Modi places merit on premium, appoints Deka as DIB, extends Goel as RAW chief

By appointing Tapan Deka as Director Intelligence Bureau and extending Secretary RAW Samant Goel term by one more year, the Modi government has indicated that it wants to build operations capability of intelligence agencies rather than analyses

Published on: Jun 24, 2022, 15:58:11 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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Placing merit over seniority and operational ability over analyses, the Narendra Modi government today appointed Tapan Deka as the new Director of Intelligence Bureau and rewarded Samant Goel by extending his tenure as Secretary, Research and Analyses Wing for one more year.

Intelligence Bureau chief Tapan Deka and RAW secretary Samant Goel

Tapan Deka currently heads the Operations desk of the Intelligence Bureau and has been tracking terrorists and religious radicalization for the past two decades. Deka, a 1988 batch Himachal Pradesh cadre officer, is essentially a expert on north-east affairs and was sent by Home Minister Amit Shah to Assam after the anti-CAA violence broke out in 2019. By appointing Tapan Deka as the DIB, the government has picked up an officer over some four seniors in the Intelligence Bureau with the objective of adding more teeth to the intelligence agency.

A quiet thorough professional, Deka was the man who broke the back of Indian Mujahideen group as also the man who investigated the 26/11 attacks. He has been tracking Islamic radicalization for the past two decades, while maintaining his links and root in Assam. Coming from a humble background, Deka has a clear-cut understanding of terrorism in the country from Pakistan based jihadists in Kashmir to PFI in Kerala.

The Narendra Modi government also rewarded Secretary (R&AW) Samant Goel by giving him unprecedented second extension after a two year fixed tenure for building up operational capability and accountability of India’s external agency. An Af-Pak expert, Goel, a Punjab cadre officer, believes in calling spade a spade and brings total commitment to his job. He works closely with both Home Minister Amit Shah and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.

Given that both Goel and Deka are hardcore operations men, the Modi government has also set the stage for the two agencies to come on the same page and operate with synergy as the Indian neighborhood is a never ending challenge with subversives within.

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

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