PM Modi extends tenures of both RAW and IB chiefs by one year

While RAW chief Samant Goel has been keeping a keen watch of the India neighbourhood, IB chief Kumar has been monitoring Maoists, terror networks and political protests.

Published on: May 27, 2021, 17:03:26 IST

By Shishir Gupta, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

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The Narendra Modi government on Thursday extended tenures of Samant Kumar Goel, Secretary, Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and Arvinda Kumar, Director Intelligence Bureau (IB) for a period of one year. The two 1984-batch IPS officers of Punjab and Assam-Meghalaya cadre respectively now retire on June 30, 2022.

File photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (PTI Photo)

The decision to extend tenures of the two spy chiefs was taken on the basis of their work and also taking the future of organizations into consideration. Goel has been a hard-core operations man, while Kumar is known for political reading of the internal situation. Both work under the directions of Prime Minister, Home Minister Amit Shah and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.

While the government remains tight-lipped over RAW activities, the IB has been giving active feedback to the government on internal security situation including political protests, Maoist activities and terror networks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More