R N Kao Read online

  In fact, the bond was so strong that in January 2002, when the younger brother had to be admitted to the ICU of Ram Manohar Lohia hospital, RNK was beside himself with worry. And despite his own reasonably good health, got himself admitted in the same hospital to be close to his brother. No one will know what went through RNK’s mind that January in 2002 as his brother fought for his life in the ICU, almost wishing for his own death. It was as if RNK did not wish to contemplate a life without his brother. However, the fact is that Rameshwar Nath Kao passed away on 20 January 2002 before his brother did a few days later.

  To get back to RNK’s joining the IP, after doing the mandatory medical examination, RNK had to get his uniform, the mess kit, shoes, riding boots—everything that was necessary for daily use as an IP probationer—from designated shops in Lucknow. Kao described his state of mind in detail. ‘Then came the excitement of having my uniform made before I joined the Police Training College at Moradabad. I remember that I had my khaki uniform made by a tailor from Lucknow cantonment. There was also a shoemaker, who made my riding boots and my polo boots in accordance to the specifications. Then I went to Anderson and Company in Lucknow, where I had a dinner jacket made. It was quite a new experiment because as a student, I never had the money to go to any first-class tailor, and Anderson, in those days, was still an English-run firm, and I still wear the trousers he made for me then. The material was beautiful.’

  Duly kitted out, RNK arrived at the Police Training College in Moradabad and reported for duty on 7 April 1940. He was given a room in the Officers’ Mess, which was actually a cavernous old building, dating back to the First World War. He had a large room with an attached bathroom allotted. A Gorkha, Jeep Bahadur, had accompanied RNK from Lucknow. Life appeared to be beautiful at that moment. RNK was also fortunate to have Dyan Swarup Sharma and Amarjit Kumar Das as his course mates, both known to him from his days in the hostel of Allahabad University.

  Kao’s first encounter with British Police officers was, however, far from cordial. Having excelled in English Literature and read romantic poems of Milton, Shelley, Keats and writings of Shakespeare, RNK’s first close contact with the Britishers was a rude awakening. ‘Who should I find in the police but people who appeared to me only semi-literate, very crude, rough and using swear words and generally arrogant in behaviour. In the beginning, this caused me a lot of distress,’ Kao recalled. Initially, the Britishers did not approve of RNK’s insistence on remaining a teetotaller, but later they accepted him for what he was.

  Interestingly, the conduct of the probationers in the mess, outside and even the way they behaved in the rooms, was under constant watch by the Principal, who seemed to have a number of informants. Kao realised this one evening in the mess after dinner when he was playing billiards. During the game, a discussion on the Indian National Movement, led by the Congress began. Suddenly, the Principal turned around and said, ‘If you want to know anything about the National Movement led by the Congress, ask Kao, because he reads the Hindustan Times.’

  Hindustan Times, it must be noted, was seen as a supporter of the Indian freedom movement, which was obviously noticed by the Principal. Police officers under the British were expected to only read The Statesman from Delhi or get The Pioneer from Lucknow. ‘This was an eye-opener for me. Those were difficult days during the War, and I had to be very careful and watch my step. There were no unpleasant incidents as such, but one distinctly had the feeling of being kept under observation,’ RNK noted.

  Once in a while, Indian food was prepared in the mess and RNK remembered on one such occasion, a British officer asking him, ‘Does this food taste as bad as it looks?’

  All this was rather galling, Kao remembered. Indians could not play Indian music on the radio in the mess. Early during his stay in Moradabad, RNK imbibed a lot of knowledge about various drinks, liquor and wines, because he was designated to work as the ‘C’ (or Cellar) Officer for nearly six months. He had to keep individual accounts of the liquor consumed by various people. He noted that that was, in itself, quite an interesting education.

  ‘Frequently, we had mess nights, when a number of army officers and officers of the IP from neighbouring districts were invited. Those were very boring occasions for me, because we were the junior-most people and we could not leave the mess until the senior guests had departed, and quite often it would be nearly 3 AM by t he t ime we used to get back to our rooms. Then we had to be up again by 5 AM to at t end t he parade. That really was quite tiring, and a lot of drinking used to go on,’ Kao recalled.

