BSF ex-DG Pankaj Kumar Singh appointed Deputy National Security Adviser

Retired Director General of the Border Security Force (BSF) Pankaj Kumar Singh has been appointed as deputy National Security Adviser.

According to an official order, Singh, a 1988-batch IPS officer of the Rajasthan cadre, has been appointed on a re-employment contract for a period of two years. Singh retired as BSF chief on December 31, 2022 When Singh took charge of the BSF on August 31, 2021, he had created history of a son and a father holding the top post of a paramilitary force during their services.
His father and retired IPS officer of the 1959-batch, Prakash Singh, had also headed the BSF from June, 1993 to January, 1994.

Prakash Singh is considered an architect of police reforms in the country.He had petitioned the Supreme Court in 1996 for carrying out reforms in the police establishment following which the government started giving a fixed tenure of two years at least to the chief of the Intelligence Bureau, the CBI, foreign secretary, the RAW chief and the Union Home Secretary. 

Ajit Kumar Doval is the fifth and current National Security Advisor (NSA) to the Prime Minister of India. He is a retired Indian Police Services (IPS) officer of the Kerala cadre and a former Indian intelligence and law enforcement officer. Born in Uttarakhand in 1945, he was the youngest police officer in India to be awarded the Kirti Chakra meritorious service, a gallantry award for military personnel.

India’s September 2016 surgical strike and February 2019 Balakot airstrikes across the border in Pakistan were conducted under the supervision of Doval. He also helped end the Doklam stand-off and took decisive measures to tackle insurgency in the Northeast.

Doval began his police career in 1968 as an IPS officer and was actively involved in anti-insurgency operations in Mizoram and Punjab. He played a key role as one of the three negotiators in the release of passengers from the hijacked IC-814 in Kandahar in 1999. He successfully terminated at least 15 hijackings of Indian Airlines aircraft between 1971 and 1999.

Doval is said to have spent seven years as an undercover operative in Pakistan gathering intelligence on active militant groups. After a one-year stint as a secret agent, he worked at the Indian High Commission in Islamabad for six years.