RAW power

Do you know what the 
Research and Analysis Wing is? Despite its misleading name, it is India’s external intelligence agency, the country’s equivalent of America’s CIA 
or Britain’s SIS (the Secret Intelligence Service — though it is sometimes referred to as MI6).

Most Indians know that the Research and Analysis Wing exists. But that’s about all. Hardly anyone knows where its headquarters are (they are in an 
ugly, modern building in Delhi’s CGO complex). The name of its chief is not 
a secret but even well-informed journalists have difficulty recalling it. And one good indication of how peripheral the organisation is to India’s consciousness is that people who want to seem in the know call it RAW while insiders usually refer to it as R&AW.

Contrast this with the CIA. The CIA director is appointed by the President after a process of consultation with 
Congress. Frequently, the directors go 
on to become household names. Leon Panetta features on TV every day. And the older George Bush made his name as CIA director before going on to bec-ome President. The CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, are so well-known
that they are sign-posted on the highways leading to Langley and the buildings themselves feature regularly in 
movies and TV shows. The CIA even invites journalists for briefings and shows them around its offices. In this respect, it is not unlike SIS, whose fancy office building on the Thames is a well-known London landmark.

But things might be changing for 
India’s secret service. Two recent Hindi movies have focussed on RAW — or R&AW if we are to engage in insider-speak. In Agent Vinod, not only is Saif Ali Khan a James Bond-like R&AW agent 
but the organisation’s workings also feature, in particular a crisis control room that is so advanced and sophisticated that agents in the real R&AW control room probably dropped their jaws in astonishment when they saw the movie.

Salman Khan also plays an R&AW agent in Ek Tha Tiger and Girish Karnad plays his boss. Though the portrayal of R&AW’s operations is considerably less realistic than the version offered up by Agent Vinod (Saif Ali Khan had done his research), the movie does make heroes out of India’s secret agents. It also seems to give them lots of importance by suggesting that the R&AW chief sits in the same North and South Block complex occupied by the Prime Minister and the foreign minister. (I am sure this has given many R&AW officers a few ideas. The chief of the Intelligence Bureau, India’s domestic intelligence agency, gets to hang around with the Prime Minister a lot more than the R&AW chief, who sits far away.)

What accounts for the sudden 
emergence of R&AW in Indian popular culture? My guess is that some of this is simple imitation. Producers want to make James Bond-type movies and so they need their heroes to work for 
Indian secret services. But I think that there is also a deeper reason.

Let’s take the example of the CIA. British movies tend to glorify SIS. Apart from James Bond’s antics, there is also the more realistic version offered by the Smiley TV shows and movies, based on the novels by John Le Carre. On the other hand, Americans have had a more complicated relationship with the CIA. In many Hollywood movies, including the recent Bourne series, CIA agents are not always the good guys. Often the CIA is portrayed as acting against the interests of American citizens.

But those days are over. Two of last year’s biggest movies have CIA agents as their heroes. Both were based on true stories. In Argo, Ben Affleck played Tony Mendez, a legendary CIA operative who smuggled American diplomats out of Teheran during the hostage crisis in Iran. Though Affleck and his buddy George Clooney, who produced the movie, are both well-known Hollywood liberals, not only did the movie glorify the CIA but Affleck also paid tribute to the work done by the clandestine services while accepting his Golden Globe.

Maya, the central character of Zero Dark Thirty, is a composite character but based on real-life CIA agents. The portrait of the CIA in Zero Dark Thirty is uniformly flattering and Maya’s single-minded devotion to tracking down Osama Bin Laden is meant to show us how hard CIA agents work to defend America.

What accounts for the change? My guess is that when a society feels threatened, it glorifies the secret agents who fight terrorism and the country’s enemies. That’s why Americans have deci-ded that the CIA is not so bad after all.

Something similar is happening in India. A new generation of Indians has no appetite for war and so war movies find few takers. But because covert 
action and terrorism are major threats, Indian audiences have warmed up to stories of spies who risk everything to protect India.

These trends have had two distinct consequences. The first: the CIA can no longer be cast in villainous plotlines. I am willing to bet that the next instalment of the Bourne franchise will be less critical of the agency. And the second is that R&AW, an organisation about which most Indians know nothing, suddenly finds itself thrust into the spotlight.

Now all that the real-life R&AW has to do is to live up to the hype.

Fat chance.