  Riding was an integral part of Police Training College. RNK had, in fact, acquired a horse within a week of his arrival at Moradabad. He remembered having bought it from a Police officer called Thorat, who was a Deputy Superintendent under training from the state of Gwalior. RNK says, ‘I think his brother later became a General in the Army (Lt General P.P. Thorat, who retired as Eastern Army Commander in the early 1960s). This particular Thorat later joined the Maharashtra Police from Gwalior, and I remember the last time I met him was when he was a Deputy Commissioner of Police in Bombay.’

  RNK kept the horse for seven years and became quite proficient in riding, although he had one fall that almost resulted in a serious injury. Gradually, the cost of maintaining the horse went up, and Kao could no longer afford to keep it.

  Weeks and months went by in Moradabad. Occasionally, the officers used to be invited by the Nawab of Rampur to the neighbouring town of Rampur, about 80 miles from Moradabad. These used to be quite memorable events as they were feasted and dined by the Nawab in his palace. The Nawab also screened private cinema shows. On one occasion, the famous movie Gone with the Wind was screened.

  The Principal’s wife, Mrs Field, used to pay great attention to the training of Indian officers in acquiring social graces. ‘It seemed to me that one of the chief objects of the kind of life, which was imposed on us at the Officer’s Mess, was to convert us into some kind of brown-snobs. It was strange that a strict caste system was enforced there and anyone who was not a member of the Secretary of State Services or a Commissioned Officer in the Defence Services was not permitted to enter the mess. In the beginning, this seemed very strange to me, because many of my friends from the university days or, at least, a few of them who had also taken the competitive examination along with me and had not qualified for the IP had got into the Provincial Police Services. They were being trained along with the IP officers; they attended the same classes and outdoor work, and some of them were, in fact, better than the IP officers, and, yet, while they might, sort of, visit us once in a while in our room in the mess, they could never be allowed to enter the dining hall and the Officer’s Mess as such,’ RNK noted.

  Even in their day-to-day conversation, Indian officers were encouraged to affect a contemptuous attitude towards the average Indian. In this, they were encouraged to assiduously reflect the views and opinions of their British colleagues, Kao remembered. The training in Moradabad continued until the end of 1940, and for practical district training, during the months of January and February of 1941, RNK was posted to Khiri, which was the headquarters of the Lakhimpur Khiri district. Thereafter, RNK got posted to various districts, spending nearly seven years in the United Provinces.

  Even as he was contemplating the future and his career in the IP, after spending six–seven years in service, Kao was deputed to the Directorate of Intelligence Bureau in 1947.

  Founded as an ad hoc organisation in the late 19th century by a British civil servant working with the East India Company, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) was formally organised in 1920, modelled after the British Security Service, MI5. Throughout India’s freedom struggle during the first 47 years of the 20th century, the IB became an indispensable arm of the repressive British regime, keeping tabs on Indian freedom fighters and political leaders. Post-Independence, however, the IB’s mandate expanded to keep a watch on India’s adversaries and its neighbours. Collection of intelligence from India’s border areas
became an important function of the IB in the post-Second World War years.

  T.G. Sanjeevi Pillai, IB’s first India Director between 1947 and 1950, consciously tried to change the job profile and philosophy of the organisation by inducting more Hindu officers. In fact, according to M.K. Narayanan, who served as the IB Chief in the late 1980s, and later as National Security Adviser, RNK had the distinction of being the first Hindu officer to join the IB.1 Under the British, the IB used to be dominated by white British officers and a smattering of Muslims.

  As he joined the IB, Kao started working closely with Bhola Nath Mullik, then Pillai’s deputy and later IB’s longest serving director from July 1950 to October 1964. When he took over as IB’s second director, Mullik made Kao in-charge of the security of the prime minister. As a Deputy Director in the IB, apart from looking after the security detail of Prime Minister Nehru, Kao was also entrusted with overseeing the security arrangements of visiting foreign dignitaries.

  There is an incident worth recalling. In 1950, England’s Queen Elizabeth was on a visit to India. Kao was heading the security and travel arrangements of the British Monarch. In Bombay, the Queen was wading through a huge crowd which was kept in control by the police. Kao was keeping a hawk’s eye on the surroundings when he noticed something being hurled at the queen. Instinctively, Kao caught the package hurled towards the Queen, which turned out to be a flower bouquet, and not a bomb as Kao suspected. Noticing his quick reaction, the Queen apparently drolly remarked ‘good cricket’.2 Apocryphal or not, this incident shows that Kao had an alert mind and presence.

