Former RAW chief to head revamped national security advisory board

NEW DELHI: Days after the Pahalgam terror assault, wherein a Pakistan hyperlink has emerged throughout investigations, the Centre has reconstituted the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB), appointing former RAW chief Alok Joshi as its chairman and 14 different area consultants that embrace ex-commanders from the three armed forces, former diplomats, officers and technocrats.
NSAB, tasked with enterprise long-term evaluation of and offering perspective to the Prime Minister-led National Security Council on points associated to national security, now has 15 serving members. The different new members appointed are former Western Air Commander Air Marshal P M Sinha, former Southern Army Commander Lt Gen A Okay Singh and Rear Admiral (Retd) Monty Khanna, former IPS officers Rajiv Ranjan Verma and Manmohan Singh, and former diplomat B Venkatesh Varma. NSAB additionally contains technical consultants like Prof Okay Kamakoti and B S Murthy.
The board is reconstituted from time to time, with appointments often for a two-year time period. The members’ tenures don’t run concurrently.
The resolution to get Joshi, a prime intelligence mind – who served within the Intelligence Bureau earlier than he joined RAW and retired as its director, after which went on to head the nation’s technical intelligence company, National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), post-retirement – to lead the NSAB comes at a time when India is bracing to give a befitting response to Pakistan for persevering with to sponsor terrorism in J&Okay by facilitating recurrent assaults on harmless civilians, the Pahalgam carnage by Pakistani terrorists, facilitated by native Kashmir aides, being the latest.
With the carnage being seen as an intelligence failure, bringing in Joshi, instead of ex-ambassador to Russia P S Raghavan who has been on the helm for nearly 8-9 years now, is seen as a transparent transfer to focus the national security coverage on revamping intelligence gathering and evaluation to foil any future terror misadventures by Pakistani parts.