Modi government revamps NSA Board, new members with unique skill sets added for fresh impetus
The new appointees include former Western Air Commander Air Marshal P.M. Sinha, who retired in December 2024.
The government has appointed six new members to the 15-member board, with a majority from the defence and security establishments.
New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government has appointed former R&AW and National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) chief Alok Joshi as the National Security Advisory Board (NSA Board) chairman.
He is an experienced fighter pilot, category 'A' qualified flying instructor, fighter striker leader, instrument rating instructor and examiner, with more than 4,500 hours of flying experience.
He also comes with rich experience in planning air operations. He has been air assistant to the chief of air staff and assistant chief of air staff operations (offensive) at Air Headquarters.
He also served as the Director General of Air Operations at Air Headquarters.
The other military officer appointed to NSA Board is Rear Admiral Monty Khanna, a submariner who formerly served as an assistant military adviser at the National Security Council Secretariat, headed by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval.
His appointment to the NSA Board comes as the government focuses on the submarine-building programme, with a larger goal within the security establishment to increase deterrence and punitive strike capability of underwater ships, too, rather than just of the surface ships.
Another new member is former Southern Army Commander Lieutenant General A.K. Singh, who commanded the South Command of the Indian Army till his retirement in June 2024.
Two other new members ARE from the world of intelligence—a 1990-batch, UP-cadre IPS officer, who formerly served as the Special Director in the Intelligence Bureau, and Manmohan Singh, a 1988-batch Bihar-cadre IPS with a rich experience from the Punjab issue.
IFS B. Venkatesh Varma, who served as envoy to Russia, is the sixth new appointee.
Sources said the government has ensured that new appointees recently retired from their departments where they held key positions and took part in the overall decision-making process in their respective spheres.
'There is a reason why the NSA Board tenure is for two years, which is extendable. These new appointments have now been made to give the 15-member board a fresh impetus,' a source said, adding that the revamped NSA Board will be meeting for the first time Thursday.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
Also Read: Ultra & Alpine Quest—technologies that keep Pakistani terrorists, especially LeT, going in J&K
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The emergence of leftist ideology as a tool of political Islam is a phenomenon that has been widely observed around the world in recent years The shooting of two Israeli embassy employees in front of the Jewish Museum in Washington last month was an example of the threat Jews face around the world today. The attacker had shouted the slogan 'Free Gaza" as he opened fire, killing a young couple. Early this month, global media fondly reported how environmental activist Greta Thunberg sailed up on Israeli shores in a boat laden with just a truckload of aid supplies for the Gazans. But the ideological significance of these two events lies beyond the 'liberation" of Gaza. The Washington incident bore all the hallmarks of an Islamist terrorist attack. But the terrorist in this case was not an Islamist, but an activist from a far-left political party. Similarly, what lies beneath the delicate veneer of Greta Thunberg's activism is a stark portrait of the New Left politics. For the Left, all the problems in the world are caused by colonisation, imperialism, the Western capitalist system and, of course, the 'genocide" they accuse Israel of carrying out. The majority of those on board the 'Freedom Flotilla" boat with Greta Thunberg were either extreme leftists or those who openly support Hamas-Islamist terrorism. Prominent among them was Rima Hassan, a far-left French politician and member of the European Parliament, who praised the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, and shamelessly called it legitimate. The emergence of leftist ideology as a tool of political Islam is a phenomenon that has been widely observed around the world in recent years. French researcher Pierre-André Taguieff coined the term 'Islamo-leftism" in 2002 to describe this. He said that political Islam and the Left are joining hands for some chosen common goals, and that this is a threat to republican values, Western culture, and secular norms. On the surface, this cooperation may seem impractical. The leftists see religion as a bane, but ironically jump into bed with the political Islamists who plan to install theocratic governments. These two ideologies are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, going by their stated missions, but they cooperate to fulfil their ulterior motives. This paradox might look intractable, but recent developments show that both these