He belongs to the 1968 batch of the Kerala cadre and retired as chief of the Intelligence Bureau in January 2005. Mr. Doval, who belongs to Garhwal, has outstanding credentials as an operations man. He made his name as a field operative in the Mizoram insurgency where he broke rebel leader Ladenga's hold over his private army. In 1989, he lead an IB team along with the Punjab police and National Security Guards in Operation Black Thunder to evacuate terrorists from the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

Does Left Extremism really pose a threat to India’s security or is it something that media has hyped for want of better stories? After all, they don’t stand for secession, do not question India’s territorial integrity and apparently are not working as proxies of powers hostile to India. They, at best, want a regime-change, albeit through violence, which many others would also vote for. Or is it merely the problem of hunger and poverty that needs a soft approach.