The Missing Discipline: Why Indian Universities Must Teach Intelligence Studies

India trains more engineers than any other country on earth. It produces civil servants through one of the most competitive examinations in human history. It has, in the IITs and IIMs, built institutions that rival anything the West has to offer. And yet, in a nation perpetually negotiating a contested border with China, absorbing cross-border terrorism from Pakistan, managing insurgencies in its northeast, and increasingly exposed on a digital frontier that did not exist a generation ago, there is no serious, sustained, academically rigorous discipline of intelligence studies anywhere in the Indian university system.

This is not a small oversight. It is a structural gap with consequences that show up, with grim regularity, in commission reports written after the damage is done.

A Discipline That Exists Everywhere Except Here

Walk into King's College London and you will find the Department of War Studies, which has trained generations of British intelligence analysts, diplomats, and journalists since 1962. Georgetown's Center for Security Studies has produced CIA analysts for decades. Tel Aviv University runs intelligence and security studies as a core discipline, not an elective curiosity. Even smaller democracies — the Netherlands, Singapore — have built academic infrastructure around the serious study of intelligence as a craft, a profession, and an ethical problem.

India has the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, RUSI India, and assorted think-tank output. What it does not have is a university course that treats intelligence with the same seriousness it treats economics or constitutional law: a syllabus built on primary sources, taught by people who have thought deeply about both the craft and its discontents, examined not through rote memorisation but through original research.

The result is predictable. India's national security establishment recruits brilliant generalists — IAS and IPS officers, engineers, area-studies graduates — and trains them on the job, inside institutions that cannot teach reflective distance because they are too busy operating. Meanwhile, the people who should be thinking critically about intelligence from outside the system — journalists, lawyers, legislators, civil society — have no academic grounding to do so. They arrive at the subject through television panels and Twitter threads, not through Kargil Review Committee reports or the actual text of the Arthashastra.

Why This Gap Is Now Urgent, Not Merely Regrettable

Three things have changed that make this absence more dangerous than it was twenty years ago.

First, the threat environment has become more layered. A 1962-era intelligence failure was, broadly, a failure to read troop movements. A 2026-era intelligence failure involves troop movements and disinformation campaigns and cyber intrusions into power grids and radicalisation through encrypted messaging and financial networks moving through shell companies and crypto rails. No single agency, and certainly no single training pipeline, can hold all of this in working memory without a body of scholarship feeding it new frameworks. Universities are supposed to be exactly that feeding mechanism. In India, for intelligence, they are not.

Second, the accountability question has become harder, not easier, to avoid. The Supreme Court's 2017 privacy judgment in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India established privacy as a fundamental right and explicitly warned that a state which surveils everything dominates rather than protects its citizens. NATGRID, expanded UAPA powers, and current debates over encrypted communication access are not abstract policy disputes — they are live questions about where the line sits between a security apparatus that protects democracy and one that erodes it from within. A democracy cannot resolve that tension with classified briefings alone. It needs a public, academically literate conversation, and that requires people trained to have it.

Third, and most simply: every major intelligence failure India has suffered has been followed by a commission report identifying the same handful of structural defects — interagency silos, political override of operational advice, institutional memory lost to bureaucratic rotation, intelligence shaped to please rather than inform decision-makers. These patterns are documented in exhaustive detail in the Kargil Review Committee Report, the Jain Commission Report on the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, and the NIA's Pathankot inquiry. The patterns recur because nobody outside the security establishment is required to study them systematically enough to break the cycle. A course is not a panacea. But the absence of one guarantees that each generation of officials re-discovers the same lessons at the same cost.

What Such a Course Should Not Be

Before making the case for what intelligence studies in India should look like, it is worth being precise about what it must avoid becoming, because the failure modes are as instructive as the successes.

It must not be a celebration of the security state. A course that teaches intelligence history as a parade of heroic operations, without sitting honestly inside the failures, produces graduates who cannot distinguish operational necessity from institutional overreach. It must not be a borrowed Western syllabus with Indian case studies stapled on. The conceptual vocabulary of intelligence studies as currently taught globally was built largely around the Cold War experience of the United States and Britain — Kennan, the CIA's founding doctrine, Cambridge spy rings. India's own intelligence tradition is older than any of that, codified in a political treatise written more than two thousand years before the CIA existed, and it deserves to be the foundation of an Indian course, not a footnote to a Western one.

And it must not avoid the uncomfortable material. A course that teaches 26/11 and Kargil but skips the political manipulation of intelligence around Operation Blue Star, or the consequences of releasing Masood Azhar at Kandahar, is not teaching intelligence studies. It is teaching public relations.

What the Discipline Should Actually Rest On

A serious Indian intelligence studies curriculum has three obligations that no existing institutional pipeline currently fulfils.