  It was only natural that Nehru would send the then 37-year-old RNK to be a special investigator to enquire into the crash of an Air India aircraft, named Kashmir Princess, off the coast of Indonesia on 11 April 1955.

  Prime Minister Nehru had conceived of an Afro-Asia conference to be hosted by Indonesia at Bandung. It was scheduled to be held between 18 and 24 April 1955. The Air India International Super Constellation plane was chartered by the Chinese Government to carry its delegates for the inaugural conference.

  It had left Bombay on 10 April and reached Hong Kong around noon, local time, the next day after a refuelling halt at Calcutta, and a change of crew at Bangkok. The plan was to carry the Chinese delegation from Hong Kong to Jakarta. In the first trip, the advance Chinese party consisted of eight Chinese officials, two Polish journalists and one North Vietnamese official besides five crew members. The Kashmir Princess took off from Kai Tak airport, Hong Kong, on 11 April 1955 around 1:30 local time. It was supposed to land at Jakarta that evening.3

  However, after a five-hour journey, it crashed near Indonesia’s Natuna islands. All 11 passengers and five of the eight crew members died in the crash. Three crew members survived, and swam to an isolated island, and were saved by local fishermen. These crewmen, later, revealed that they had heard murmurs of sabotage at Hong Kong. They revealed that no security drill or thorough check was carried out during the halt at Hong Kong and many people had access to the plane. As it transpired, anticipating (wrongly as it turned out) Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s presence on the plane, a Formosa (now Taiwan) Intelligence operative, masquerading as an aeroplane technician, had planted a bomb on the aircraft during the halt at Hong Kong. The intent was clearly to assassinate the Chinese Premier.

  Shaken by this close shave, Zhou Enlai requested Prime Minister Nehru for Indian assistance in the probe. Britain too joined the enquiry since Hong Kong was then a British territory. On the advice of the then IB Chief, B.N. Mullik, Nehru deputed RNK to represent India in the trilateral probe.

  Prime Minister Nehru, an itinerant politician and statesman, travelled the world frequently. RNK invariably accompanied him on every tour, be it at home or abroad, after he returned from the Kashmir Princess investigation. The wide exposure to high dignitaries, top officials and the intricate discussions and negotiations, stood RNK in good stead in later years when he founded the R&AW. Working closely with India’s longest serving prime minister brought RNK in contact with many intelligence chiefs during his travels abroad. He was also noticed by Nehru for his quiet efficiency and meticulousness. This was to stand him in good stead, as RNK rose in hierarchy and started occupying central position in the secretive world of intelligence and espionage.

  1 https://koausa.org/rnkao/gentleman.html

  2 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/r-n-kao-9204116.html

  3 From the book by the then Indian Defence Attache in Indonesia, Col A.K. Mitra (retd), Disaster in the Air: The crash of the Kashmir Princess 1955 (New Delhi: Reliance Publishing House, 2017).

  THREE

  Ramji: The Gentle Giant

  ‘He was a noble man!’ This was how Malini Kao, the frail 99-year-old widow of Rameshwar Nath Kao, described her husband as she sat at the dining table in the Kao household in July 2019. Even though largely confined to her bedroom and most of her faculties failing her, she seemed energised when she was told that a book on RNK was at a planning stage, and that the author wanted to meet her. ‘He had an outstanding career,’ Malini Kao added as an afterthought. Straining to remember their life together (they were married for 60 years), she described RNK as a loyal and gentle man, who never thought ill of anybody.

  RNK, a devout Hindu, was deeply spiritual and practiced meditation and puja every day. A devoted family man, RNK and Malini Kao had stayed with RNK’s younger brother and his wife as a joint family under one roof all their life. In the Kashmiri Pandit community, the brothers were known as ‘Ram-Lakshman ki jodi’ (pair) because of their close bond. Their bungalow in Vasant Vihar is, in fact, aptly named Saketa (Ayodhya), the abode of Prabhu Ramchandra. RNK had an unparalleled sense of duty, which he fulfilled as the family’s patriarch.

