Olaf Kirkpatrick Kruuse Caroe

Sir Olaf Kirkpatrick Kruuse Caroe, (15 November 1892 – 23 November 1981) was an administrator in British India, working for the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Political Service. He served as the Foreign Secretary to the Government of India during the World War II and later as the Governor of the North-West Frontier Province (the frontier with Afghanistan). As Foreign Secretary, he was responsible for reviving the McMahon Line, which included the Assam Himalayan frontier (present day Arunachal Pradesh) within India. After retirement, Caroe took on the role of a strategist of the Great Game and the Cold War on the southern periphery of the Soviet Union. His ideas are believed to have been highly influential in shaping the post-War policies of Britain and the United States. Scholar Peter Brobst calls him the "quintessential master of the Great Game" and the "foremost strategic thinker of British India" in the years before independence.

Early life Born in London, Olaf Caroe was the son of architect William Douglas Caroe (1857–1938) and Grace Desborough Rendall (died 1947), a daughter of John Rendall, barrister. He was educated at Winchester College, where his maternal uncle Montague Rendall was headmaster, and entered Magdalen College, Oxford in 1911 on a demyship, where he read classics.

On the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the Royal West Surrey Regiment, rising to the rank of captain. He spent the entire war in India, where he began learning Urdu and Pashto and acquired a desire to return to the country after the war. Caroe obtained the British government's permission to revise the official Indian maps to show the McMahon Line as the new boundary and to include the Simla Convention in a revised volume of Aitchison's Treaties but to do so "unobtrusively". Caroe reissued the new volume in 1938, but still carrying the original 1929 date, and had the original volumes withdrawn. When the matter was discovered in 1963, it gave rise to accusation of a "virtual falsification" of the official records. Scholar Karunakar Gupta states that Caroe's zeal in operationalising the McMahon Line warrants it being renamed the "McMahon–Caroe Line".

Caroe took a great interest in involving native Indian officials in foreign service and training them in diplomacy. Two of Caroe's officers rose to high ranks after independence: K. P. S. Menon, who became India's ambassador to China and Soviet Union as well as foreign secretary, and A. S. B. Shah, who headed Pakistan's Political Service and later went as ambassador to Egypt.

After the war, Caroe was appointed as the Governor of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), on the northwest border of the Indian subcontinent, adjoining Afghanistan and Russia. He served in this role from 1946 to just before the Partition of India in 1947. Subject to accusations that he was too close to the Muslim League, he encountered opposition from Congress Party politicians, and was replaced in mid-1947 by Rob Lockhart as governor.

Strategist He wrote extensively after returning to Britain in 1947. His strategic ideas proved influential in the United States:

Works

The Pathans 550 B.C.–A.D. 1957. Macmillan and Company, London 1958