The frontiers of criminality
in India have been expanding exponentially since Independence, with
terrorism and the changing internal security scenario adding a dramatic
new dimension to the character and scale of the challenge faced by
the intelligence and enforcement apparatus of the state. Apart from
insurgent and terrorist violence, there has also been a noticeable
upsurge of organized and transnational crime in recent decades, including
disturbing tendencies to collusive operations covering complex economic
offences, as well as linkages with powerful politicians and the bureaucracy,
on the one hand, and with international criminal and terrorist groupings,
on the other.
A combination of demographic,
technological and geopolitical factors suggests that these problems
have the potential for significant augmentation in the foreseeable
future. Already, many movements of extreme violence are led by men
who are obsessed by apocalyptic visions of genocide and omnicide,
and who, increasingly, are approaching the possibilities of securing
the means to achieve these ends. Indeed, intelligence and security
agencies across the world now concede not only the possibility, but,
in fact, the imminence of a future catastrophic attack, potentially
involving WMD technologies; among these, the most devastating and
accessible could well be biological terrorist attacks that could leave
millions dead.1
Terrorism is undergoing
radical, generational shifts, and when this transition manifests itself
in a new wave of catastrophic attacks, the resultant shocks could
destroy almost all capacities of response within the target systems.
With rare exception, however, India’s strategic and policy establishment
continues to prepare to counter nothing more than the last terrorist
attack, substantially oblivious of the continuous process of reinvention
that terrorists are engaged in. There is, in India today, little comprehension
of the magnitude and the evolving nature of the future threat of terrorism,
consigning much of the discourse on the subject to the realm of make-believe.
Terrorism, however, does
not exhaust the threat the country faces. India’s democracy is, today,
under sustained attack from within and without. In 65 years of independence,
the institutions of governance have never appeared as fragmented and
fragile as they seem today. Even as the capacities for governance
appear to be insufficient to fulfil the most rudimentary mandate of
modern administration,2 the institutions of governance
are confronted with a tsunami of rising aspirations, and by a divisive,
criminalized and polarized politics that exacerbates centrifugal tendencies
across the country.
It is within the complex
dynamic of these rising disorders that India’s intelligence apparatus
has to respond, and is to be evaluated. Despite its considerable achievements,
there is evidently a crisis in the intelligence establishment in the
country today, and it is obvious that the system is unprepared to
deal with the projected threats of the future. Indeed, it has seen
significant failures even in its efforts to confront the problems
of the present.
There has been much talk
of intelligence failure and intelligence reform over the past years,
particularly since the Kargil debacle of 1999. Nevertheless, the contours
of the crisis of intelligence in the country may not be those that
exhaust much of the public discourse. The current debate on intelligence
has overwhelmingly focused on ‘coordination failures’, centralization
or integration of command and control, including the controversial
proposals for the National Counter-terrorism Centre,3
‘accountability’, and, in a critique arising from a different direction,
the interface with human rights and fundamental democratic freedoms.
While many of these concerns
are legitimate, they can only be considered secondary, within a framework
of priorities, to far more urgent issues that plague India’s intelligence
establishment in an environment of rising security threat. Indeed,
unless the more pressing imperatives of focus and efficiency, legitimacy,
capacity and capability – including manpower profiles and technological
resources – are addressed, the broader ‘architectural’ discourse will
remain unproductive, even meaningless.
More crucially, all these
concerns, both the ‘higher order’ discourse on meta-institutional
reforms and the more pragmatic considerations of capacity, collapse
into the more fundamental enquiry: what are the legitimate concerns
and limits to an intelligence apparatus within the framework of democracy
– and more specifically, India’s democracy? And its corollary: how
are these to be realized? If a clear, coherent and detailed answer
could be found to these questions, most of the remaining conundrums
would easily melt away.
Within the theory of
democracy, there is a powerful stream of justification that argues
that democracy is, itself, to be maximised as an ‘ultimate value’,
as opposed to the contrasting options of ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘tyranny’.
