Indian Analysts
Are Asking For Army's Accountability
By
Harish Khare
AFTER
the recent Mumbai blasts, the time has come to ask a few hard
questions of the alleged iron-willed practitioners of our new
'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 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 traveled
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 traveled 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 patronized 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
organizations. 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 neutralized whatever goodwill the Center 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 traveling
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
organizations.
And
because no show cause notice is issued either to the Home Minister
or the Defence Minister, we shall continue to engage in our civilization
weakness of blaming the outsiders for our misfortunes.
The
writer is a columnist for The Hindu
