Arfeen Angel:
When Union Home Minister Amit Shah conferred the Lokmanya Tilak National Award 2026 on National Security Advisor Ajit Doval in Pune on August 1, he described a legacy that history itself would be compelled to record. Whenever the story of India’s internal and external security is written, Shah said, a golden page will be reserved for Ajit Doval. For millions of Indians, and particularly for those who have watched the arc of Jammu and Kashmir over the past decade, that golden page is already being written — and much of it is set in the Valley.
The award, presented annually to individuals who embody the spirit of Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, could hardly have found a more fitting recipient. Tilak was a proponent of fearless nationalism, a man who placed the nation above self and inspired generations to do the same. Doval, in his acceptance, urged India’s youth to do precisely that — to place national interest above personal ambition and dedicate themselves to building a stronger India. It was not rhetoric. It was a summary of his own life.
From the Shadows to the Summit
Ajit Doval’s career reads like the biography of modern Indian security itself. A Kerala-cadre IPS officer who spent the bulk of his service in the Intelligence Bureau, he operated in the most dangerous theatres India has known — the Northeast during the Mizo insurgency, Punjab at the height of militancy, and, crucially, Kashmir in the darkest years of the 1990s. Long before he became a household name, Doval was working the ground in the Valley, engaging militants, negotiating surrenders, and helping turn insurgents away from the gun at a time when Srinagar’s streets belonged to fear.
That ground-level intimacy with Kashmir is what separates Doval from the strategists who study the Valley from Delhi’s conference rooms. He knows its lanes, its languages of grievance, and the machinery of proxy war that Pakistan built across the Line of Control. When he became National Security Advisor in 2014, as Amit Shah noted in Pune, he brought that lifetime of operational wisdom to the shaping of India’s national security and foreign policy. Nowhere has the result been more visible than in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Kashmir Test
Every National Security Advisor inherits Kashmir as a burden. Doval treated it as a mission. His doctrine — often described as “defensive offense” — rejected the old fatalism that terrorism from across the border was a permanent weather condition India simply had to endure. Instead, India would raise the cost of proxy war for its sponsors while systematically dismantling the ecosystem of terror, separatism, and terror financing within the Valley.
The results unfolded in stages. The response to Uri in 2016 and Pulwama in 2019 signalled that attacks on Indian soil would no longer be absorbed in silence; the surgical strikes and the Balakot operation redrew the rules of engagement and were widely understood to bear the NSA’s strategic imprint. Within the Valley, sustained crackdowns on terror funding networks, the choking of hawala channels, and relentless intelligence-led operations steadily shrank the space in which militancy could breathe.
Then came August 2019 and the abrogation of Article 370 — the most consequential constitutional decision on Kashmir since 1947. Whatever one’s assessment of the politics, the security management of that moment was extraordinary. A change that many predicted would set the Valley ablaze was executed without the mass casualties that doomsayers forecast. And it was Doval, characteristically, who did not manage it from Delhi. He went to Kashmir and stayed there for days, walking through Shopian — long considered a militancy hotbed — sitting on the roadside, and sharing meals with ordinary Kashmiris. The image of the country’s most powerful security official eating lunch with locals in South Kashmir travelled around the world. It said what a hundred press briefings could not: that the Indian state was not afraid of its own people, and did not intend to govern Kashmir from behind sandbags forever.
From Stone-Pelting to Statehood Conversations
The decade since has vindicated much of that approach. The organised stone-pelting that once paralysed the Valley’s towns has largely vanished. Terror recruitment, once a torrent, has slowed dramatically. Separatist organisations that ran a parallel political economy of shutdowns and hartals have been defanged or disbanded. Tourism has returned in record numbers, with millions visiting the Valley annually; cinema halls reopened after decades; the G20 tourism meeting was hosted in Srinagar; and in 2024, Jammu and Kashmir voted in assembly elections with enthusiastic participation, restoring an elected government to the region. Each of these milestones rested on a security foundation that Doval’s team spent years constructing — the unglamorous, invisible work of intelligence grids, coordinated policing, and denial of space to those who profit from chaos.
Amit Shah, in his Pune address, recalled an earlier chapter of this same story: how Doval’s guidance helped Gujarat Police crack the 2008 Ahmedabad serial blasts and a string of other bombing cases. It is a reminder that the Kashmir turnaround was not an isolated success but part of a consistent method — meticulous intelligence, operational courage, and an unsentimental clarity about the adversary — applied over a lifetime.
The Tilak Connection
There was a quiet poetry in the venue and the award. Doval recalled his own childhood in Pune, where his father served in the Army, remembering visits to the Chaturshringi Temple with his mother and first learning about Tilak in school. The boy who read about the man who declared that freedom was his birthright grew up to spend five decades defending that freedom — often anonymously, often at personal risk, in places where failure would have carried no obituary.
Tilak believed nationalism had to be lived, not merely proclaimed. Doval’s Kashmir record is nationalism lived: the conviction that the Valley is not a problem to be managed but a part of India to be secured, developed, and embraced. His message to the youth in Pune — nation above self — is the same message his career has broadcast to a generation of young Kashmiris now choosing universities, start-ups, and cricket academies over the false romance of the gun.
Golden pages in history are not written by those who avoid hard choices. They are written by those who make them and stand by them. In honouring Ajit Doval, the Lokmanya Tilak National Award has honoured the man who, more than any other single official, changed the question India asks about Kashmir — from “how do we contain the fire?” to “how do we build on the peace?” That shift, still unfolding, may prove to be his most enduring legacy.
