A. S. Dulat

Amarjit Singh Dulat is a retired Indian Police Service officer who rose to be a Special Director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and then Secretary of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India's external intelligence agency, from 1999 to 2000. He was born in 1940 into a Sikh family and studied at Bishop Cotton School, Shimla, and Panjab University, Chandigarh. He joined the IPS in 1965 in the Rajasthan cadre and the Intelligence Bureau in 1969.

His career is centred on Kashmir, not Punjab. He was posted to Srinagar in 1988, ran the IB's Kashmir work from 1988 to 1990, and after RAW advised the Prime Minister's Office on Kashmir under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Scroll's review of his memoir says Kashmir is its central theme. His books are Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years (2015, with Aditya Sinha), The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace (2018, a dialogue with Pakistan's former ISI chief Asad Durrani, moderated by Aditya Sinha) and A Life in the Shadows (2022).

Where he touches the Panth's history

• 1984: on a train journey from Delhi to Bhopal, where he was then the IB's man, he saw a mob stop the Tamil Nadu Express at Dholpur and murder two Sikh passengers. He says it made him think of himself first as a Sikh (Scroll's review of his memoir).
• Giani Zail Singh, as President, insisted on Dulat as his security officer on official foreign trips. Dulat writes that Zail Singh meant to resign after Operation Blue Star but was talked out of it by Yogi Bhajan.
• 13 December 2020: reviewing G. B. S. Sidhu's book on Punjab in the 1980s for The Tribune, Dulat wrote that Blue Star was a huge blunder and a disaster with far-reaching consequences, that the problem was of the Congress's making, notably the Gandhi family, and that Bhindranwale dead became far bigger than Bhindranwale alive. He also relayed Sidhu's account that the Department, which the review's context indicates is RAW, helped build the Khalistan legend and took part in planning Blue Star.
• February 2023: in a PTI interview he said neither Punjab nor Kashmir can be governed from Delhi and that Punjab needs "empathy". PTI's report adds that he "did not foresee another outbreak of militancy in Punjab". He said this after the Ajnala police station incident.

How he is read. Dulat is an insider of the Indian state, so his admissions carry weight in Panthic arguments precisely because he served that state. Scroll describes him as a well-wisher of Kashmiris, and says he is critical of the present government's approach to Kashmir, including the role of Ajit Doval. His own statements on Punjab are mostly in the 2020 review and the 2023 interview above; the sources opened for this profile do not show him holding a Punjab posting.