Kao and RAW proved themselves in the lead-up to and the conduct of the 1971 war with Pakistan; his bureaucratic reward came with elevation to the level of secretary to the government in 1973. After his formal retirement at age fifty-eight, Kao continued to advise the government at the highest levels, providing invaluable advice on various issues relating to the country's national security. Between 1981 and 1984 he served as Security Adviser to the cabinet, in effect as the first National Security Adviser. His role in setting up the Policy and Research Staff as an in-house think tank became the forerunner to today's national Security Council Secretariat. He was a pioneer in intelligence coordination, that bugbear of so many national security systems. The personal links Kao maintained with foreign intelligence chiefs served the country well in many ways that most of us will never learn about. (Kao even set up the intelligence service of Ghana.) And he had a sense of humor — when critics in the bureaucracy described RAW agents as “Kao-boys,” he promptly commissioned a fiberglass sculpture of a cowboy and installed it in the foyer of the RAW building.
Kao's own interest in sculpting was, appropriately enough, in iron, and he was known for his fine collection of Gandhara paintings. As a writer, my one regret is that he never wrote his memoirs, despite earning his master's in English literature at Allahabad University. Rather like the reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon, the legend goes — I heard it from one of his juniors — that R. N. Kao has been photographed in public only twice. There might be an element of exaggeration there, but there is no doubt that his death in January 2002 robbed the country of one whose contribution to building the nation — a safe and secure India — is immeasurable and yet will never be widely known. It is as a consequence of his tireless efforts that the foundations of modern intelligence in India were laid and an edifice constructed that protects the nation to this day. Kao made an enduring impact on the training and professional development of an entire generation of intelligence professionals.
Some of the secrecy that is part of Kao's legacy is natural and understandable. Some of it may merit greater debate. As the Research and Analysis Wing of the Cabinet Secretariat, RAW is not a separate department of government and is therefore not answerable to Parliament. The funds allotted to it are not audited in the usual way, again for understandable reasons, but equally any form of public judgment or performance audit it faces is almost always political rather than professional, with the agency regularly being blamed and traduced in the media without any objective means of defending itself. I suspect that many of the professionals in RAW would benefit from the agency being made accountable in the legal sense, so that they can do their assigned work as a legitimate government body and receive appropriate recognition and criticism for their performance.
I am sure there are many who would disagree with this, and who would celebrate that RAW is relatively little known to the informed international public. Nonetheless, RAW's exact locus within the Indian strategic establishment has remained a puzzle even to many well-informed observers. Our diplomats are not always noted for valuing intelligence inputs in foreign policymaking; our internal intelligence institutions, including the police and the army, do not want RAW's expertise in counterterrorism to amount to meddling in issues of internal security. Indeed, RAW's contribution to Indian foreign policy and national political objectives has never been properly documented: even the study commissioned by R. N. Kao of RAW's work on the 1971 war has never seen the light of day. In any country, an external intelligence organization should always serve as an effective, even if necessarily hidden, arm of foreign policy. But part of that effectiveness comes from a knowledgeable sense of the organization's performance. I think it is a great pity if it is true that, as I am told, secrecy has gone to the point where many who serve in RAW do not have a sense of their own history.
Today, informed knowledge about external threats to the nation, the fight against terrorism, a country's strategic outreach, its geopolitically derived sense of its national interest, and the way in which it articulates and projects its presence on the international stage are all intertwined, and are inseparable from its internal dynamics. There can no longer be a watertight division between intelligence and policymaking, external intelligence and internal reality, foreign policy and domestic society. Indeed, even the image of our intelligence apparatus contributes to the way India is perceived abroad. This is why I welcomed the invitation to speak at RAW. I hope that, in the years to come, its doors will open even wider. R. N. Kao would, I suspect, have grudgingly approved.
32. The Genius Lost to Infinity
THE NEWS THAT THE BRITISH ACTOR-DIRECTOR STEPHEN FRY and our own Dev Benegal will co-write and direct a new film about the tragic mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan is both welcome and worrying. Welcome, because Ramanujan's story deserves to be told for a mass audience; worrying, because the obstacles in the realization of such a project are so great that one fears the tragedy of the genius's life and death might be compounded by the further disappointment of never seeing the movie made.
And what a story it is! In January 1913, a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras, with no university education, sent the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy nine pages of closely written mathematical formulae, in a rounded schoolboy script. The letter offered startling conclusions on such arcana as divergent series and the negative values of gamma function — and refuted one of Hardy's own papers. At first Hardy thought the author might be a crank; but after studying the theorems he realized that they “could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class…. They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.”
The letter offered only a foretaste of the prodigious calculations to come. For Ramanujan, born so poor he could not afford paper to record his formulae (he wrote many of his calculations in chalk on a slate and erased them with his elbow; sometimes he would write in red ink on paper already written upon) was now summoned to Cambridge, where he embarked on a brilliant career that brought him the world's greatest mathematical honors — and led to his death at the age of thirty-two. When Ramanujan died, at the height of his powers, he left a final notebook full of formulae—650 theorems devised as his body was being inexorably consumed by tuberculosis. It was a tragedy, his doctor later wrote, “too deep for tears.”
A film of this tragedy must vividly portray Ramanujan's humble birth (and a childhood marked by questions like “How far is it between clouds?”), his strong-willed mother, his schoolboy brilliance (a headmaster declared that he “deserved higher than the maximum possible marks”), his Hindu religious convictions (“an equation,” Ramanujan once said, “has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God”). And it must not gloss over the years of neglect and penury until his persistence found him patrons for a shoestring stipend, a clerical job — and the letter to Cambridge that transformed his life.
It is appropriate that the film should be an Indo-British collaboration. The partnership between Ramanujan, a short, dark Tamil with a pockmarked face and glowing eyes, and Hardy, a Fellow of Trinity College, cricket player, and perfectionist who prided himself on the “uselessness” of his purist mathematics, was as unlikely as it was productive. Papers flowed from them amid the ravages of World War I; Hardy polished the rougher edges of his partner's genius and ensured its public acceptance. Ramanujan came up with a succession of astonishing insights that others have proven since. Eminent scholars have devoted decades to the study of Ramanujan's notebooks, and the task is still unfinished. Ramanujan's work retains a compelling relevance; his theorems have found applications in a variety of fields, from computer science to cryptology, particle physics to plastics, statistical mechanics to space travel. President Abdul Kalam has even presented the filmmakers with a paper he has written on Ramanujan's theories on secure communications.