Operation Sindoor was not about Nuclear War: AS Dulat

From Shyam Bhatia

New Delhi, August 27, 2025. 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.

Playing host on the first floor of his home in Delhi’s Defence Colony, where he was at his most urbane and polished, he reminisced over whisky and kebabs about his years in power, mentioning the foreign trips he once took as part of President Zail Singh’s entourage. Then, turning to the present crisis, he was blunt.

“Total rubbish,” Dulat, a former Director of India’s external intelligence agency RAW, 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 often 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 sure 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 the Research and Analysis Wing (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 was set up in 1968 by RN Kao, and Shankaran Nair, the last of the Imperial Police (IP) officers from the British rule. The two played a decisive role in the Bangladesh Liberation War. Civil Services officers, particularly from IPS, Indian Police Service, and military officers were among the first to be inducted).

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.

The Kashmir Contacts

His recently released memoir, The Chief Minister and the Spy, blends those experiences with current day reflections on Sindoor, Pahalgam and the larger dilemmas of Indian statecraft. The title refers to Dulat’s unusual relationship with Farooq Abdullah, the then Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. The book recounts how Dulat — the “spy” — kept channels open with Abdullah even at the height of insurgency, convinced that engagement with Srinagar’s political leadership was as vital as tracking militants.

In conversation, he returned to that theme. “Farooq keeps saying, ‘There is no option but to engage with Pakistan, otherwise terrorism will not go away. Listen to this great man.’”

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 in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, eliminating more than 100 terrorists – maybe 500 as per some Pakistani media reports – including their senior commanders linked to past atrocities.

“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. We did not take advantage of that. When there was no reaction from Delhi, the Kashmiri reaction started to shift.”

Even today, he pointed out, Pakistan as usual deny any responsibility and put the blame on India, even though their generals and ISI officers attended the funerals of the bombed terrorists.

Muscular Strategy

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 for Vajpayee. “When Vajpayee went to Kashmir in April 2003, he spoke extempore. He said, ‘I have held out my hand of friendship twice to Pakistan and I’ve been let down twice’ — meaning Kargil and the terror attack on Indian Parliament. ‘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. The BJP gave the Kashmiris hope, 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.”

Backchannels and Friendly Spies

What makes his verdict resonate beyond India is his role in navigating fears of escalation during the Kargil aftermath. Between 1999 and 2000, Dulat was RAW chief while Sir Richard Dearlove was newly installed as head of Britain’s MI 6, formally the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

Dulat confirmed that he and Dearlove interacted personally, creating a rare backchannel between the two Services at the very moment Washington and London most feared miscalculation could spiral out of control. He also looked further back, recalling the “friendly ties” of Maurice Oldfield, MI 6’s legendary 1970s chief, whose discreet contacts with Delhi symbolised an earlier phase of Indo-British intelligence cooperation.

SIS itself had maintained a presence in India since independence in 1947. Figures such as Walter Bell, who later went on to Nairobi during the Mau Mau uprising, and Keith Gosling, who subsequently served in Tel Aviv, were part of a cadre of British officers for whom Delhi was both a proving ground and a vantage point on the wider Cold War.

From Bell’s years in Delhi to Oldfield’s quiet friendships, from Gosling’s Cold War postings to Dearlove’s direct conversations with Dulat, the arc of RAW–MI6 relations show how much has always hinged on individual trust.

Nuclear War Fears Unwarranted

Dulat’s blunt conclusion on Sindoor — and on nuclear fears today — 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: that nuclear red lines are rhetorical rather than real, and that 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.”