The Home Ministry's cure for terrorism is worse than the disease

The Union Budget 2011-12 is unexceptional when it comes to supporting the Indian national security buildup. The formula adopted by the finance minister is to provide the sum asked for and add that “additional funds will be made available if required.” Such funds rarely get any public scrutiny, the parliament standing committees, do of course, examine the demands for grants, but in a normative rather than an analytical fashion.  As a result, people are unaware of the wider implications of certain decisions. One such relates to the Rs 39.75 crore appropriated for the National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid).
The challenge in the internal security area has only been seriously taken up in the wake of the Mumbai attack, even though the country has faced terrorist attacks for the past three decades. The post Mumbai efforts involve beefing up the National Security Guard to act as SWAT teams in various urban centres, creating a system of coastal and maritime security, as well as boosting internal intelligence coordination. 

Natgrid
All these are as they should be. But there are some measures which are now beginning to impinge on the rights of the average citizen. Prominent among these is the Natgrid for which some Rs 75 crore have been appropriated in the Union Budget in the last two years.  The proposal to link up all manner of individual information — tax, travel, internet and telecom usage, credit card spending, investments and so on, is the kind of thing that bureaucrats, especially national security ones, dream about. Sitting in their office, and at the press of the button, they can track everyone and everything at all times.
But this is the stuff of nightmares for the average law abiding person. Things would be fine if we had a sensitive and subtle bureaucracy. But we don’t. We have one which is already tipsy on power. While its core comprises of  dedicated and well-meaning persons, a significant proportion — much too large for comfort— are venal and not sufficiently ground in the ethics of good governance.  Trusting sensitive personal information to them is like allowing a fox to guard a hen coop.
A national grid where various intelligence agencies who collect information through various sources share their informationat various levels of classification makes for good sense and will aid  efficacious action against criminals and terrorists. But not the proposed Natgrid.
So far the principle behind the  interception of phone calls and its invasion into the privacy of a citizen is that he or she must  do something suspicious for which the authorities then seek a warrant which is signed by the Home Secretary and his equivalent. The interception  undertaken for a strictly limited period and the records subsequently destroyed.
What is being proposed now is an open ended system where as many as 11 intelligence agencies will be given a licence to trawl through the data banks of telecom and insurance companies, stock exchanges and banks, internet providers and airline booking networks to undertake  a grand fishing expedition which they hope will yield them something.
I am not being paranoid when I argue this. We have, after all, the example of the Radia tapes before us. These tapes were obtained by official sanction and were in official custody, yet they were leaked out. While there is an element of schadenfreude in the discomfort of some well known journalists being revealed as ethically challenged individuals, no crime seems to be evident, at least from the tapes so far released.
 Yes, they refer to lobbying and the craven politics of the UPA government, but that is in itself not a crime. There is considerable merit in Ratan Tata’s affidavit to the Supreme Court arguing that the indiscriminate publication of private conversations did constitute a violation of his constitutional rights.
Most of us will concede that the government needs to have the ability to tap phone conversations to take on organised crime, terrorism and money laundering. But the governments needs to assure us that its minions use the powers in a responsible way. As of now there is nothing in the law, nor the behavior of the government, to convince us that they will do so. 

NCTC
The Natgrid is the core of the grander plan of the Union Home Ministry to establish a National Counter Terrorism Centre. The scope of the NCTC, as outlined by Union Home Minister in his December 2009 Intelligence Bureau Centenary Endowment Lecture, would be truly awesome — not only would it subsume the Multi-Agency Centre, the Natgrid, National Investigation Agency and the like, but, also, more questionably,  the National Technical Research Organisation(NTRO) and the  the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).
There are two problems here. First, the existing MAC and enhanced security awareness since 26/11 have yet to break up a conspiracy in advance using all the current level of snooping that they have presumably been doing. Consider, on the other hand, the record of UK where several conspiracies have been rumbled in advance with sufficient evidence to jail the conspirators through an open trial.
In India, the intelligence agencies claim that they have disrupted several conspiracies, but none of them at the point where there was enough evidence to enable people to be fairly tried and convicted for their acts. Of course, there are always encounters, but then dead men don’t talk. Given the reputation of the police, these more often than not raise more questions than answers.

