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Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah on Wednesday dismissed ex-R&AW chief A S Dulat's claims that he had "privately backed" the Article 370 abrogation as a "cheap stunt" to boost the sales of the top spy's forthcoming memoir. He suggested that Dulat's motive behind penning the book -- 'The Chief Minister and the Spy', slated for release on April 18 -- could be an attempt to reach the power corridors or earn a lot of money. "It is possible that he wants to make a new relationship," Abdullah told PTI. Reacting angrily to Dulat's assertion that the National Conference (NC) would have "helped" pass the proposal to abrogate the special status of the erstwhile state had it been taken into confidence, the 87-year-old president of the party said this was a "figment of imagination" of the author. Abdullah pointed out that both he and his son Omar Abdullah had been put under arrest for several months at the time of the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5, 2019. "We were
Senior IPS officer Tapan Kumar Deka was on Friday appointed Intelligence Bureau chief, replacing Arvind Kumar whose extended tenure ends on June 30. Deka, who has been handling the operations wing of the IB, takes over as the new chief for two years, according to an official order issued by the Personnel Ministry. He is a 1988 batch officer from the Himachal Pradesh cadre. The tenure of Samant Goel, who has been heading the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), has been extended by one more year, the ministry said in another order.
Former R&AW chief Vikram Sood says there are several powerful reasons - strategic, technological, geopolitical and legal - to suggest that it that could be risky to permit Chinese telecom major Huawei, with its state-structured backing, to launch operations in India's critical infrastructure. His assessment comes at a time when the government is yet to take a final decision on allocating radiowaves despite telecom operators applying for spectrum to start 5G trials. In his just released book "The Ultimate Goal: A Former R&AW Chief Deconstructs How Nations Construct Narratives", Sood writes that Huawei may "want to masquerade as an independent entity, but anyone in the trade would know that this is simply not the case. The Chinese government financed Huawei and had few moral compunctions in helping intellectual property theft in the US". He also says that post-COVID, the narrative about China being a responsible state is getting terribly skewed and this change in perception is ..