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...IN 1966, three years after his third child, Raghuram, was born in Bhopal, R Govindarajan was posted to Indonesia. A failed coup the previous year had sparked off a frenzy of violence, which targeted communist supporters of the Indonesian president Sukarno and claimed more than half a million lives. I remember the sound of machine guns in the evenings, Rajan told me. My mother bore the brunt of the uncertainties. You had soldiers with a lot of authority moving around. It wasnt clear that they would respect diplomatic immunity.
Profiles of Rajan invariably describe him as the son of an Indian diplomat, whose further assignments took the family to Sri Lanka and Belgium. Growing up, Rajan assumed his father worked for the Ministry of External Affairs. But Govindarajan, who topped his 1953 Indian Police Service batch, was an officer in the Intelligence Bureau (IB); he would have been dispatched to Indonesia as a spy, not a diplomat.
When the IB was split to create a separate external intelligence agency in 1968, Govindarajan became one of the original Kaoboysthe first men to join the new Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) under the legendary spymaster RN Kao, for whom Rajans father was officer of staff, according to a former R&AW director...
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Line of Credit | The Caravan - A Journal of Politics and Culture
