The Guilty Men

By V Balachandran

Our intelligence agencies must be held to account.

On September 28, 1977, Japanese airliner JAL 472 from Paris to Tokyo was hijacked by Japanese Red Army (JRA) terrorists and taken to Dhaka. The hijackers had boarded the aircraft at Bombay. Osamu Maruoka, a JRA leader, when arrested in Tokyo on November 25, 1987, told his interrogators that they chose Bombay airport for its lax security after surveying other airports.

I was asked to fly to Pretoria in December 1994 to get a briefing from South African intelligence agencies on a possible white extremist plot to kill President Mandela during his ensuing visit to Delhi in January 1995. The intelligence report said that the assailants had chosen India for its lax security. Fortunately, nothing happened during that visit.

Nothing has changed during the last 30 years. It is, therefore, not surprising that a handful of terrorists could hold Mumbai to ransom for four days last month. Over a period of time our security institutions have deteriorated to such an extent that it would have been better had some of them been disbanded. It was reported that the NSG team could not reach Mumbai in time because the aircraft was not ready. When the NSG was raised in 1984-85 there was a standing instruction that a contingent should be ready at the Delhi airport with an ARC aircraft 24 hours, 365 days a year. Who has amended these instructions?

There have been several instances when ARC aircraft have been used for private purposes — as a VIP taxi — disregarding the standing orders. A parliamentary committee should go into the logs of the ARC fleet to find out how many private visits have been undertaken in the recent past under the guise of security-related visits. UPA leaders who had totally ignored internal security all these years now want to position NSG detachments all over the country. This is a knee-jerk reaction. The success of the NSG is thanks to its constant training in weaponry and mock exercises in their base camp, which keep them alert. Would such training be available all over India? How many years will it take to organise such facilities?

The biggest lacuna in our anti-terrorist methodology is intelligence integration. After every terrorist strike, state police and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) indulge in shadowboxing over the IB’s ‘alerts’ with the latter leaking information to the press that it had passed on intelligence and the states maintaining that what they received was not actionable information. Neither the IB nor the RAW has any legal standing. By the same token they have no legal accountability. The
state police forces, however, are answerable to the courts. They always get the rap.

Most intelligence establishments elsewhere in the world, barring dictatorships, have a system of accountability. The US has the Congressional Intelligence Committee authorising intelligence budgets. UK Parliament’s Intelligence & Security Committee inquires into major incidents involving its three major intelligence services. Most of these reports are available on government websites. In contrast, our intelligence services operate in great secrecy, mostly hiding their failures. It is high time we started an audit system to judge the performance of our intelligence outfits. The huge amounts of secret funds spent by these organisations should also be subjected to external audit since complaints abound that top intelligence officials spend some of the funds on personal indulgences.

While the US could establish a major overhaul of its internal security within 46 days of 9/11 thereby averting any subsequent attack on its soil, we have done nothing despite being battered by major terrorist attacks starting with the 1993 Bombay serial blasts. Till September 2008 the government of India did not think of studying the US government’s successful homeland security system (DHS). The pivot of this system are 58 DHS-funded 24-hour state fusion centres that continuously update state police and local security agencies with inputs from the National Counterterrorist Centre which integrates intelligence from a 16-member Intelligence Community.

In India, coordination between different state police systems and central agencies on terrorism is woefully inadequate. This would not have happened had we adopted a central counterterrorist information exchange centre as recommended by the Kargil review committee. Unlike the clear-cut demarcation of responsibilities laid down when the DHS was formed, we in India have a colonial and antiquated system of rules of business, which only lists the portfolios of different ministries without any description of responsibilities. We still do not know what the exact roles of the National Security Council or national security adviser are vis-a-vis that of the ministry of home affairs with regard to internal security. If at all the responsibilities are demarcated, it is not known publicly.

In the US, apart from constant Congressional oversight, pressure to perform well is codified and monitored by a legally empowered Homeland Security Advisory Council with 24 members, and a majority of them are from outside the bureaucracy. This is because of the belief that citizens are affected by terrorism and they should have a clear idea of what the government is doing for them. Unfortunately in India, general public or their representatives have no say in such matters.