Kinattinkal Sankaran Nair, former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), who passed away in Bangalore on Tuesday, was the Indian version of James Bond, the master British spy who was created by Ian Fleming.
Nair was the desi Bond without the ultra-modern gadgets carried by the fictional character during his missions to East European and African nations in search of Communist backed desperadoes who were out to ruin the world.
Nair was described as India’s leading spy master and was the lone surviving member of the Imperial Police, the precursor to the Indian Police Service. What made his unique was his penchant for tradition and passion for modernity. While Ram Nath Kao, India’s master spy who founded the RAW left to meet his maker without even uttering a single word to the common man about his tumultuous and excitement career, Nair preferred to pen down his reminiscences and memoirs in the lucidly written Inside IB and RAW: The Rolling Stone That Gathered No Moss. But he maintained his reputation as the cop with a stiff upper lip as he did not reveal details of many missions he had undertaken for the country.
“No my dear boy, it is not for entertainment and controversies,” he had told this writer when asked about the hundreds of his missions for India. It may sound surprising for those who swear by Jawaharlal Nehru’s obsession with scientific temperament. Nair believed in astrology and he wore it on his sleeves.
He has disclosed how the family astrologer predicted immediately after his birth that the child would become an important figure in the country and would own fleet of cars. Years later, when he was deputed to Ghana to help that country set up its own intelligence system he had won the confidence of Kwame Nkrumah, the then President. Nkrumah who heard about the science of astrology from Nair asked him to get the horoscope of the former’s third son Sekou (born in 1963) written by an Indian astrologer.
During his trip to New Delhi, Nair met an astrologer who prepared Sekou’s horoscope. It had some shocking forecasts. Nkrumah would be ousted as the president of the country before the boy turned five and he would die in another country as an exile. True to the forecasts, Nkrumah was thrown out as president in a military coup in February 1966 during his visit to China and could not return to Ghana even once and breathed his last in Romania in 1972.
He proved his organisational skills by single-handed working for the success of the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi. Though the credit for hosting the show went to Rajiv Gandhi, old timers still praise for Sankaran Nair for the magnificent show. In an era where there were no modern gadgets like internet or mobile phones or satellite phones, Nair managed spying and intelligence gathering with his own brain.