groups have no qualms about engaging in this opportunism. There are certain ideas that act as the catalyst for this convergence. Some of them include the hatred for Jews, blind opposition to the United States, hostility to Western culture, and, in India, the demonisation of nationalist politics. In fact, these two groups are birds of the same feather in their stance on democracy as well. The constraints on building a society based on Marxist-Leninist thought are nationalism, market capitalism, and a social system driven by religion and morality. Political parties that stand for strong nationalism are the thorn in the side of the Left all over the world. Similarly, for the Islamists, nationalism is the first hurdle in their attempts to establish religious state enclaves wherever possible in the world. Only nationalist movements and governments can stop them from skillfully using their demographic advantage to create the ultimate theocratic empire. The primary foe of all nationalist political movements around the world is Islamism. The next is the Left. And these two are the closest allies in fighting nationalist movements in democratic countries. This can be seen in India, France, Britain, the United States and elsewhere. In return for helping their causes, political Islam gives unconditional support to the so-called anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial policies of the Left. Beyond that, Islamists also implicitly, and perhaps deceptively, support the neo-liberal ideologies espoused by the Left. The contradictions that emerge from this cooperation can be glaring. For example, ultra-left feminists join Islamists in their pro-Gaza marches, turning a blind eye to the fact that the Islamists are the ones who have scaled the pinnacle of misogyny. LGBT people are coming under rainbow flags to fight alongside Islamists, who sentence homosexuals to death in countries where they have established their preferred social order. Such conflicts are no longer news to us. In Kerala, some years ago, an Islamist extremist movement held marches against the central government's Citizenship Amendment Act. The protesters held banners with the slogan 'Save the Republic" in a vain attempt to give a self-righteous afterglow to their conceited agenda. What an irony! 'Republic" is the cornerstone principle of democratic and secular statehood. Here, the very same forces that aspire to establish a religious state were using the perceived dangers to the republic as a campaign plank! What fate would befall the republic if these forces gained political power or if they achieved demographic superiority? You won't have to look far out into Afghanistan or Syria to know; just look at nearby Bangladesh. More shockingly, it was revealed later that the extremist Islamists who mobilised people under the slogan 'Save the Republic" had prepared a secret blueprint to abolish the Republic and establish a religious state in India within a few decades. Here, parallels can be drawn to how the Left treated Indian democracy soon after the country gained independence. The Marxists continued to harbour revolutionary ambitions, considered the Constitution and the democratic framework as a bourgeois system that needed to be overthrown, and believed limited participation in democracy would be an interim stage before class struggle was amplified to usher in revolution. Democracy is an interim arrangement for communists until they seize total power. For Islamists, democracy is merely a hiding place until complete religious rule is implemented. Both of these groups use the principles that are the cornerstones of democracy as needed and then abandon them by the wayside. The left-wing and progressive parties in Iran helped Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini establish a fundamentalist religious state. Islamists, who accepted the help of the Left as much as they could, persecuted leftists and expelled them from the country after the establishment of the religious state. In India, the Left and the progressives boosted Islamist radicalism by converging with their pseudo-fight for the republican fundamentals of the Constitution. The progressives were too dumb to realise that the CAA was the only remedy to protect the republican rights of the minorities who are persecuted by Islamist radicals in the neighbouring theocratic countries. Yet, they would shamelessly walk under a banner raised by the Islamists. History is witness to the fact that such contradictions have not caused any kind of psychological conflict for the leftists and Islamists. They are merely united in their struggle against nationalist politics. Some left-wing political organisations in Germany and France decided to cooperate with Hitler's Nazi party for certain specific political goals. Similarly, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem nursed a desire to exterminate the Jews of Israel in the early 1940s with Hitler's help. This cleric went to Germany and directly requested help from Hitler to annihilate the Jews. Germany has, thankfully, parted with its Nazi past, but the Islamist bigots have not. They still