The reign of Ravi Sinha as the head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) comes to a close tonight and his replacement, Parag Jain, isn’t much of an improvement.
Jain is a graduate of the 1989 batch of Indian Public Service – Punjab cadre, and is know for his quiet, methodical style and staying away from the limelight, which makes sense since Ajit Doval, India’s National Security Advisor, doesn’t like sharing the limelight with anyone.
While the Indian media is singing his praises as a “seasoned intelligence officer,” we @commandeleven are surprised that someone with such little real experience in intelligence has been selected to run India’s external intelligence agency. But then, we dug in and understood.
Over the past decade, Jain has served overseas in Sri Lanka and Canada, where he was responsible for monitoring the activities of Khalistan dissidents, domestically, he has overseen Jammu and Kashmir, after the abrogation of Article 270 in August 2019, and Punjab.
Jain is credited with masterminding the recent Operation Sindoor, which India hasn’t diplomatically or militarily recovered from as yet. In the ill-timed, poorly-planned and abhorrently executed Operation Sindoor, the 4-day thrashing that Pakistan gave India, Jain headed the Aviation Research Center (ARC), “an elite wing known for its work in aerial surveillance, imagery intelligence (IMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), photo reconnaissance (PHOTINT), and border monitoring.” We can easily suggest the loss of India’s Rafale fighters and the grounding of the entire Rafale squadron was due to the planning and execution of Jain. He is also credited with providing intelligence support for operations against Pakistan, which seems a bit lofty when the only operation against Pakistan in the last 2 years has been Sindoor, which globally has been seen as a failure of Indian military capabilities.
We look forward to more poorly planned operations from Indian intelligence, under Jain, as their proxy network in Afghanistan and Baluchistan are being comprehensively collapsed, their relations with Iran becoming more tumultuous, and diplomatic failures continue to plague the Modi government.