Such a framing of the question is obviously emotionally loaded – for
how could authoritarianism or tyranny be preferred to democracy, freedom
and the rights of man? Advocates of this thesis tend to emphasise
the value of certain processes, such as elections, deliberation, and
the separation of powers, and various relational and ethical criteria,
such as freedom, equality, justice, rights and participation, which
are regarded as good and desirable in themselves, without reference
to the objective circumstances of their operation or the results they
produce.
Such an orientation has
resulted, in India’s imperfect democracy, in an excessive emphasis
on form, and an enduring neglect of substance, with a new institution
or new legislation being proposed to ‘resolve’ every new – or newly
perceived – problem. The abundance and impotence of existing institutions
and laws to secure their purported objectives has done nothing to
discourage this orientation, which appears to have deep roots in the
highest institutions of the state, as well as in what passes for the
intellectual elite in this country. Within such a framework, clearly,
the inherent secrecy of operations of intelligence agencies would
find little legitimate space, unless it was superimposed with layers
of oversight which, in present circumstances, would effectively paralyse
the agencies from performing any but the most innocuous and ineffective
of functions.
Such a perspective, however,
militates against far more vibrant and realistic traditions of democracy,
which have never shied away from the fundamental truth that democracy
is, in essence, a system of government. Few, in India, understand
and appreciate the tremendously hard-headed realism that underpinned
democratic theory in its early contours, and these origins have been
buried deep under the increasingly deceptive and diversionary populism
of contemporary electoral democracies, not only here, but, increasingly,
across the world. The truth is, the idea of democracy as an end in
itself, rooted in the intangibles of ‘popular sovereignty’ and the
‘will of the people’, cannot provide any satisfactory justification
without reference to outcomes. Democracy must find its justification
in the world of hard facts. Politics, in our world, is ultimately
concerned with the relationship between the governing and the governed,
and it takes little wisdom to conclude that it is about power, and
about the outcomes of the distribution and exercise of power. No system
of government can be an ultimate ideal without reference to what it
can do, or does, for the governed. As Giovanni Sartori notes, “a democracy
cannot pass the test, in the long run, unless it succeeds as a system
of government. For if a democracy does not succeed in being a system
of government it does not succeed – and that is that.”4
If democracy is to succeed
in practical – and not merely notional – terms, it must, first and
above all, be secured. It must recognize the various threats to which
it is exposed, and acquire the capacities and capabilities to confront
and neutralize these.
Democracies are, today,
everywhere under unprecedented attack. Fundamentalist creeds and ideologies
of hatred and enveloping violence have created movements that seek
millennial transformations that would destroy, not just democracy,
but civilization itself and all the freedoms that have come to comprise
it. Such movements have, of course, secured only very limited success
against the broader democratic edifice and endeavour, but even where
this is the case, the damage they have done is colossal. The extraordinary
costs they have inflicted, not only in the visible terms of lives
and resources lost, but of the long term opportunities of development,
the loss of freedom for large populations, and the instability, disorders
and suffering they generate even through occasional acts of disruption,
can hardly be quantified.
These threats are infinitely
compounded by a regime of collusion and criminalization of the state
apparatus that has weakened governance everywhere. The Vohra Committee
had written about the urgency of breaking down the politician-bureaucrat-criminal
nexus after the 1993 Mumbai bombings. Nearly two decades later, if
anything, this nexus appears immensely stronger. It needs to be constantly
reiterated that the activities of the corrosive cabal of the corrupt
that is eating away at the democratic and constitutional edifice from
within, is not only a law and order, but an urgent internal security
concern for the country. An elite whose urge for domination is easily
translated into a cynical machtpolitik based on force, fraud,
and the ruthless use of power, is as much a danger and possibly even
more detrimental to the national interest, than any terrorist movement.
