Opinion - News Analysis   

India’s stalled intelligence war

Late last month, when police in Karnataka arrested Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami operative Riyazuddin Nasir on vehicle theft charges, they had no way of knowing the Andhra Pradesh resident was in fact among India’s most wanted terrorists.

If it hadn’t been for a series of fortunate breaks — including a chance encounter between files relating to the Karnataka arrest and a New Delhi-based intelligence official familiar with the case — Nasir might well have slipped unnoticed through the black holes in India’s counter-terrorism information system.

Nasir’s near-escape illustrates, as nothing else could, just how little has been done to give India’s police and intelligence services the tools they need to take on increasingly sophisticated adversaries. Even as investigators struggle to cope with terrorists with transnational resources and reach, bureaucratic wrangling has sabotaged the creation of an institution experts believe is essential to the effort.

Despite calls from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Committee on Security, and the Union Home Ministry, the Union Finance Ministry has refused to clear the hiring of the estimated 140 personnel needed to staff a new organisation intended to coordinate the counter-terrorism work of India’s external, domestic and military intelligence services. In effect, India’s effort to modernise its counter-terrorism operations has been choked at birth.

Plan to create the Multi Agency Centre, an overall hub for India’s counter-terrorism efforts, were first proposed by a high-level committee set up to study intelligence reforms in the wake of the Kargil war. Chaired by former Research and Analysis Wing chief Girish Saxena, the committee included now-National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan among its members, and carried out the first full appraisal of India’s intelligence services since independence.

MAC, along with state-level subsidiaries called SMACs, was to have run and operated a national counter-terrorism database, identified operational priorities, and built the capabilities needed to execute them. In turn, MAC was to have been fed by State-level police-intelligence Joint Task Forces. Ground-level intelligence work would have been carried out by Inter-State Intelligence Support Teams reporting to MAC.

Mr. Saxena’s proposals were accepted without modification in 2003 by a Group of Ministers which studied internal security issues. Five years on, though, MAC is staffed only by a skeleton crew of Intelligence Bureau personnel. While MAC does operate a database, powered by bare-bones computer systems designed in house, it has no real-time links to state police forces. Just five SMACs are in existence, one in each metropolitan centre, again run by a skeleton staff.

Given that the 140 jobs would involve an annual expenditure of less than Rs. 3 crore a year — a tiny fraction of India’s intelligence budget — the delay is hard to understand. Finance Ministry officials say the problem is built into the language of the Group of Ministers recommendations. Since the Group mandated that MAC pool the resources of several separate services, the Finance Ministry believes MAC should draw its personnel from their existing staff.

But the intelligence and defence services have pointed out that government service rules mandate that personnel can only be assigned to MAC on deputation once jobs are created for them to be posted to. The Indian Army, in particular, has been hostile to proposals for informally assigning personnel to MAC outside of the structured deputation system, saying it would create serious problems of discipline and accountability.

Interestingly, several expensive projects cleared by the Group of Ministers — among them the fencing of India’s borders, as well as the setting up of a Disaster Management Committee, a Financial Intelligence Unit and a Serious Fraud Office — are up and running, even as MAC languishes. “It’s all a question of which bureaucrat is pushing what project,” one Ministry of Home Affairs official noted, “not what needs doing first.”

Even as MAC has been choked, similar bodies have sprung up elsewhere in the world —informed by the ideas of intelligence experts whose proposals have been ignored at home. In the wake of the Al-Qaeda strikes in the United States of America on September 11, 2001, intelligence services across the world reviewed the weaknesses that had allowed terrorists to conduct an operation of unprecedented scale and sophistication without detection.

Officials in the United Kingdom, in particular, drew heavily on the MAC idea. Although its domestic intelligence service, MI5, had extensive experience of combating groups like the Irish Republican Army, its experts understood that the transnational reach and technological resources of Islamist organisations like the Al-Qaeda required a new degree of coordination between different services, each of which focussed on separate parts of the picture.

Under a broad government counter-terrorism strategy code-named CONTEST, reforms were instituted to pursue four distinct aims: the prevention of terrorist acts, the pursuit of perpetrators, the protection of targets, and preparation for future threats. MI5 assessments fed the work of the Joint Intelligence Council, which served as the government’s focal point for intelligence appraisal, and were made available to key politicians.

In June, 2003, the United Kingdom established the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, or JTAC—an umbrella organisation that closely resembles India’s stillborn MAC. Officials on assignment to JTAC helped the United Kingdom’s police special branches to develop regional intelligence cells, which work to turn information provided by the covert services into on-ground action against terrorist groups.

Similar reforms were implemented in the United States of America, after it emerged that failures of communication and appraisal facilitated the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda strikes. One major change was the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, with an express counter-terrorism intelligence charter—a one-stop assignation of political and bureaucratic responsibility for securing its citizens that India still lacks.

Among the reforms that were put in place to improve intelligence coordination was the creation of a new intelligence top-job: the Director of National Intelligence. A National Counter-Terrorism Centre, which closely resembles MAC in its conception, was set up to facilitate appraisal of intelligence flows from multiple agencies. The Federal Bureau of Investigations consolidated many of its counter-terrorism functions into a National Security Service.

In a June, 2007, article for the journal Homeland Security, analyst James Burch noted that the “domestic intelligence challenge in the United States is similar to India’s in terms of organisation and the scope of the problem.” Despite the reforms, the FBI experiences problems “with coordinating with multiple state and local efforts,” Mr. Burch pointed out, adding that “there is no clear linkage or relationship between the NCTC and the numerous state and local fusion centres.”

Still, countries across the world have realised that some coordination, even if it isn’t perfect, is better than none at all. Six years since the Saxena Committee submitted its findings to the government, and almost five years after a Group of Ministers on Internal Security accepted its recommendations, India is still waiting for action. For hundreds of citizens, action — if and when it does come — will have come too late.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Darwin’s legacy
A long neglected area
Of technology, efficiencies, and human dignity
India’s stalled intelligence war
The wrong man for the EU job
A new Russian engagement
Can Obama close the white working-class gap?
Corrections and clarifications
Militants’ arrest
Who killed Benazir?
Dangerous trend
Lopsided growth
Poignant article
Shining example

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu