Intelligence, or its failure, is once again a chattering class talking point. Not even Shivraj Patil?s remarkable observations about the rights and wrongs of capital punishment can take the focus away from questions raised once again after Jaipur?s bombs. The pattern is depressingly familiar. More so when you consider India?s security establishment was supposed to have learnt valuable lessons from a humiliating intelligence failure 10 years back. On May 18, 1999, army commanders had sent up a company of the 8th Sikh Battalion to the now famous Tiger Hill in the Drass sector of the Kashmir border. There was no homework. Eight soldiers were killed and 33 went missing. The company was virtually wiped out. That was the defining moment of the Kargil war?proving how unprepared India was. The intelligence establishment had no idea that Pakistan?s Northern Light Infantry troops had come in, no idea what the extent of incursion was.
The Kargil committee was set up to revamp intelligence gathering and processing. But whether it is Chinese nuclear submarine pens in Hainan Islands or the presence of at least 10 bombers in Jaipur, our security establishment?s default position is to get caught by surprise. Tools or funds are not the problem. Neither is structural innovation. A multi-agency centre and the joint task force on intelligence was set up during the NDA?s term. The current National Security Advisor, MK Narayanan, was a member of this task force and his job was to improve coordination between the Centre and states. The task force has achieved little.
Narayanan?s picks are heading IB and RAW. But the current RAW chief, Ashok Chaturvedi, relative of the former Cabinet Secretary BK Chaturvedi, has not been keeping well for the past few months. The government does not want to fill the de facto vacuum. When the Jaipur blasts took place, IB chief, PC Haldar, a veteran operations man, was with his predecessor and current Chhattisgarh governor, ESL Narasimhan, in the state. Of course, that shouldn?t make any difference to reactive capacities. And indeed it didn?t. Because the problem is not the organisation per se but the quality of data.
Let?s look at how intelligence is gathered and processed in India. Raw data collected by intelligence operatives is processed by ?experts? (a joint director in IB or a joint secretary in RAW). They analyse the data and transform it into actionable intelligence after cross-checking with the officer?s own contacts or seeking corroboration via technical means such as electronic surveillance or satellite imagery, the latter especially in the event of hostilities.
After collation and interpretation, the information is disseminated in form of alerts. In case the information is of national importance, then the report (in the form of an unofficial letter) is taken up at the umbrella Intelligence Coordination Group headed by the NSA. States are kept informed by the Centre through the Multi-Agency Centre or the Joint Task Force on Intelligence. The state chief secretary or director general of police is kept in the loop on a need to know basis.
There?s, as we said before, nothing inherently wrong with this system. But RAW is still to recover from the defection of Rabindra Singh and is bogged by leadership issues and the IB has adopted a hands-off approach to tackling counter-terrorism, thanks to political signals. Human intelligence gathering is discouraged and the emphasis is on information acquired through technical means. But the fact is that from the 2005 Delhi blasts to the 2008 Jaipur blasts, scanning of millions of phone calls and intercepts have yielded nothing.
JeM sympathiser and a cleric from Phulpur, Waliullah, the prime accused in Sankat Mochan blast, told his interrogators that the ?Bangladeshi bombers? left their mobile phones in Allahabad before they went to attack Varanasi. Groups such as HUJI, which was blooded in the Afghan jehad, rarely use phones for communications.
India lost 1,093 persons in terrorist attacks in 2007, the fourth largest in the world after Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. But our intelligence chiefs are working in an environment where the wellbeing of the current political dispensation has acquired a large importance in the security establishment?s scheme of things.
Jehadi groups have to be outwitted by infiltrating them. That?s a hard way to gather intelligence, phone taps are so much easier, but there?s absolutely no other way to improve on the current intelligence inputs. What the Centre and states often get by way of intelligence inputs is generic or unverified reports or alerts that are basically designed to protect the agency?s turf.
A senior secretary to government tells this story of his younger days as joint secretary (North-East) in the Union Home Ministry. While on an official trip to Bangladesh, he quietly slipped out of the delegation to locate the residence of ULFA chief, Paresh Barua. Indian intelligence agencies had provided the Home Ministry the Dhaka address of Barua. Did the officer find Barua staying at that address? No, he found no such address existed.
Shishir Gupta is editor, Express News Service, The Indian Express