It is necessary to recognize,
moreover, that major crimes occur within an enabling environment that
comprises a multitude of lesser transgressions; that the distressing
theatre of a catastrophic terrorist attack is the culmination of a
protracted series of concealed – and preventable – offences that relies
on a network that services both petty and major crime. The same hawala
networks, for instance, service corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and
businessmen, as well as terrorists. Smuggling channels that bring
grey market goods into the country also bring in arms, ammunition
and explosives. And the same compromised enforcement agencies and
personnel ‘look the other way’ when such crimes occur.
It is significant that
those who have spoken the loudest – particularly in the wake of major
terrorist attacks – about reforming and restructuring India’s intelligence
‘architecture’, have tended to maintain a deafening silence on an
overwhelming proportion of these concerns, preferring to exploit the
hysteria provoked by occasional acts of terrorism to augment the powers
of select institutions, or to surreptitiously alter the constitutional
distribution of powers between the Centre and the States.5
Nevertheless, within
the broader context of the multiplicity of threats to national security
and their impact on the rights and welfare of the average civilian,
it is evident that the presumption of an inherent contradiction between
intelligence and human rights or democratic freedoms is fundamentally
false. Indeed, intelligence operations are often crucial in the protection
of human rights, particularly where these are threatened by organised
criminal or terrorist violence, by deviant elements within the state
apparatus, and by the distortions that corruption and abuse of power
introduce into the framework of constitutional governance. Absent
effective intelligence, no possible preventive or corrective to these
ills can be found. All these issues necessarily fall within the legitimate
and pressing concerns of a principled intelligence agency within a
democratic framework. There is, here, no necessary conflict between
democratic values and individual freedoms, on the one hand, and intelligence
operations, on the other. Principled intelligence operations are,
in fact, necessary to the fuller exercise of freedom by the average
citizen. It cannot be the case, within any just system of democracy,
that the rights of criminals and those who violently transgress the
law should have precedence over the rights of their victims – both
potential and actual; this, however, is what the system for the protection
of rights has come to mean in India. A just society cannot owe its
criminals a protection greater than it affords those who abide by
its laws.
It is useful to notice,
here, that much of the assault on democracy is ideological, subversive
and covert, and is executed through agencies that tread the margins
of the law. Virtually all insurgent, terrorist and organised criminal
groups, today, set up front organisations, or penetrate and exploit
groups of ‘useful idiots’, to manipulate the interstices and peculiar
vulnerabilities of democracy, for propaganda, for campaigns of disruptive
protests and demonstrations, to create legal obstacles for the functioning
of security agencies, to propagate their virulent creeds, and to clandestinely
recruit to their ‘armies’. These are constituencies that adopt the
language and idiom of democracy, even as they set about to destroy
democracy. An overwhelming proportion of these activities cannot be
countered within the framework of a normal ‘enforcement’ apparatus
– which is ordinarily galvanized only after the commission of a specific
offence. More significantly, democracies in general and Indian democracy
in particular, have failed to mount an effective counter-campaign
at the ideological level. At least part of such a counter-campaign
would necessarily include the sharing by intelligence agencies, of
authoritative assessments and information that does not have operational
implications. Where these reach the sphere of public discourse, they
would generate both greater awareness and cooperation, on the one
hand, and better feedback for the agencies themselves, on the other.
The wholesale marking of all intelligence information as ‘secret’
is both counter-factual and counter-productive. There is a vast quantity
of intelligence flows that can and should be widely published, and
such publication would generate greater strength and credibility for
the agencies and help promote India’s security objectives. An essential
function of the agencies is to create the operational, political and
diplomatic environment where India’s security interests are better
projected and protected. Public advocacy and creating international
perceptions on a range of issues are essential to this function, and
must be facilitated by moderated information flows from the agencies.
It is useful to recall that a ‘media cell’ was established within
the Intelligence Bureau in 2004, and operated for a couple of years,
but was abruptly and inexplicably dismantled thereafter, with information
flows reduced to the fitful, opportunistic and unreliable system of
‘leaks’ once again. A permanent interface with the media and public
would serve both public and agency interests, and is an integral element
of the modern intelligence apparatus in the more advanced countries
of the West.
