What makes a great intelligence chief? Is it the number of operations the public knows about — or precisely the number it never comes to know about? Is courage in espionage measured by the bullets an officer faces, or by the wars his intelligence prevents? Can satellites, drones, artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber surveillance ever substitute the old-fashioned human asset who whispers the one piece of information that changes history? And, above all, after more than a decade in which Ajit Doval has become almost synonymous with India's national-security architecture, is another intelligence professional emerging who could eventually occupy a comparable place in India's strategic imagination?

That man may well be Parag Jain. But there is an important qualification.

Calling Parag Jain the "next Ajit Doval" makes for a compelling headline. It should not become a shortcut for analysis. The careers of the two men are different, their institutional roles are different, and much of Jain's professional record necessarily remains classified. Intelligence officers are not movie heroes whose adventures arrive neatly packaged for public consumption.

Indeed, one of the paradoxes of intelligence is that its greatest successes frequently have no press conference.

Parag Jain's story must, therefore, be reconstructed from the unusually demanding theaters in which he has served: militancy-era Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, the Pakistan desk, Canada, Sri Lanka, technical intelligence (TECHINT) and aerial reconnaissance, and, most dramatically, the intelligence architecture surrounding Operation Sindoor. Taken together, they reveal something significant.

India may have selected not merely another administrator to run the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). It appears to have chosen an intelligence professional shaped by the transition from the age of the informer to the age of the algorithm — from HUMINT to TECHINT, from the man on the street to the satellite in the sky. And that could make Parag Jain particularly important for the India of the 2030s.

The Man Who Entered ‘India's Most Secret Office’

Parag Jain is a 1989-batch Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of the Punjab cadre. He was appointed Secretary of the Research and Analysis Wing — popularly called RAW, though formally abbreviated R&AW — for a two-year tenure beginning July 1, 2025, succeeding Ravi Sinha. Immediately before his elevation, Jain headed the Aviation Research Centre (ARC), R&AW's important airborne surveillance and reconnaissance arm, and had also handled responsibilities connected with the Pakistan desk, administration and personnel. That career trajectory deserves attention.

India did not appoint to the R&AW chief's chair a man who had spent his life exclusively behind a desk in Delhi. Jain's career passed through police work, counter-terrorism, foreign postings, Kashmir, geopolitical intelligence and technical surveillance. The ingredients are remarkably contemporary.

The spy chief of yesterday required disguise, instinct, sources and nerves. The spy chief of tomorrow requires all of those — and satellites, drones, cyber intelligence, AI, signal analysis, open-source intelligence, financial intelligence and data fusion.

Parag Jain appears to stand at precisely this intersection.

Forged in Punjab, Not in a Seminar Room

Before the polished corridors of the Cabinet Secretariat came the far harder school of Punjab.

Jain served during the years when militancy had transformed Punjab into one of India's most difficult internal-security theaters. Reports place his operational experience in districts including Bathinda, Mansa and Hoshiarpur, and record his later service as Senior Superintendent of Police in Chandigarh and Deputy Inspector General in Ludhiana. This is significant because counter-terrorism cannot be fully learnt from files.

A young police officer operating in a militancy-affected environment confronts uncertainty in its rawest form. The enemy does not wear a uniform. Intelligence may arrive incomplete. An apparently ordinary individual may be an informant, sympathizer, courier, militant or innocent citizen. A wrong assessment can cost lives. An overreaction can alienate a population. A leak can kill an asset.

That environment teaches something textbooks rarely can: the difference between ‘information’ and ‘intelligence.’

Information tells you what happened. Intelligence tells you what is likely to happen next. Strategic intelligence tells you what your adversary wants you to believe will happen next. That distinction would become increasingly important throughout Jain's career.

It is tempting here to invent cloak-and-dagger stories about gun battles and undercover escapades. That would make dramatic reading but poor history. Specific operational accounts from Jain's Punjab years remain sparse in the credible public record. That silence should be respected.

The intelligence profession deserves admiration precisely without mythology being manufactured around it.

Kashmir: Intelligence at the Edge of Politics & War

Jain's subsequent experience in Jammu and Kashmir placed him at the intersection of terrorism, geopolitics and national policy.

