The Hindu : Internal accountability

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Wednesday, Sep 03, 2003

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Internal accountability

By Harish Khare

Pakistan's involvement and its intractable hostility to our safety and security is an old song. But we cannot keep on wringing our hands in despair, petitioning the "international community" to do something about Islamabad.

AFTER LAST week's Mumbai blasts, the time has come to ask a few hard questions of the alleged iron-willed practitioners of our new su-urajed `hard state.' The post-blast rituals and post-massacre drills no longer suffice. The post-violence rituals are only too familiar: The Deputy Prime Minister flies out to the scene of bloody massacre, announces the involvement of the Inter-Services Intelligence and repeats his demand for the "most wanted 20"; the Prime Minister and the President issue messages of condemnation; Foreign Ministers telephone our Foreign Minister, offering condolences and advising restraint; compensation is announced for the kin of those killed; the "martyred" army and paramilitary personnel are given a befitting funeral; politicians engage in blame game; within days, the "master-mind(s)" are arrested; Ministers and Police Commissioners hold press conferences to announce a "breakthrough," friendly and gullible journalists are palmed off "incriminating" evidence to link the arrested men to this or that outfit headquartered in Pakistan, and so on. After a few days, we move on to other local or national distractions, till there is another outbreak of terrorist-perpetrated violence.

Perhaps these rituals are needed to reassure the apprehensive citizens that they are not helpless, that the "government" is alive to its constitutional duty to provide safety and security to every Indian, that "we" do have the men and the arms to take care of the terrorists, and that our rulers are not insensitive to the plight of the common man. The therapeutic usefulness of these rituals cannot be overlooked, especially as we all know what happened in Gujarat last year when the rulers in New Delhi and Gandhinagar decided to do away with these rituals. But surely, a regime that proclaims to have bestowed on India the status of a "nuclear state power" ought to be able to do something more than simply wait for another terrorist outrage. The disease is no longer confined to Jammu and Kashmir but has now travelled to "smaller towns." What is most alarming is the qualitative change in the nature and origin of the potential terrorist: he is home-grown. The terrorist outfits and their ISI puppeteers no longer need to send "Afghanis" to attack targets; they are finding recruits here on the periphery of the national capital.

Pakistan's involvement and its intractable hostility to our safety and security is an old — and tired — song. We cannot keep on wringing our national hands in despair, petitioning the "international community" to do something about Islamabad. At least this was the promise of the `deshbhakts' five years ago, when the country was invited to vote for tough men who knew what tough measures needed to be taken to tell our detractors that India was no longer a soft state. It is a different matter that the country is less secure than it was five years ago, and terror has travelled from the Kashmir Valley down to the heartland. It is possible to suggest that some political leaders find that this periodic terror is good for their electoral health. May be.

But the cynical political calculations of a few cynical men cannot be sufficient reason for the failure of the overseers of the Indian state to put in place instruments, procedures and practices that deny the terrorist local support. Why should, for example, our political establishment go on blaming Dawood Ibrahim for suborning the loyalties of policemen in Maharashtra, Gujarat and other States? After all, Mr. D fled the country more than 10 years ago; Maharashtra, in the meantime, had a 24-carat nationalist government, headed by a Shiv Sena man, for five years; and, since 1998, we have been fortunate enough to have Sardar Patel the Second as our Home Minister. Yet we continue to believe that the only way to put an end to this criminal-terrorist synergy is to have the "most wanted" 20-odd characters in our custody, without once wanting to know why and how these criminals (now allegedly patronised by the ISI) continue to get the better of police establishments across the country.

In fact, it was 10 years ago — after the first Bombay blasts, in 1993 — that the N.N. Vohra Committee put its finger on the crux of the context which allows foreign intelligence agencies (like the ISI) to play their mischief: "all over India crime syndicates have become a law unto themselves. Even in the smaller towns and rural areas, musclemen have become the order of the day. Hired assassins have become a part of these organisations. The nexus between the criminal gangs, police, bureaucracy and politicians has come out clearly in various parts of the country. The existing criminal justice system, which was essentially designed to deal with the individual offences/crimes, is unable to deal with the activities of the mafia; the provisions of law in regard to economic offences are weak; there are insurmountable legal difficulties in attaching/confiscation of the property acquired through mafia activities."

Have we made any progress in our internal security management since the Vohra Committee alerted us to creeping enfeeblement of our law and order machinery? Admittedly not; and this enfeeblement has provided enough space for our nation's enemies to hand out franchises in the heartland. Besides the first Vohra Committee report, the country's rulers have also had the benefit of the second Vohra Committee report. The former Union Home Secretary headed the Internal Security task force; it was one of the four groups (besides intelligence, border management, and security) that inquired into the "Kargil" making. The Internal Security report remains a secret document, but it is well known that its most emphatic recommendation was that a "Federal Law Enforcement Agency" be set up. This recommendation was in tune with the first report, which had suggested a "nodal set-up", which, in turn, could draw on the resources of all intelligence and enforcement agencies, across the bureaucratic turfs. Nothing came of the "nodal set-up," primarily because the political leadership was preoccupied with survival games and the bureaucrats were unwilling to cede any turf. The proposal was further elaborated in the second report; the idea being that the criminals and terrorists had succeeded in setting up national and even global networks, and that it was only logical that the security agencies should pool their resources.

The Central Government's most glaring failure on the internal security front has been its inability to create such an agency. In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha, on March 11, 2003, the Home Ministry conceded "there is no consensus on the proposal due to the perception of some of the States that this could impinge upon their spheres of responsibility with regard to the maintenance of public order." The root of this perception is essentially to do with the entirely partisan political leadership at the North Block. This partisanship has neutralised whatever goodwill the Centre has traditionally enjoyed in dealing with the States.

More than this unhelpful partisanship, what has hampered the Union Home Ministry is Mr. Advani's failure to provide the sustained, involved and inspirational leadership to the internal security bureaucracies. A successful Minister is one who looks ahead without getting caught in the smoke and crises of the current battle; ministerial leadership means honing bureaucratic resources to anticipate and meet problems as well as to demand that officers perform. In this regard, the Union Home Ministry has been singularly unlucky. The Prime Minister needs to ask his Home Minister why he has not been able to sort out the internal security matrix.

A similar failure is evident in the other Ministry across the road. We have had a Raksha Mantri who has made a fetish of travelling to the remotest army posts to be with "the boys," but who has not yet demanded of his generals why they are not able to stop infiltration. The reason is simple. The Government has devised this clever stratagem of denouncing any demand for accountability on the national security front as an unfair questioning of the "jawan." This has worked well against an inept Opposition but in the process, the political leadership has lost its capacity and appetite for asking tough questions of the over-pampered generals as to why they continue to make the same mistakes again and again, especially in Jammu and Kashmir, as compared with the other para-military organisations. And because no show cause notice is issued either to the Home Minister or the Defence Minister, we shall continue to engage in our civilisational weakness of blaming the outsiders for our misfortunes.

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