in the election, is expected to accelerate the process through the defence bureaucracy, helped by a direct reporting line to the all-powerful prime minister.
According to a Pakistani intelligence officer who did not want to be named, “Doval is an out-of-the-box thinker. Expect him to shake things up.”
The official said he expected the new security team to push for a rapid expansion of border infrastructure and a streamlining of intelligence services, which still function in isolation and often impede one other.
A secure India is a long-standing goal of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Modi won the election in May in a landslide victory, largely on economic pledges that India’s 1.2 billion people hope will secure jobs and raise living standards.
As most foreign troops prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of this year, India is concerned that Islamist militants fighting there will turn their sights towards the disputed region of Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have fought three wars.
Modi is keen to defuse regional tensions as he spoke to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Thursday and extended an invitation to Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit India.
Pakistan said it remained committed to improving ties with India and that it had got off to a good start.
“Whoever is appointed by Modi in his national security team is his own prerogative, and we will certainly not interfere in that,” said Tariq Azeem, a senior official in Sharif’s team.
“Pakistan will carry on with the determination shown by Sharif to build good relations with India,” he said.