Public reporting associates him with intelligence responsibilities during the period surrounding the 2019 Balakot air strike and the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019. The Indian Express reported that he was posted briefly in Jammu and Kashmir in the months after the constitutional change, when intelligence operations were central to the government's security calculations. 

Consider what such an assignment involves. A constitutional decision is announced in New Delhi. But its security consequences must be assessed village by village, communication network by communication network, militant group by militant group and border sector by border sector.

Will terrorist organizations attempt spectacular retaliation? Will handlers across the Line of Control activate dormant modules? Will demonstrations become violent? Will foreign intelligence agencies exploit discontent? What is genuine public anger and what is externally manipulated agitation? Which communication channels matter? Where does the threat actually lie?

These are intelligence questions before they become policing or military questions. Jain's exposure to Kashmir, therefore, represents more than another line on a résumé. It places him inside one of the world's most complicated intelligence environments.

The Pakistan Desk: Learning the Adversary's Mind

Perhaps no responsibility prepares an Indian intelligence professional for the top of R&AW quite like sustained experience dealing with Pakistan. Jain handled the Pakistan desk within the agency, according to multiple reports. 

That assignment is not merely about tracking troop movements or terrorist organizations. Pakistan presents India with an unusually complicated intelligence problem because conventional military capability, nuclear deterrence, cross-border terrorism, militant proxies, information warfare, cyber operations, diplomatic signaling and domestic political dynamics can overlap.

The intelligence officer, therefore, has to understand not one Pakistan but several Pakistans simultaneously — the political establishment, the military establishment, intelligence structures, terrorist groups, extremist ecosystems and the relationships among them.

Sometimes the critical intelligence question is not "What can Pakistan do?" It is: "What does Pakistan believe India will do?" That is a much harder question. And it is precisely where strategic intelligence begins.

Canada: When the Battlefield Is Thousands of Kilometers Away

Jain's overseas assignments reportedly included Canada, where he dealt with Khalistan-linked networks and developments affecting Indian security interests. Hindustan Times reported that during his Canadian posting he repeatedly warned New Delhi about the evolving Khalistan ecosystem there. 

This reveals another dimension of modern intelligence. Threat geography has changed. A movement concerning Punjab can raise money in one country, conduct propaganda from another, communicate through encrypted applications hosted in a third jurisdiction, move funds through cryptocurrency or informal networks and attempt violence thousands of kilometers away. The battlefield has become transnational.

The modern intelligence service must, therefore, understand diaspora politics without equating diaspora activism with terrorism; distinguish constitutionally protected political expression from criminal conspiracies; work through diplomatic constraints; monitor financing and communications; and cooperate, or sometimes compete, with foreign security agencies. This requires not simply aggression but judgment.

An intelligence chief who confuses dissent with terrorism fails. An intelligence chief who ignores the point at which extremism becomes operational terrorism fails equally badly. The art lies in distinguishing between the two before blood is spilled.

Sri Lanka: The Intelligence Value of Political Change

Jain also served in Sri Lanka, including as India's station chief during an extraordinarily turbulent period in the island nation's politics.

Sri Lanka suffered a severe economic crisis in 2022. Mass protests eventually preceded President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's departure. Political realignment continued thereafter, culminating in Anura Kumara Dissanayake's presidential victory in September 2024. Indian Express reporting states that Jain's tenure contributed to intelligence assessments that helped New Delhi navigate this fluid environment and counter adverse influence while maintaining bilateral stability. Here again, intelligence is much larger than espionage.

Sri Lanka lies at the heart of the Indian Ocean. Ports, shipping routes, infrastructure investments, political alignments and Chinese strategic influence make the island important far beyond its geographical size. For India, intelligence in Sri Lanka, therefore, requires watching three movements simultaneously: the internal political tide, the regional strategic tide, and the expanding competition for influence in the Indian Ocean.

This is precisely the environment in which a future intelligence chief learns that national security is no longer divisible into neat boxes labeled "military," "economic," "political" and "diplomatic." Everything increasingly touches everything else.

Operation Sindoor: When Intelligence Became Precision

If one episode elevated Jain's public profile more than any other, it was Operation Sindoor.

On April 22, 2025, terrorists killed 26 people — 25 Indians and one Nepali citizen — in the Pahalgam attack. In the early hours of May 7, India launched Operation Sindoor against terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. The Ministry of Defence initially confirmed that nine sites had been targeted. 