Flaws
The second issue is the scope of the NCTC. The NTRO and the JIC that Mr Chidambaram wants in the NCTC do not only deal with terrorism. Notwithstanding Mumbai, the Union Home Ministry needs to understand that terrorism is not the main threat to the country’s security. They are painful and ugly challenges, but they can hardly damage our system, in the manner an attack by an external state adversary can. The NTRO’s remit, for example, includes ballistic missile defence, or that part of it that deals with the detection of hostile incoming missiles, it also looks at, among other things, the issue of cyber security. Surely these are not subjects that can be supervised by the NCTC.
Actually, the US experience with its NCTC has not been particularly good. The obvious example is the case of Umar Farook Abdulmuttalab, the so-called underwear bomber. Information on his activities was known — the British intelligence sent a report to their American counterparts in November 2009 and his own father met and informed two CIA personnel in Abuja, Nigeria a week later about his predelictions. His name was added to the data base of the US NCTC, but was not sent to that of the FBI that  screened incoming air travelers. On December 25, Abdulmuttalab tried to detonate plastic explosives sewn into his underwear while on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
The obvious lesson here is that the large all-encompassing bodies are not a particularly good idea. In matters of security, as well of systems in general, there is need to build redundancies. In other words, systems where a failure does not end in a  cataclysmic disaster, because there are other systems  there as backups.
 We  need to stop,  think and question the logic of  outfits like the Natgrid and the NCTC which, besides being of questionable utility in fighting terrorism, are also a major encroachment into the very liberties our Home Ministry is supposed to protect.
Terrorism, a major threat, is not the only national security challenge we confront. But it is perhaps the only one which requires discrete and subtle use of strength, rather than a sledgehammer that the Home Ministry is envisaging and the Parliament  unquestioningly funding.
Mail Today March 3, 2011

Revamping Intelligence

This country’s intelligence culture is evident from two books that appeared in 2006. The first, the Mitrokhin Archive spoke of high-level penetration and influence-peddling by the KGB in India. It was politely ignored.
The second, by a former Intelligence Bureau (IB) official, Maloy Krishna Dhar detailed the political shenanigans of the IB, including the outrageous episode where Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi allowed his office to be used to bug President Giani Zail Singh in Rashtrapati Bhavan. Again, the book and the charge were coolly ignored by the entire political class.
The Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) arose from the disastrous defeat India suffered at the hands of China in 1962. Till then IB handled both internal and external intelligence as well as military intelligence. The R&AW got a good start under the leadership of Ramnath Kao, its first Director. But it would seem it has been downhill since.
India is one of the few democratic countries where the intelligence agencies are not supervised by the legislature. Actually there is little supervision by anyone at all. The misuse of money and facilities has become a byword. The Aviation Research Centre has aircraft for surveillance and liaison activities, yet there are reports of its aircraft being used to ferry politicians and provide joyrides for the bosses. Some of these were brought out in a book by Maj Gen V.K. Singh who’s now being prosecuted under the colonial Official Secrets Act.
Last month when a Pakistani minister announced that the ISI was being asked to shut down its political wing there was a great deal of amusement around the world and in India. But the fact is that the IB runs an equally big political operation. The IB may not funnel money to politicians, but it uses its machinery to spy on them for the benefit of the government of the day. The IB has a sophisticated secretariat to cover the entire political spectrum.
The result, naturally, is that these outfits don’t do their real job properly—protecting the country from external subversion and battling India’s enemies abroad.
Though a Group of Ministers’ decisions were approved in 2003, intelligence agencies used the 2004 change of government to block reform. The process got underway only in mid-2005 due to the sudden demise of National Security Advisor J.N. Dixit. The appointment of M.K. Narayanan as his successor led to expectations that reforms would be fast-tracked because he had himself been an IB director. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. Narayanan brought in cronyism into the intelligence agencies, allowing them to revert to the pass-the-buck culture.
In the process, the country’s new high-tech spying agency — the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) was not allowed to come up as directed by the GoM decisions. The NTRO was created to centralise all high-tech, and hence expensive, assets under one organisation to look after imagery and communications intelligence. Predictably, there was a lot of hue and cry from existing agencies who had to surrender turf. Narayanan as the chairman of the Technology Coordination Group to mediate conflicting claims refused to push the R&AW and IB to allow NTRO to come up. The agency remains stymied by poor leadership and morale.

