Amarjit Singh Dulat is a former head of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India's external intelligence agency. After retirement, he was appointed adviser on Kashmir in the Prime Minister's Office and served there from January 2001 to May 2004. During this time, he accumulated a vast reservoir of goodwill with Kashmiris of all shades. As Jane's Intelligence Digest put it in 2001, ‘Well known for his social skills, Dulat preferred dialogue to clandestine maneouvres.' In his heyday, Dulat was referred to as ‘Mr Kashmir'.
Dulat was born in Sialkot, Punjab, in December 1940. After India's partition, his father Justice Shamsher Singh Dulat relocated his family to Delhi. After schooling in Delhi, Simla and Chandigarh, Dulat joined the Indian Police Service (IPS) in 1965, and then the Intelligence Bureau (IB) in 1969, where he served for almost thirty years. At the IB he headed the Kashmir Group during the turbulent 1990s till he joined and headed the R&AW.
He is the author of Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years (2015; co-authored with Aditya Sinha), The Spy Chronicles: R&AW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace (2018; co-authored with Lieutenant General Asad Durrani and Aditya Sinha) and A Life in the Shadows (2022).
Lieutenant General Asad Durrani is a former director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate of Pakistan. He is the author of
The Spy Chronicles: R&AW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace (2018; co-authored with A.S. Dulat and Aditya Sinha) and
Honour Among Spies (2020).
Neil Krishan Aggarwal is a psychiatrist and social scientist at Columbia University. He does research on and teaches the psychology of cross-cultural conflicts, negotiation and peacemaking. A descendant of post-Partition families, he writes on how Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs view themselves and each other's communities. Covert is his fifth book.