The government's subsequent account emphasized that these targets had been confirmed through multi-agency intelligence and that the operation was intelligence-led and meticulously planned. This qualification is extremely important. No serious intelligence analysis should describe a complex tri-service national operation as the achievement of one officer.

Operation Sindoor involved political leadership, military planners, armed forces, intelligence agencies, technological platforms, surveillance systems and years of accumulated knowledge.

Yet media reports repeatedly credited Jain and the Aviation Research Centre (ARC), which he then headed, with an important role in developing the intelligence picture that enabled accurate targeting and surveillance of Pakistani military activity and terrorist infrastructure. 

That is where Jain's career becomes especially interesting. ARC represents the technological eye of intelligence. Aircraft, imaging, surveillance, reconnaissance, signals and other technical capabilities can transform a suspicious location into a verified target. But technology alone is not enough. 

A satellite image may show a building. Human intelligence may tell you who sleeps inside it. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) may tell you who called whom. Pattern analysis may reveal when people arrive and depart. Financial intelligence may identify who funds them. AI may connect relationships hidden inside millions of data points. The intelligence breakthrough occurs when these fragments become one coherent picture. That is intelligence fusion. Operation Sindoor appears to have demonstrated the growing importance of precisely such a model.

The government later stated that the campaign hit nine terrorist camps and resulted in the deaths of more than 100 terrorists, including individuals linked to organizations such as Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen. Those casualty figures remain government assessments and should, therefore, be understood as officially stated figures rather than independently audited numbers. 

That distinction — between official claim and independently established fact — is particularly important when writing about intelligence and war.

Courage Without a Camera

Where, then, are Parag Jain's famous "adventures"? Perhaps this question itself reveals how cinema has distorted our understanding of espionage. Intelligence courage does not necessarily mean jumping from helicopters or exchanging gunfire in foreign capitals. Sometimes courage means sending an assessment that contradicts what political leaders want to hear; it means trusting an asset when every bureaucratic instinct says not to; it means refusing to trust an apparently perfect source; it means recommending restraint when public anger demands retaliation; and sometimes it means recommending action when hesitation would cost hundreds of lives.

A police officer serving in militancy-era Punjab, an intelligence professional dealing with Kashmir, an officer monitoring extremist networks abroad, a station chief operating during political convulsion in Sri Lanka and the head of an aerial intelligence organization during a cross-border military confrontation have all operated in environments where bad judgment could carry enormous consequences.

That may be less cinematic. It is no less courageous.

Why Is Parag Jain Being Compared With Ajit Doval?

The comparison is understandable. But first, one misconception should be removed.

Ajit Doval was not R&AW chief.

Doval was a career intelligence officer who spent decades with the Intelligence Bureau, eventually becoming its Director before retiring in 2005. He was appointed India's National Security Adviser on May 30, 2014 and was reappointed for a third term effective June 10, 2024. 

His career included counterinsurgency work, Punjab, the Northeast and participation in negotiations during the IC-814 Kandahar hijacking crisis. Contemporary accounts describe him as having spent more than three decades in intelligence and heading the IB's operations wing for years. 

The similarity between Jain and Doval lies less in job title than in professional temperament. Both emerged from the IPS. Both accumulated field experience before reaching strategic positions. Both dealt extensively with Pakistan-related security questions. Both operated in environments where terrorism, insurgency and geopolitics overlap. Both developed reputations for discretion rather than publicity. And both appear to represent the operational school of national security — the belief that policy divorced from ground intelligence becomes dangerously theoretical.

But there is an equally important difference. Doval's reputation was forged predominantly in an era in which HUMINT — human intelligence — was the spine of intelligence operations. Jain's ascent has occurred in an era when HUMINT must coexist with TECHINT, SIGINT, cyber intelligence, satellites, drones, data analytics and AI-assisted pattern recognition.

Doval belongs to the legendary age of the human operative. Jain may come to represent the age of the hybrid intelligence commander. That difference could prove more important than the similarities.

India Does Not Need an ‘Ajit Doval Clone’

There is another reason the "next Ajit Doval" label should be treated carefully. Great institutions cannot depend upon replicas of great individuals. India does not require Ajit Doval 2.0. It requires Parag Jain 1.0.

Doval's contribution cannot simply be copied because the strategic environment itself has changed. Tomorrow's intelligence chief faces threats that barely existed when Doval joined the IPS in 1968.

