Who is Parag Jain, Pakistan expert set to take over as R&AW chief?
Jain has played an operational role during Punjab terrorism days serving in Bhatinda, Mansa, Hoshiarpur and was SSP Chandigarh and DIG Ludhiana in the past.
The Narendra Modi government on Saturday appointed Parag Jain, a 1989-batch IPS officer of Punjab cadre, as the next Secretary of Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) for a term of two years. He succeeds Ravi Sinha who completes his rather lackluster tenure on June 30.
Parag Jain is currently heading the Aviation Research Centre, which played a vital role during Operation Sindoor
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Parag Jain is currently heading the Aviation Research Centre, which played a vital role during Operation Sindoor, by collecting intelligence about Pakistani armed forces and terror camp locations.
Who is Parag Jain
Jain has played an operational role during Punjab terrorism days serving in Bhatinda, Mansa, Hoshiarpur and was SSP Chandigarh and DIG Ludhiana in the past. He has handled Pakistan in India’s external intelligence agency with tenures in Jammu and Kashmir during abrogation of Article 370 and Operation Balakote. An unassuming officer, Parag Jain has served in Canada and in Sri Lanka as Indian representative.
During the Canada posting, he had also taken on the Khalistan ecosystem there and had repeatedly warned Delhi that it was morphing into something dangerous.
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Even as Parag Jain takes over from Ravi Sinha on Monday, India’s external intelligence needs a revamp as it has been found wanting during Maldives and Bangladesh crisis in the past two years.
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Even as Parag Jain takes over from Ravi Sinha on Monday, India’s external intelligence needs a revamp as it has been found wanting during Maldives and Bangladesh crisis in the past two years.
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The failure to anticipate the dastardly strike at Pahalgam on April 22, 2025, was noted with concern despite then Pakistan Army chief spewing hatred against Hindus and calling Kashmir the jugular vein of Pakistan.
The R&AW’s role becomes very important considering the fact that Asim Munir has become a Field Marshal with cross border terrorism against India high on his agenda.
Given that India has suspended the Indus Water Treaty, Pakistan will use terrorism to strike back at India and for that India’s external Intelligence needs to improve ground intelligence rather than purely rely on technical intelligence.
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.
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