seek the annihilation of the Jews. And they have an able and trusted partner in the Left and the so-called progressives, who blindly demonise Israel. And, these two ideologies, which have not hesitated to cooperate with the most evil fascist forces in world history, now say that democratically elected nationalist governments are fascists! Because the concept of nationalism and the system of democracy are the ultimate obstacles to the goals that both these groups chase. Political Islam and the Left are strategically aligned to disparage, disrupt, and destroy the concept of nationalism. They help each other in this endeavour. Elijah Muhammad, who carved out Islam's identity in America as a religion for blacks and the oppressed, called white Americans 'blue-eyed devils". The Americans, who implemented the 'exploitative" system of market capitalism, are the same devils in the eyes of the Left. Elijah, who created the massive movement called the 'Nation of Islam" to promote his religion, had the stated goal of establishing a separate, ultra-religious Muslim state in the United States. Elijah's follower Louis Farrakhan described Hitler as a great leader. The accusation of racism or racial discrimination is a formula that can be used to oppose whites, Jews, and capitalists all at once. Elijah used the slogan of liberation from racial discrimination to foster the Islamist movement. This is the very foundation of the New Left, which argues that the Western world order and its cultural, economic, and political systems are based on racial and communal discrimination. Social justice is an aspirational goal, but for the far Left and the Islamists, it's only a false, delusional and deceptive vanguard that can be jettisoned at will at a later point. We saw this Left-Islamist collaboration later during the 'Black Lives Matter" movement. The leaders of this movement were those who described themselves as trained Marxists. This movement also used the same style and tactics as Islamist street revolutions seen in various countries in recent times. The BLM, which tried to overthrow the 'racist" American system, was appealing to the Islamists who were eager to destroy the 'Judeo-Christian" Western system. A handful of extreme left-wing members of the US Congress representing the Democratic Party were the most vocal supporters of this neo-Marxist anarchist movement. Not uncharacteristically, they are also the ones who support fundamentalist Islamists in America and fan the flames of anti-Semitism. In Kerala, radical Islamist parties used sweet left-wing and progressive slogans to recruit non-Muslims who were at the bottom of the socio-economic system. The tactic was to use secular-social justice slogans in the interim to gain momentum for movements that were formed with the ultimate aim of building a religious state. In a bizarre paradox, the Left, which professes to eradicate religion, joins hands, as a temporary measure, with those who seek to build a religious state. The ultimate victims of this alliance are democracy, true secularism, individual freedom, and economic prosperity. Another stark irony of this Left-Islamist alliance is that those who seek to implement religious dictatorships also praise communist dictators. Osama bin Laden and the communist autocrat of Venezuela are equally heroes for them. In India, the Leftists and Islamists lead the campaign to oppose the ruling nationalist party on all fronts. In a recent controversy in Kerala, it was the Leftists who took the lead in mocking the concept of 'Mother India" on social media with astonishing aggression. That campaign started after the governor of Kerala garlanded the Bharat Mata portrait at a function at the Raj Bhavan, and one of Kerala's communist ministers boycotted the event over the niceties relating to the depiction of Mother India as a goddess. The concept and idea of Mother India is something that Islamist fundamentalists find hard to digest. The Left knows that by making fun of that concept and image, they would win the votes and hearts of the Islamists. Their grandstanding on secularism is a smokescreen; there is no idealism that they would not hesitate to surrender at the altar of Islamism for crass political goals. It is curious to note that the Left and Islamism began to fly the same flag at a time when democracy faced the greatest threat in history. The Communist International (Comintern) was formed in 1919 under the leadership of the Soviet Union to unite the world's communist forces and implement global revolution. At the 1920 Comintern conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, Vladimir Lenin described Islam as the religion of oppressed countries. He said the communists, who were inherently anti-religious, should give privileges and special consideration to Muslim religious sentiment. Going a step further, Comrade Grigory Zinoviev, a prominent Bolshevik and Lenin's confidant, called for a 'jihad" against the Western capitalist powers. That announcement was the first sign of the Left and Islamism joining hands in the name of anti-imperialist sentiment. This is the jihad that was carried out by a radical leftist activist in Washington last month. A man who once worked for a Marxist-Leninist movement, the Party of Socialism and Liberation, shot and killed two innocent people. He said he did it for the liberation of Gaza. How could someone who worked for a party that sought to overthrow the capitalist economic system and the Western system have the motivation to support Hamas and shoot innocent people dead? History offers more ample clues to solving this seemingly intractable question. In 1994, the leader of Britain's far-left Socialist Workers' Party wrote an article explaining the connection between the Left and Islamism. In this article, titled 'The Prophet and the Proletariat", he argued that Islamism can fill the void where the Left is powerless or absent. Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a radical leftist thinker from Latin America, became a terrorist in the 1970s and led the attacks on the French embassy in The Hague and the OPEC headquarters in Vienna. Born in Venezuela, he became a dyed-in-the-wool leftist after his education in Moscow. This staunch Marxist-Leninist later converted to Islam and praised Osama bin Laden as an 'immaculate martyr". Ramirez, who carried out hundreds of terrorist attacks around the world, said during his trial in France that no one else had killed more people than he for the liberation of Palestine. If his claim is taken literally, Hamas would be ashamed of the fact that it was a leftist 'fellow traveller" who killed more Jews than they did. Michel Foucault, a prominent figure in the 20th-century left-wing intellectual movement, was an ardent admirer of the Iranian religious revolution. Foucault, who visited Tehran twice in 1978, saw the revolution only from a Marxist perspective and said it was a revolt of the underclasses. When Iran, a secular country with civil liberties and women's freedom, was conquered by the Islamists, this leftist thinker gloated that 'politics was regaining spirituality". In Kerala, some mainstream television channels and newspapers described the 2021 takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban as a 'wonderful" moment. The Left offers unbroken ideological brotherhood to the Islamists who flaunt a merely pretentious and deceptive use of democratic, secularist, and civil rights slogans. The Left-progressive alliance doesn't even have any qualms about stitching up electoral partnerships with the extremists. As the Left supports the Islamist hardliners, a large number of people who sympathise with the broader leftist ideology fall into the trap and end up amplifying Islamism. This Left-progressive ecosystem lends pseudosecular-republican cover to the Islamists, and mainstreamises, legitimises, and intellectualises their bid for sabotage. top videos View all In Foucault's philosophy, the Western world lost its revolutionary verve after the French Revolution. Surprisingly, Foucault said he found the heights of revolutionary heroism and 'political spirituality" in the Islamist street revolution in Iran that created a religious state, replacing a secular one. In Indian college campuses, Foucault-esque 'political spirituality" finds its voice only when there is an Islamist cause to be upheld. Let's try to see why the Left's revolution is intertwined with the religious revolution of Islamism. We know what the cornerstones of Marxism-Leninism are: materialism, class struggle, struggle against the powers of capital and imperialism, revolution, and so on. But what happened to these ideologies? Did the Marxists create the beautiful communes they promised? The ideology that imposed bloodshed, poverty, and chaos in several countries for decades, and denied religious and personal freedom, later dumped the lofty goals and chased new ones. When the wheels of revolution stopped turning and those who were in the vanguard established dictatorships and farcically turned the followers into slaves, victims, and fools, fundamental leftist thought disappeared or became irrelevant. Today, the hard Left's main planks are anti-semitism packaged as anti-zionism, the theory of institutional racism, support for gender anarchy in the name of feminism and the like. The New Left throws into this heady cocktail their time-worn platitudes of colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, capitalism, climate activism, and, not to mention, genocide. The Left accuses Israel of all these, dramatically conjuring up the image of a perfect enemy in the Jewish state. The Islamists also do the same thing; in their blinkered view of Palestinian exceptionalism, all other problems in the Muslim world can be simply ignored and all venom directed against Israel. This mutually beneficial narrative is the glue that keeps the Left-Islamist contract in its place. The author is a senior journalist who has worked in India and abroad, and is currently a financial journalist in Europe. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views. tags : gaza Islam israel jew Left Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: June 21, 2025, 23:02 IST News opinion Opinion | What's Behind The Left-Islamist Contract?