  Their daughter Achala Kao, now Achala Kaul, remembers RNK as a man with strong convictions about right and wrong. ‘He never pontificated and always led by example. He used to say, ‘nasihat mat do, namuna ban jao.’ (Don’t advise, set an example for others to follow.) That was the essence of the man,’ Achala says, her face glowing with justifiable pride.

  Malini Kao narrated the incident when the couple had met Ma Anandamayi. RNK greeted her with a pranam, when she asked, ‘Kya naam hai tumahara?’ (What’s your name?) When he told her that his name is Ramji, the saint said, ‘Jas naam thata gun.’ (The man has attributes that go with the name.) In the Hindu religion and mythology, Ram is considered an epitome of duty and principle. The Saint apparently saw similar characteristics in RNK. He was well versed in the Gita and the Ramayana.

  A very disciplined and punctual man, RNK disliked sloppiness. His routine was set. Breakfast at 9 AM, lunch at 1:30 PM and dinner at 9 PM. ‘When he used to ask us to be ready by 8, we made sure that we were ready by 5 to 8,’ Achala recalls. A teetotaller and vegetarian, RNK nevertheless was an extremely gracious host and served alcohol to his guests. Malini Kao was a good cook and enjoyed entertaining people. Meticulous to the core, he always wore three-piece suits during winters and white, khadi bush shirts in summer months. He had immaculate taste and was particular about dress and manners.

  Hormis Tharakan, who headed the R&AW between 2005 and 2007, has a memory of his last meeting with RNK. ‘I met him for the last time in the winter of 1998 just before I left Delhi on transfer. When Molly, my wife and I reached Vasant Vihar, Mr Kao, wearing a perfectly-stitched pinstripe suit and Mrs Kao, with a smiling face as always were waiting in the drawing room to receive us. Caught up in the evening Delhi traffic, we were about 15 minutes late. As I expected, Mr Kao remarked on the delay with some displeasure. He was always a stickler for time. But thereafter, he got fully involved in hospitality. Although he had only a soft drink, he would pour me nothing but Scotch (that too, Black Label). Though I said I would get the second drink myself, he did not agree. He got up with some difficulty, and poured another drink for me.’

  The couple were mentors to two generations of R&AW sleuths. Vikram Sood, who joined the agency in 1972 and rose to become its Chief in
2001, says, ‘The impression I formed about RNK in the first meeting was only reinforced over the years; he was a father figure who led by example.’

  This sentiment is echoed across the board—by his colleagues, by his subordinates and by the people who interacted with him professionally. Sankaran Nair who succeeded RNK in 1977 as the second Chief of the department—albeit briefly—had this to say about Kao, ‘Ramji … a person of high intellect, a true Hindu and a man who will not harm his worst enemy. Once I found one of our ex-colleagues, who had retired, waiting to see him for some favour. I queried Ramji why he was willing to help this man who had been spreading false rumours about him. His reply was that rumours would not harm him, but any assistance provided to our ex-colleague would help him.’

  The friendship and professional collaboration between Nair and RNK is legendary in the secretive world of foreign intelligence. Their contribution in building an organisation from scratch is a rare success story in post-Independence India. RNK and Nair were different like day and night, but their bond went beyond their individual personalities. And RNK’s saintly demeanour amused and irritated his friends, such as Nair, no end. As he remarked to RNK with reference to the above cited incident, ‘Ramji, you should be sitting in a cave in the Himalayas contemplating your navel. But don’t forget to store scotch in the cave for my occasional visits!’1

  But RNK was not all about official work alone. He had an artistic bent of mind—a man who loved to sculpt and someone who had an eye for beauty. He worked with wood, clay and stone. He was a man with a strong sense of smell and loved fragrant flowers. ‘In our house, fresh flowers used to be changed twice a day,’ Achala fondly recalls.

  In his post-retirement years, RNK pursued his hobby of sculpting more vigorously and frequented the Garhi village in Delhi. He was a great patron of young artists and encouraged them, since RNK felt that artists always struggle for survival. During his frequent visits to Garhi, he came across a young artist named Mohammad Sadiq and worked with him. Today Sadiq is settled in London but still keeps in touch with the family. ‘We always receive Diwali greetings from him every year,’ Achala says.