It must root itself in Kautilya's Arthashastra, read directly rather than through intermediary commentary. The text is not ornamental. Kautilya's theory of the saptanga — the seven constituent limbs of a state — is a genuine framework for understanding why intelligence failures happen: a state that does not honestly measure its own strength against an adversary's will be surprised, and surprise is what cost India the Aksai Chin and the high ground of NEFA in 1962. His writing on upajapa, the sowing of dissension within an enemy's ranks, anticipates information warfare and proxy conflict with uncomfortable precision — read it alongside Pakistan's documented use of non-state actors in Kashmir and the parallel is immediate. And his unflinching writing on the ethics of secret means, including assassination and the corruption risks inherent in paying informers, forces the exact question a democracy must keep asking itself: what methods can a state use and still remain the kind of state worth defending?

It must use the testimony of practitioners as primary source material, not anecdote. B.N. Mullick's memoir of the seventeen warnings he placed before Nehru before the 1962 war and watched be dismissed is not colour commentary on a historical event — it is the most direct evidence available of how an intelligence-political interface breaks down under ideological conviction. R.N. Kao's near-mythical reputation as the architect of the Research and Analysis Wing deserves to be studied as institution-building, not hagiography. T.V. Rajeswar's account of knowing, in 1984, that the Golden Temple complex was militarised — and watching the political leadership delay action for electoral reasons rather than operational ones — teaches a different and arguably more dangerous failure mode than 1962's outright dismissal of warnings. These are not stories. They are case law for a discipline that has none.

It must treat failure as the central object of study, not an embarrassing footnote. 1962, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Kargil, the Kandahar hijacking, 26/11, Pathankot, Pulwama — each represents a genuinely distinct failure mode, not a repetition of the same mistake. Some are failures of collection. Some are failures of political will. Some, like Pathankot, occurred after reforms were already in place, and are therefore the most analytically valuable of all: they tell us not whether reform is needed but whether the reform actually worked. A discipline that cannot interrogate its own institution's failures with the same rigour a medical school applies to malpractice is not a serious discipline.

The Argument Most Often Missing: Why Defend India At All

There is a final, more difficult component that most security studies programmes — Indian or otherwise — simply skip, treating the value of national defence as self-evident. It is not self-evident, particularly to a generation of students who have grown up sceptical of state power, aware of surveillance overreach, and conscious of the human cost of counter-insurgency operations in Kashmir and the northeast. A course that wants to produce thoughtful citizens rather than reflexive nationalists has to make the actual case.

That case is not really a security case. It is a civilizational one. India is, by any honest historical accounting, an improbable country — a single democratic polity holding together a scale of religious, linguistic, and economic diversity that has fractured almost every comparable attempt elsewhere in history. It is the only major example of a non-Western civilisation that has built a functioning modern democracy without theocracy, without ethnic homogeneity, and without the kind of colonial-rupture reinvention that produced modern China. If that experiment fails — through war, through internal fracture, through a slow loss of institutional self-confidence — there is no other country positioned to demonstrate that it was ever possible. That is what an intelligence apparatus, at its best, exists to protect: not a flag, but a fragile and still-unfinished proof that pluralist democracy can work at civilizational scale.

But the case has to be held in tension with its opposite, because that tension is the only honest version of the argument. The same apparatus built to protect that democracy is also the most direct threat to the freedoms that make it worth protecting. A surveillance state that knows everything about its citizens, as the Supreme Court warned in 2017, does not protect them — it dominates them. Any course that teaches why India deserves defending without simultaneously teaching why the defenders must themselves be held accountable is not teaching intelligence studies. It is teaching propaganda with a syllabus attached.

What Indian Universities Stand to Lose by Continuing to Avoid This

The cost of not building this discipline is not abstract. It shows up as journalists who cover national security without the analytical tools to distinguish a genuine operational necessity from bureaucratic self-protection. It shows up as legislators voting on surveillance legislation without a grounded understanding of either the threat environment or the comparative constitutional law that should inform the limits of state power. It shows up, most directly, as a security establishment that recruits its analysts from disciplines — engineering, area studies, generalist administration — that were never built to teach the specific judgement intelligence work demands, and then is surprised, every decade or so, when the same structural failure recurs in a new uniform.

Building this course is not a small undertaking. It demands instructors willing to spend months securing archival access at institutions like the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, where the most important primary documents on India's one unambiguous intelligence triumph — the 1971 Bangladesh operation — remain only partially catalogued. It demands the discipline to use primary translations of a two-thousand-year-old Sanskrit text rather than the comfortable shortcut of secondary commentary. It demands a willingness to sit in the discomfort of failures that implicate political leaders still revered in public memory.

That is precisely the kind of intent and investment a serious discipline requires. India has built world-class institutions for almost every other domain that matters to its future. It is past time it built one for the discipline whose failures, uniquely among academic subjects, get measured in human lives.