Nuclear war between India and Pakistan was not on the cards: A.S. Dulat
London Letter
By Shyam Bhatia
London correspondent of The Tribune (India)
Amarjit Singh Dulat, India’s former spymaster, has dismissed claims that India’s recent military push against Pakistan, codenamed Operation Sindoor, brought South Asia to the edge of nuclear war.
Former RAW Chief Amarjit Singh Dulat. Pic – The Raisina Hills
During a recent visit to New Delhi, when I was invited to a meal of whisky and kebabs at his home in the exclusive suburb of Defence Colony, the urbane former chief of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), was blunt.
“Total rubbish,” Dulat said of the nuclear scare. “That will never happen. It makes no sense. This last skirmish — why did it last three days only? Which India-Pakistan conflict has lasted more than ten days? No matter what Pakistan says.”
For one of India’s most seasoned intelligence professionals, the idea that Sindoor crossed nuclear thresholds is a myth, recycled more in drawing rooms and diplomatic cables than in real decision-making. “We are never going to do it,” he repeated. “Some Pakistani leaders can be erratic, but unlikely; their military would surely visualise the results.”
Born in Sialkot — the Punjabi city that went to Pakistan at Partition — Dulat joined the Indian Police Service in 1965 before moving to the Intelligence Bureau, where his immersion in Kashmir set the course of his career. By 1988, he was inducted into RAW. A decade later he became its chief under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, later serving as Adviser on Kashmir in the Prime Minister’s Office.
RAW itself had been created in 1968 by R.N. Kao and Shankaran Nair, both of whom played decisive roles in the Bangladesh Liberation War.
Operation Sindoor, May 2025. Pic – India Today
Over the years, Dulat built a reputation as a spymaster who believed in dialogue as much as surveillance, cultivating contacts with militants and moderates alike.
His newly published memoir, ‘The Chief Minister and the Spy’, blends past experiences with current reflections on Sindoor, Pahalgam and the dilemmas of Indian statecraft. The title refers to his unusual relationship with Farooq Abdullah, the then Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir.
“Farooq keeps saying, ‘There is no option but to engage with Pakistan, otherwise terrorism will not go away. Listen to this great man,’” Dulat noted.
India launched Operation Sindoor in May 2025, less than two weeks after militants massacred Hindu tourists in the Kashmiri resort town of Pahalgam, killing 26 civilians and wounding nearly 20. India hit back, targeting ISI’s militant training camps across the border, eliminating more than 100 terrorists – possibly as many as 500, according to some Pakistani media reports. For Mauritian readers, that may be the equivalent of wiping out the population of an entire coastal village in a matter of days.
“If you ask me, after Pahalgam the Prime Minister had to do something,” Dulat recalled. “It was on the cards.” For him, the tragedy briefly united the Valley: “For the first time the Kashmiris as a whole came out in support of Delhi. Only time I’ve seen this happen. But when there was no follow-up, that support started to shift.”
Dulat warned against mistaking coercion for strategy.
“Yes, from time-to-time muscular policy helps, but that cannot be the long-term policy,” he said. His strongest praise was reserved for Vajpayee: “When Vajpayee went to Kashmir in April 2003, he said, ‘I have held out my hand of friendship twice to Pakistan and I’ve been let down twice… but I have not given up hope.’ The Kashmiris went delirious with joy.”
That spirit, he lamented, has not been sustained. “When PM Modi came to power, the Kashmiris were happy. They hoped Delhi would pursue Vajpayee’s policy.”
On Pakistan itself, Dulat was scathing: “What is Pakistan? It’s a small country. What is Lahore? They say it’s like Delhi — actually it’s just a more beautiful version of Amritsar. Pakistan is a small, tiny place.”
Dulat’s verdict resonates beyond India because of his role in managing fears of escalation during the Kargil aftermath. As RAW chief, he created a discreet backchannel with Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of Britain’s MI6, at a time when Washington and London most feared miscalculation.
He also recalled the “friendly ties” of Maurice Oldfield, MI6’s legendary 1970s chief, whose discreet contacts with Delhi symbolised an earlier phase of Indo-British intelligence cooperation.
Dulat’s blunt conclusion on Sindoor — and on nuclear fears more broadly — is that the panic belongs more to “drawing rooms and diplomatic cables” than to the real calculus of those who have actually run the region’s spy agencies.
As he promotes ‘The Chief Minister and the Spy’, Dulat is determined to push back against both alarmism and complacency. His message is twofold: nuclear red lines are rhetorical rather than real, and lasting peace in Kashmir requires imagination as much as muscle.
“A muscular state can bludgeon,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “But lasting peace requires imagination.”
Shyam Bhatia is the London correspondent of The Tribune (India)
History
Robert Clive’s Billions: The Will that Reveals Empire’s Spoils
The will of Robert Clive, the East India Company adventurer remembered in history as “Clive of India,” has been located in the British National Archives. It is a document that throws fresh light on the extraordinary fortune accumulated by one man who played a decisive role in Britain’s colonisation of India and in the transfer of staggering wealth from Bengal to London.
Clive died by his own hand in 1774 at the age of just 49. The will, drafted only months before, details not only his household possessions but also his lands, investments, cash, and legacies to family and friends. Reading it today is to confront in black and white the immense rewards of conquest and plunder.
Among the items listed are annuities and bequests of tens of thousands of pounds to relatives and retainers, alongside landed estates across Shropshire. The sums are difficult to grasp until translated into present-day terms. Using a measure of relative economic power, Clive’s wealth has been estimated at between £7–9 billion today — the equivalent of roughly ₨400–500 billion in Mauritian currency. That places him in the league of modern tycoons, centuries before the concept of billionaires existed.
One passage in the will specifies bequests of £20,000, another mentions £15,000, and others £500 or £1,000 each — amounts that in today’s terms run into tens of millions. In rupees, ₨1.2 billion here, ₨900 million there, given almost casually to younger relatives, siblings, an loyal staff. For comparison, the average annual wage for a worker in Bengal at the time was little more than a few pounds.
The scale of these riches underscores the nature of what Clive took home from India after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the subsequent control of Bengal’s revenues by the East India Company. It was the first decisive foothold of British power in India, and Clive’s personal share of the spoils shocked even his contemporaries. He was impeached in Parliament, accused of corruption and extortion, though ultimately acquitted. Still, Samuel Johnson’s famous remark that Clive “sat a tyrant over the lives and fortunes of a whole people” has echoed down the centuries.
The will also humanises him in unexpected ways. Clive leaves instructions for mourning rings to be distributed to friends and for care to be taken of his servants. Yet these touches of sentiment are dwarfed by the colossal fortune at his disposal — a fortune wrung from India’s villages, from its merchants, and from the collapsing Mughal system that the Company so ruthlessly replaced.
For Mauritius, with its own layered history of French and then British colonial rule, the will of Clive is a reminder of how empire was built on the extraction of wealth overseas. The riches that filled the estates of men like Clive set patterns that still resonate: the funding of stately homes, the endowments of institutions, and the quiet accumulation of intergenerational privilege in Britain.
The rediscovery of this will does not change what is already known about Clive’s role in history. But it gives the most intimate glimpse yet of how conquest translated into personal fortune — line by line, legacy by legacy, pound by pound. At the time of his death, Clive was the richest man in England. In today’s terms, his billions would eclipse most of the great fortunes of Mauritius itself.
That is the enduring lesson of this document: empire was not an abstract project of flags and frontiers. It was, at its core, about money — money that left India and never returned.
Shyam Bhatia is the London correspondent of The Tribune (India)
Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 12 September 2025
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