Deepfakes can trigger communal violence. AI-generated identities can penetrate digital systems. Commercial satellites can expose military movements previously visible only to governments. Cyberattacks can disrupt banks, hospitals and power grids without a single soldier crossing a border. Drones costing a few thousand dollars can threaten military equipment worth millions. Cryptocurrency can finance transnational networks. Encrypted messaging can connect terrorist handlers with operatives across continents. Social media can transform propaganda into a precision weapon. Quantum computing may eventually undermine existing encryption. AI can produce both extraordinary intelligence capabilities and extraordinary deception. 

Therefore, the future R&AW cannot merely recruit spies. It must build teams of mathematicians, linguists, behavioral scientists, engineers, data scientists, cyber specialists, regional experts, economists, satellite analysts, financial investigators and traditional field operatives.

The modern spy agency increasingly resembles a fusion of a diplomatic mission, military headquarters, technology laboratory, behavioral-science unit and data company. Jain's ARC background makes his leadership particularly intriguing in this context.

HUMINT Vs. TECHINT? India Needs Both

One of the most important challenges before Jain is correcting a seductive misconception: that technology can eliminate the need for human intelligence. It cannot.

A satellite can photograph a terrorist camp. It cannot always tell you what the commander discussed over dinner. A drone can monitor a border. It cannot necessarily explain why an adversary suddenly changed strategy. An intercepted communication can reveal words. It may not reveal intentions. AI can find patterns in vast datasets. It can also confidently identify patterns that do not exist.

Technology sees. Human intelligence understands. The intelligence agency that relies entirely on technology risks becoming extraordinarily well informed and strategically blind. The agency that relies exclusively on traditional sources risks becoming perceptive but technologically obsolete. Jain's challenge is, therefore, not to choose between HUMINT and TECHINT. It is to fuse them.

The Pahalgam Warning: Intelligence Success Must Never Become Self-Congratulation

There is, however, another side to the story. Any serious examination of an intelligence chief must examine failures and vulnerabilities alongside achievements.

The April 2025 Pahalgam attack killed 26 people before Operation Sindoor was launched in response. Whatever tactical and intelligence successes followed, the attack itself is an unavoidable reminder that the first responsibility of intelligence is prevention. Hindustan Times noted concerns about the failure to anticipate the Pahalgam strike and also pointed to broader questions arising from political developments in India's neighborhood, including Maldives and Bangladesh. This is precisely why triumphalism is dangerous in intelligence. 

An organization can conduct a brilliant retaliatory operation on Wednesday and still need to ask what it failed to detect on Tuesday. Successful intelligence cultures conduct ruthless post-mortems of their own mistakes. They ask: What signal did we miss? What assumption proved wrong? Which agency possessed information that another agency needed? Did technology produce too much noise? Did bureaucratic hierarchy prevent bad news from traveling upward? Did confirmation bias make analysts interpret evidence according to existing beliefs? Was there inadequate human penetration? Was the intelligence available but not operationalized? These questions should not weaken intelligence agencies. They make them stronger. The day an intelligence organization starts believing its own legend is the day an adversary begins discovering its vulnerabilities.

From Pakistan to China: The Battlefield Is Expanding

Pakistan will undoubtedly remain one of Jain's principal responsibilities. But the long-term strategic challenge is larger.

India now faces an increasingly integrated security environment involving the Pakistan-China strategic relationship, cyber operations, information warfare, emerging technologies, maritime competition and influence across South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Analysts reviewing Operation Sindoor have already highlighted the importance of China-Pakistan defense and intelligence cooperation for India's future security planning. 

China presents a fundamentally different intelligence challenge from Pakistan. Its technological capabilities are enormous. Its economy is deeply integrated with global supply chains. Its influence extends through infrastructure, telecommunications, ports, academia, commerce and digital ecosystems. Its strategic footprint stretches from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean.

Therefore, R&AW increasingly needs economic intelligence as much as military intelligence. All these may matter significantly: who controls a port, who supplies telecommunications infrastructure, who owns critical mineral assets, who finances an election campaign abroad, who develops an AI platform, who controls an undersea cable, and, most of all, who owns the data. The geography of espionage is expanding from territory to technology.

