Mahesh Dixit, a postgraduate medical doctor from Pune who joined the Indian Police Service nearly three decades ago, will take charge as Director of the Intelligence Bureau on July 1, succeeding Tapan Deka, who is retiring after four years in the post. Dixit is perhaps the first doctor to head the agency. Deka’s decision not to seek a third extension cleared the way for the appointment.
Dixit ranked 35th in the UPSC Civil Services examination but turned down both the Indian Foreign Service and the Indian Administrative Service, opting instead to join the Indian Police Service in the 1993 batch, allotted to the Andhra Pradesh cadre and later to Telangana after the state’s bifurcation. As a Superintendent of Police, he worked against Left Wing Extremism before moving to the Intelligence Bureau, where he was assigned to counter rising Islamist terrorism in Hyderabad. The city had emerged as a hub for the Indian Mujahideen and other pan-Islamist terrorist networks, including HUJI, and the joint efforts of the state IB and Telangana Police built what came to be regarded as one of India’s most effective counter-terrorism units.
Over 33 years of service, Dixit has spent most of his career in the field, heading Subsidiary Intelligence Bureaus in Kohima and Patna in addition to a foreign posting in Moscow. His core specialisation, however, has been counter-terrorism: he spent nearly a decade on Jammu and Kashmir, heading the SIB in Srinagar, before moving to IB headquarters. He currently serves as Special Director heading the counter-terrorism desk, where he has worked to counter Pakistan-backed terrorism in Kashmir.
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Dixit, alongside Gyanesh Kumar now India’s Chief Election Commissioner, who headed the Kashmir desk at the Ministry of Home Affairs at the time played a role in the run-up to the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A in Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. As head of the IB’s Kashmir wing, he also held responsibility for intelligence coverage along the 1,597-km Line of Actual Control in Ladakh, and oversaw IB’s intelligence inputs in the aftermath of the 2025 Pahalgam attack, as Indian forces tracked down and killed the three attackers in Operation Mahadev that July.
Colleagues from his IFS and IAS batches say Dixit had set his sights on the Intelligence Bureau from the start of his career. He now takes over as head of India’s internal security apparatus.
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