The Spies Who Protected India: Heroes Who Lived in the Shadows

India’s wars and crises are usually told through generals, politicians, and public victories. Another story runs underneath that record. It belongs to people who changed their names, crossed borders, sat in enemy rooms, and sent back what they heard. Most of them were never meant to be famous. A few names leaked out through books, films, family accounts, and the occasional official hint. The rest remain in files that will stay closed for a long time.

These spies did not look like cinema heroes. They were students, nurses, businessmen’s daughters, theatre actors, and police officers who agreed to disappear. What they protected was not a slogan. It was warning time — hours or days in which an attack could be stopped, a ship moved, a test hidden, or a militant plan mapped before it reached a city.

A sixteen-year-old in Netaji’s intelligence wing

Saraswathi Rajamani was born in 1927 in Rangoon to a prosperous mining family. In 1943 she heard Subhas Chandra Bose speak and donated her jewellery to the Indian National Army. Bose tried to return it, thinking a teenager had acted on impulse. She refused. He named her Saraswathi and took her into the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, then into intelligence work.

She cut her hair, dressed as a boy called Mani, and worked as an errand boy around British camps and officer messes in Burma and Calcutta. Officers spoke freely in front of the “boy.” For nearly two years she and a small group of other young women passed on troop movements and plans. One account says they helped flag a plot against Bose.

When a colleague was captured, Rajamani entered the camp dressed as a dancer, helped drug the guards, and got her out. She was shot in the leg. The two hid in a tree for days before reaching safety. After the war she lived quietly in Chennai and died in 2018. For most of her life the country barely knew her name.

Building an external service from almost nothing

The Intelligence Bureau, with roots in the colonial period, remained India’s main internal agency after Independence. The wars of 1962 and 1965 showed that external collection was not enough. In 1968 the government created the Research and Analysis Wing. Rameshwar Nath Kao became its first chief.

Kao built RAW as a small, tightly held organisation. Its best-known early success was the 1971 Bangladesh war: support to the Mukti Bahini, mapping of Pakistani forces, and political work that helped isolate the enemy. RAW later developed a reputation for human sources in hostile neighbourhoods and for operations that never made the papers. Kao also helped create the National Security Guard. He avoided publicity. That habit became the culture of the service.

IB and RAW still divide the work. IB watches threats inside the country — foreign agents, separatists, communal flashpoints. RAW looks outward. Technical agencies add satellites, signals, and cyber collection. The public sees almost none of it. Success is silence. Capture is what leaks.

A Kashmiri bride and the 1971 navy

The story published as Calling Sehmat, and later filmed as Raazi, is based on a real woman whose identity author Harinder Sikka protected. Her father, a Kashmiri businessman with contacts in Pakistan and links to Indian intelligence, was dying of cancer as war approached. He arranged her marriage into a Pakistani military family so she could listen.

She was not a trained professional. She observed, relayed what she could, and at one point passed information about Pakistani submarine movements toward Indian naval assets, including the aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. Indian accounts credit that warning with helping the Navy reposition the carrier and with the sinking of PNS Ghazi off Visakhapatnam. She later returned to India pregnant. Her son joined the Indian Army.

The operational file is still closed. The published version is the one the public has. Even so, it shows a pattern that repeats in Indian intelligence: family networks, personal risk, and a young person asked to live inside the other side’s house.

The Black Tiger inside the Pakistan Army

Ravindra Kaushik was born in 1952 in Sri Ganganagar, Rajasthan, near the Pakistan border. RAW recruited him in the mid-1970s after noticing his talent for performance. After two years of training — Urdu, Islamic practice, Pakistani social habits — he crossed in 1975 as Nabi Ahmed Shakir.

He studied law at Karachi University, joined the Pakistan Army, and rose to major in the Military Accounts Department. Between 1979 and 1983 he sent back information on deployments and installations. Indira Gandhi is said to have called him the Black Tiger.

In 1983 another captured Indian contact broke under interrogation. Kaushik was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death, later commuted to life. He spent the rest of his life in Pakistani prisons and died of tuberculosis in Multan jail in 2001. India said little in public. His family received no official honour while he was alive. His story surfaced later through journalists and relatives, not through a state ceremony.

Seven years under another name

Ajit Doval, now National Security Advisor, spent years in the 1980s undercover in Pakistan for RAW. He lived as a Muslim in cities including Lahore and Islamabad, collected information on militant networks, and, according to later reports, watched nuclear-related activity. Accounts of those years describe extreme disguises, including time spent as a beggar near sensitive sites.

He later entered the Golden Temple complex ahead of Operation Black Thunder II posing as a Pakistani agent to map militant positions inside. He received the Kirti Chakra. Unlike most field officers, his later public role made parts of his past visible. That is unusual. Most officers who did similar work retired unnamed.

Hiding a nuclear test from the world’s satellites

Not every protective act was a person in a foreign uniform. In May 1998 India conducted five nuclear tests at Pokhran. The CIA and other U.S. agencies missed the preparations. American officials later called it an intelligence failure of the decade.

India had learned from 1995, when satellite pictures of activity at the same site led Washington to apply pressure and the tests were called off. In 1998 the circle of knowledge was tiny. Work was timed around satellite passes. Equipment moved without extra security so it would not look like a high-value cargo. Dummy activity and desert weather helped. Deception, not only technology, kept the site quiet until the explosions. That was counter-intelligence as much as physics.

The ones who came back late, or not at all

Kashmir Singh spent 35 years in Pakistani prisons after an arrest in 1973. Mohanlal Bhaskar was captured in the 1960s, spent years in jail, and later wrote An Indian Spy in Pakistan. Others — Surjeet Singh, Ramraj, Gurbaksh Ram — returned after long sentences and said they had been sent across. Some were acknowledged in fragments. Many were not.

There is a hard truth in these cases. Intelligence services use people who can blend in. When the cover breaks, the state often cannot claim them. Families wait. Prisoners age. A few are swapped or quietly released. A larger number stay listed as missing or as ordinary convicts.

What the record actually shows

Indian spy stories get inflated in popular culture. The real pattern is less glamorous. A recruit is chosen for language, face, nerve, or family access. Training is long. The mission may last months or years. The product is often a short message: a unit moved, a ship sailed, a meeting held, a test delayed. The cost is isolation, torture if caught, and a life that cannot be explained to neighbours.

RAW and IB have had failures as well as successes. Double agents have existed. Political interference has existed. Foreign services have recruited inside India. None of that cancels the people who stayed in place when it was dangerous.

The spies who protected India did not ask for statues. A few now have books and films. Most still have only a code name, a closed file, and the fact that something did not happen — an attack that never landed, a warship that was not where the enemy expected it, a test the satellites did not see in time. That is the work. Recognition was never the point.

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