The ‘Intelligence Chief’ as ‘Institutional Architect’

The real test of Jain's tenure will consequently not be whether dramatic operations are eventually associated with his name. It will be whether R&AW becomes a stronger institution. India needs deeper language capability. It needs larger pools of regional specialists. It needs better integration of open-source intelligence. It needs AI systems built specifically for intelligence analysis rather than generic commercial applications. It needs institutional mechanisms capable of challenging dominant assumptions. It needs better red-teaming, the deliberate attempt to think like an adversary. It needs seamless intelligence sharing without creating dangerous concentrations of unaccountable information. It needs stronger counterintelligence. And above everything, it needs extraordinarily capable human assets.

Machines process intelligence. Human beings recruit human beings. That remains the oldest, and possibly the most important, truth in espionage.

A Brief Additional Vote of Institutional Confidence

Jain's responsibilities expanded temporarily after he became R&AW chief. In November 2025, the government gave him additional charge as Secretary (Security), Cabinet Secretariat, a position connected with oversight of the security architecture protecting the Prime Minister and other designated responsibilities. 

That additional arrangement continued until a regular Secretary (Security), Rajiv Singh, was appointed in May 2026.  One should not overinterpret an administrative appointment. But entrusting the serving external intelligence chief with another highly sensitive security responsibility provides some indication of the institutional confidence placed in him.

The Doval Question

Can Parag Jain really become another Ajit Doval? Perhaps. But that is not the most useful question. Ajit Doval's stature emerged from decades of intelligence work and more than a decade at the center of India's national-security establishment. Even in August 2026, Home Minister Amit Shah publicly described Doval as having played a role in major national-security decisions since 2014 — a reflection of the extraordinary institutional influence he has accumulated. 

Parag Jain's historical verdict cannot possibly be written yet. His two-year tenure as R&AW chief began only on July 1, 2025. Legacies in intelligence take decades to understand. Sometimes they take decades even to discover. The better question therefore is this: Can Parag Jain help construct India's intelligence architecture for the next generation? That is the challenge worthy of comparison with Doval.

The ‘Spy Chief’ India Needs for the ‘AI Age’

There was a time when the most valuable intelligence asset might have been a handwritten note smuggled across a border. Tomorrow it could be a machine-learning model identifying an anomalous pattern across 20 million satellite images. Yet somewhere behind that machine may still be one frightened human source risking his life to confirm whether the algorithm is right.

That combination — ancient fieldcraft and futuristic technology — is where modern intelligence is heading. Parag Jain's professional journey seems unusually aligned with that transition. Punjab gave him exposure to insurgency. Kashmir exposed him to the intersection of terrorism, politics and cross-border security. The Pakistan desk provided adversarial specialization. Canada exposed the transnational dimension of extremism. Sri Lanka provided a lesson in political instability and regional competition.

The Aviation Research Centre placed him inside the technological transformation of espionage. And Operation Sindoor demonstrated how intelligence, surveillance and precision military capability can converge.

Few careers could provide a more appropriate preparation for the intelligence challenges now confronting India.

Final Thoughts: The ‘Best Spy’ May Be the One History Discovers Late

Should intelligence officers become national celebrities? Probably not.

Should democratic societies scrutinize the institutions they lead? Absolutely.

Should courage in intelligence be confused with cinematic heroism? Never.

Should India celebrate successful operations while simultaneously interrogating intelligence failures? It must.

And should Parag Jain be called the next Ajit Doval? Perhaps, but only with caution.

Ajit Doval became Ajit Doval because he created his own professional identity. Parag Jain will have to do the same.

The ultimate measure of Jain's tenure will not be the number of dramatic headlines bearing his name. It will be the threats India detects before they materialize, the strategic surprises it avoids, the hostile networks it penetrates, the technological advantages it acquires, the crises it prevents and the decisions its leaders can make because somewhere, somehow, somebody obtained the right piece of intelligence at exactly the right moment.

The mythology of espionage celebrates the spy who enters enemy territory with a false identity. The reality of statecraft demands something far harder: an intelligence system capable of seeing tomorrow before tomorrow arrives.

If Parag Jain can help build that system, history may eventually remember him not as "the next Ajit Doval." It may simply remember him as Parag Jain – the intelligence chief who prepared India for the age of AI, hybrid warfare, and invisible adversaries. And perhaps that would be the greater achievement.