Narayanan’s poor leadership of the National Security Council system is now becoming clearer. The coordination expected from the Joint Intelligence Committee does not seem to be working. The deputy National Security Advisers, a position once occupied by first-rate officers like Satish Chandra and Vijay Nambiar, are today held by people who need to be
accommodated for one extraneous consideration or other.
Actually, our intelligence services, particularly R&AW, do not have much of an operations culture. The bulk of their work is done through electronic intercepts and imagery intelligence, therefore the reluctance to allow the NTRO to come up. Another significant part of the work is to use money to buy influence and information. But the gap in an operations culture means that India has not even been able to deal with the ULFA militants living in Bangladesh.
As it is, little effort has been made to create a wider knowledge base for the intelligence agencies.The country’s language and area studies disciplines are the places where they can find interpreters, translators and analysts. Yet that is the last place they would go for them. First, because the output of our academic institutions is second or third-rate and second because the suspicious and bureaucratised agencies think that the best option is to train people in-house. As a result they can barely get the vast numbers of people you need to translate intercepts, foreign language papers and assess information. Just how skewed the system has become is evident from the fact that there are no Urdu interpreters in government service. We have millions of people who speak, read and write Urdu, but they are Muslims, and our intelligence agencies do not hire Muslims. So is it any wonder that they cannot penetrate jihadi groups?
Our agencies require urgent restructuring to enable their monitoring in a two-tier process. The first tier is supervision by ombudsmen to prevent misuse of the powers they wield. The second is that by the political class to ensure that public funds are spent for the purpose they have been appropriated in Parliament.
This appeared in Mail Today December 5, 2008

The UPA has not even attempted to reform the national security system

Last week I wrote, perhaps a shade effusively, about the achievements of the Manmohan Singh government — the performance of the economy under its watch, the legislation it has passed and so on. On security issues, however, the comments were more by way of negative achievements — that no event like Gujarat or Kargil had marred its record.
Unlike in other fields, the government has little to show by way of positive achievement in the area of defence and security. In the last four years the country has not faced any major threat to its security. This was even more reason why the government could have taken the opportunity to reform and restructure the defence and security apparatus of the country. But that has not happened and in the main we must blame the political leadership for this. As the experience of the National Democratic Alliance revealed, so huge is the task that it can only have been done by the political class. The United Progressive Alliance government inherited a positive impulse in this area in the form of decisions taken by the NDA based on the recommendations of a Group of Ministers which looked into the issues of defence management of the country. The recommendations of the GOM were well thought out and reflected a system-wide consensus.

Integration
But the UPA government has not just dithered, they have simply ignored any effort towards reform. The key area in which they were to have taken a decision was that of a Chief of Defence Staff who would be the chief military adviser to the government, along with the Defence Secretary who would be the senior-most civilian adviser. The CDS would have channeled all defence purchases to ensure there was no unnecessary duplication of effort. More important, his appointment would have initiated the process of integrating the three wings of the armed forces into a single fighting unit. This is crucial because the technological imperatives of the revolution in military affairs are already upon us. The RMA, based on new technologies of situational awareness and precision strike, cannot be effectively exploited unless the services fight as an integrated unit.
In the hands of the UPA, the GOM has become an instrument of blocking or evading decisions. The one major opportunity that the UPA had for defence reform related to the Defence Research and Development Organisation, but that was wasted by having a review committee headed by a former scientist of the organisation itself and some other former defence officials. In other words, the opportunity to make a decisive break from the organisation’s unfortunate history has been wasted.

Intelligence
It is not as though that the services have been starved of funds and equipment. Things may work slowly, but the Indian armed forces are being equipped with the best money can buy and the UPA government has not stinted on this score. The charge against it, however, is that it has not bothered to monitor how and why the money is being spent. The government has paid little attention to the larger issues of restructuring and reforming the services. The steady attrition of the army’s officer corps, with the best officers putting in their papers, and fewer signing up, is not a consequence of their pay alone. The problem is of a wider loss of esprit de corps of the force, manifested by instances of corruption and moral turpitude.
Other reforms pertained to the intelligence services. Most of the recommendations of the task force led by former Research & Analysis Wing Chief G.C.(Gary) Saxena were classified, but it is known that they called for extensive reform of the system. The 244-page paper given to the GOM was prepared by, among others, current National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan, former Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath and former R&AW official B. Raman.
It called for the creation of a new integrated Defence Intelligence Agency, a new agency called the National Technical Research Office which would own all the high tech assets of the intelligence services, and new data handling and inter-agency coordination systems. But in the four years of the UPA implementation of the recommendations have been fitful. They have been actively sabotaged by bureaucratic vested interests and undermined by inter-agency wrangling. The country’s ability to tackle the mutating terrorist threats is seriously in doubt, notwithstanding the hype about the recent SIMI captures. The key failure arises from the very fountainhead of the system — the National Security Council and its support bodies which were supposed to supervise this change. The NSC rarely meets and its support bodies are left to carry on routine tasks. Key decisions such as empowering the NTRO have not taken place. Neither have steps to ensure meaningful coordination among the MEA, IB, R&AW, the DIA and the state police intelligence services.
The primary reason for the failure in both the defence and security fields has been political. With the passing of J.N.(Mani) Dixit, the government lost whatever impulse it may have had to reform any part of the system. Former Intelligence Bureau chief Narayanan who succeeded him has been unable to overcome the limits of his own background and has been content to allow things to drift. But it is not his fault. He is by background a bureaucrat, accustomed to managing the system as it is. The onus for change lies with the political authorities. Unfortunately, this is where the problem lies. The Prime Minister, his other senior ministers and the chairman of the United Progressive Alliance are good people concerned about aam admi, social justice and India’s image abroad. Like Jawaharlal Nehru, they are not temperamentally inclined to bother about issues relating to security, especially since a threat does not appear to be imminent. The two key ministries dealing with security and defence have had very poor leadership. The less said about Mr. Shivraj Patil, the better. But equally both Mr. Pranab Mukherjee and Mr. A.K. Antony have proved to be failures in handling the defence ministry.

Guidance
The NSC system had been set up not to deal with the problems of today, but to anticipate those of tomorrow and initiate policy measures to counter them. In these circumstances, the past four years would have been a good time to push for restructuring the armed forces and the intelligence services. In these years, a new future has already come upon us. The Maoist threat does not have the capability of overthrowing our system, though it is exercising its ability to debilitate the country enormously. But all that the UPA has done is to acknowledge that there is a problem, not solve it. Terrorism has struck new and different roots in the country, expanding into urban centres in the South. For years there was an assumption that the situation in Tibet was stabilising and that the Indian agreements with China would lead to a border settlement. But recent events have belied that. The Tibetan rebellion and the Chinese response indicate that the region could remain a flashpoint in Sino-Indian relations for some time. The Maoist sweep in Nepal elections has introduced another area of uncertainty in our northern and unprotected border.
In the past decade or so, the Chinese have built up a formidable logistical capability in Tibet, including a railroad. In addition, the People’s Liberation Army has been completely modernised and restructured. Their Indian counterparts have not wanted for money or equipment, but they have not had the political guidance or leadership to take the steps needed to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
This article appeared in Mail Today April 16, 2008

Burmese Days

The events in Burma(Myanmar) have led to the usual round of self flagellation in India. Liberals have denounced the attitude of the government and demanded that India take a tough stance against the military junta, others have hit out against Sonia Gandhi for speaking at the United Nations on World Non-Violence Day on Gandhiji's birthday and not referring to events in Myanmar. The events in the country have brought home to us the difficulties that a wannabe superpower confronts. New Delhi has to not just address its own needs, but live up to the expectations of our well-wishers and friends and the fears of our adversaries.

Most Indians, speaking from their hearts, support the Burmese people’s aspirations for democracy, and want an end to the brutal military regime that has blighted their nation. But successive governments in India have had to deal with our secluded neighbor, ruled by a paranoid military regime, using their heads. In other words, New Delhi has had to calculate and calibrate its policies keeping in mind India’s national interests: First, to ensure that Indian actions do not result in an expansion of Chinese influence in the country; second, to ensure that Burma will not be used as a sanctuary by a slew of insurgent groups operating in Manipur and Nagaland.; and third, to access Burma’s considerable oil and gas resources.

While the frustration of those advocating action in Burma is understandable, its not clear as to what they would have had the government do. India’s leverage is strictly limited. Indian exports to Burma are of the order of $450-400 million, and imports around $80-100 million. (In contrast, Thailand is Burma's main trade partner accounting for some 49 per cent of its exports and providing for 22 per cent of its imports). Indeed, in relation to India, the levers are held by Burma because we are the ones that want Burmese resources and and security cooperation. So it is not surprising that the Indian reaction to the uprising last month was low key. New Delhi sought to steer clear from condemning the military junta, and instead pushed the generals to release Aung San Su Kyi.

Burma is already under a US and European embargo, so additional restrictions will hardly matter. In any case Burma’s economically most significant border—that with Thailand is virtually open. The Chinese who have far more leverage than India choose to term the events there as an internal matter and leave it at that. The ASEAN who gave membership to Yangon as an incentive to promote “national reconciliation” between the military and the people, have little to say about the current developments. The UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari toured the country and met Aung San Su Kyi twice, and obtained a commitment that the junta chief General Than Shwe will meet the jailed leader. During a briefing of the UN Security Council, he warned that there would be "serious international repercussions" if Burma did not move towards democracy.

If India is to be accused of cravenness, the attitude of Beijing is downright mendacious. At the UN Western countries circulated a draft to condemn the "violent repression" of democracy activists and called for a dialogue between the military and the opposition. The Chinese begged to differ. They said that the whole issue was an internal matter of the country and that pressure and sanctions would only encourage confrontation.

Earlier this year in January, China and Russia had vetoed a US-drafted Security Council resolution that demanded an end to political repression and human rights violations on grounds that the Burmese crisis was not a threat to international peace and security, the council's mandate.

Burma has been ruled by a military junta since 1962. The 1990 elections were swept by the National League for Democracy under Su Kyi, but they were annulled by the military led by the present leader General Than Shwe. After an initial effort to embargo the regime, the world began to come to terms with it. The Chinese were the quickest off the block. In 1989, they used their time-tested tactic for establishing themselves—providing arms transfers to a military regime. A deal in 1989 worth anywhere up to $1.5 billion not only signaled its strong support for a discredited military junta, but brought rewards in the form of access to the Hangyi Island on the Bay of Bengal which it developed as a deep-water port. Beijing also got access to the Grand Coco island, north of the Andamans, from where it could monitor Indian missile tests at Balasore in Orissa.

The Chinese actions were in keeping with its record of an amoral foreign policy that has made it the savior of unpleasant regimes around the world. China today is the major importer of Sudanese oil, it is, of course, North Korea’s main trade partner, and it has been Pakistan’s staunchest friend ever, supplying it with conventional and weapons of mass destruction. There is no regime that is outside the pale for China, and the standard pretext to oppose international action is to say that whatever is happening is an “internal matter” of the country. To an extent Chinese behavior is a function of self-interest. China is also an autocratic, ruthless regime which does not believe in democracy and has crushed the democratic aspirations of its people with force. So its stand should be no surprise.

Yet, countries like India have to contend with it, or be left with the option of pursuing a morally sound, but practically bankrupt policy that lacks the wherewithal to provide any meaningful result. Between 1988 military coup and 1994, India openly supported the restoration of democracy in Burma. India shares a 1,400-km long border with Burma that runs along a mountainous region from Arunachal Pradesh to Mizoram. Though militarily significant, the border is porous. In any case the tribal people are free to move up to 20kms on either side because of their interconnections. Though most of the Nagas live in India, a large section lives in Burma, as do Kukis and Mizos who claim a close relationship with the Chin peoples of Burma. There is a close relationship between the militancy in the Indian north-eastern states of Nagaland, Manipur and Assam and Burma. Naga and Kuki groups are able to use Burma as a sanctuary and training area, while the United Liberation Front of Assam and some Meiti insurgent groups of Manipur, use it to obtain arms. As it is, drugs from the golden triangle have led to serious addiction and HIV problems in some of the North-eastern states, especially Manipur.

In the early 1990s, Indian officials quizzed the Burmese about the Chinese activity, and were blandly told that the Chinese were helping their development efforts and India had the choice of doing the same. In 1997, the ASEAN admitted Yangon into the grouping as an alleged means of moderating its behavior So India followed suit, rather than be outflanked. It made diplomatic overtures to Yangon, offered it membership in the BIMSTEC grouping and offered aid. In recent years, New Delhi has provided some military aid, notably in the form of some old BN-2 Islander communications aircraft.

New Delhi’s primary concerns were driven by security—of the North-east, as well in a larger sense of the Bay of Bengal and its eastern shore and island territories of the Andamans and the Nicobar. The oil and the gas prospects are a bonus, though there are many in India who see the economic linkages as the means of developing the North-east, even while ridding it of the conditions that have given rise to the insurgencies. It must contest and counter Chinese gains, which is itself a tall order considering the enormous effort being put by Bejing which is also driven by the strategic need of finding ways of bypassing the choke point of the Malacca straits. According to analysts, China plans to construct a series of gas and oil pipelines and roads from Yunan to the coast of the Bay of Bengal in Burma not only to exploit Burma’s natural resources, but as potential trans-shipment points logistical lines leading into China.

As repression in Burma grows and the world community becomes restive over the situation there, the military junta has begun to dig in for the long haul. It suddenly shifted its capital to Naypidaw, some kms from Yangon, on the edge of a denuded forest. The intention is to prevent “regime change” by a military action on the more accessible Yangon.

The regime has also started re-jigging its relations with China to the detriment of other players. Early last month, an India-South Korea consortium that had the “preferential buyer” status for two blocks in the Shwe natural gas project were summarily told that they would have to defer to China. The gas field off the Arakan coast was discovered in 2003 and are expected to have one of the largest gas yields in South-east Asia. Clearly the military junta has calculated that it would be better to rely on Beijing’s hard-headed policies and UN Security Council veto than India’s woolly-headed approach. In any case, India’s options remain limited, especially because it continues to require the Burmese Army’s cooperation to check the north-eastern militancy.

The Burmese developments, where India is locked in a direct contest with China, brings out the need for not just a sophisticated policy, but an effective policy mechanisms in India. Our biggest weakness is the lack of effective institutions to guide our policies. As of now, policies relating to Burma are handled by a slew of ministries—commerce, petroleum and natural gas, home affairs, external affairs, and defence. India does have a national security council, but the body is merely a deliberative body, which takes a long-term view of a particular subject. In any case, according to observers, the NSC system remains non-functional. Decision-making bodies like the Cabinet Committee on Security are hampered by the fact that the system is based on the sum of the parts rather than a single integrated institution.

One part of the real story is that India’s effort to overhaul its higher defence management system has stalled. Efforts to overhaul the system and create new instrumentalities like the Chief of Defence Staff, or the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) have not worked as they should have. The ruling United Progressive Alliance government seems unable or unwilling to press ahead. It is no secret that the UPA's Home and Defence Ministries are its worst-run.

In the meantime, India fumbles with issues where its short-term needs have to be calibrated with its longer term world view and national interest. In the short-term we have to deal with the dictators in Burma, Pakistan or the mullahs of Iran, but in the long term we would want the emergence of secular-minded and democratic polities in these countries. But short-term compromises have a way of becoming long term policies, as the US seems to be discovering in the case of military in Pakistan. India is not what it is because of politics or history, but its democratic and secular values. Lose them and you lose the essence of the country.