These, then, are some
of the legitimate and necessary functions of intelligence agencies
within a democratic framework. However, just as democracy cannot be
justified without reference to outcomes, intelligence agencies will
have to root their own justification in the results they produce.
To the extent that such results promote the ends of democracy, the
greater security of the people, and the substance – as against the
rituals associated with the protection – of rights, their structures
and operations will be legitimized. To the extent that their operations
incline to exceptionalism, partisan interventions and manipulation,
and the further accentuation of the distortions of the system, they
become progressively delegitimized – and eventually will find their
power openly challenged and destroyed.
The crucial question,
consequently, is: What masters does intelligence serve? If it is harnessed
to partisan interests, to distort democracy and suppress legitimate
freedoms, it is the enemy of the people and of constitutional governance.
This, unfortunately, is manifestly the case, for instance, in Pakistan,
where an entire nation has been devastated by the machinations of
a corrupt elite operating through a lawless intelligence apparatus.
And while we may celebrate the fact that India is not Pakistan, our
satisfaction must be at least somewhat tainted by the periodic subordination
of the Indian intelligence apparatus to partisan political ends. Indeed,
while authoritative assessments on this are naturally unavailable,
one former Intelligence Bureau officer has claimed, without elaboration,
that at least half of the Agency’s human resources are “utilized in
a questionable manner”.6
The legitimacy and the
effectiveness of intelligence agencies are best served where agencies
make a clear distinction between the state and regime – though the
state is, of course, represented by the transient regime. Legitimate
intelligence operations serve the interests of the constitutional
state, and are required to resist subordination to the partisan interests
of particular regimes from time to time. National security and constitutional
values are the touchstone against which legitimacy is to be defined.
Intelligence agencies discredit themselves by misdirection; by providing
false, misleading and ‘convenient’ intelligence – intelligence that
conforms, not to the realities of the ground, but to the expectations
of the political executive and other ‘consumers’; or by their willingness
to lend themselves to partisan political abuse of powers, or to political
and electoral manipulation.
Within a democratic framework,
consequently, the integrity, effectiveness and legitimacy of intelligence
agencies and their operations will depend substantially on the restraints
within which they function. ‘Accountability’ has become the new byword
of intelligence reform, and many have quickly lifted current western
models of parliamentary oversight as the new panacea for the ills
that follow from the misuse and abuse of the intelligence apparatus.
Like many of our hasty and borrowed ‘solutions’, however, this reflects
a misunderstanding both of the original ‘models’ and of the ground
situation within India. Efforts to impose Parliamentary and Congressional
oversight in the West have proved, at best, cosmetic in impact, and
Western agencies have remained susceptible to misuse under an aggressive
political executive – the case of the distortion, indeed, fabrication,
of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD capabilities by both US and British
intelligence is an obvious, though not isolated, example. The business
of intelligence will remain, by its very character and mandate, secret.
It is unlikely that the relatively immature institutions of Indian
democracy would be any more successful than their Western counterparts,
in creating an effective system of parliamentary oversight though,
given the profile of elected representatives in India and the polarized
nature of the country’s politics, any such system can be expected
to be far more disruptive of the agencies’ operational effectiveness.
The most effective system
of restraints would be one that is based on professionalism, efficiency
and integrity of the agencies and their operations. Once again, invasive
intelligence gathering and operations are legitimized by their outcomes.
Where intelligence operations result in arrests, if there are clear
convictions, within acceptable timeframes, through transparent judicial
processes, such actions would find broad public validation. Where
intelligence-based operations result in protracted detentions with
negative or inconclusive judicial outcomes, public opposition to such
actions increases, even as purported ‘victim communities’ become more
resentful and potentially radicalized. Again, where particular intelligence
initiatives are seen to serve transparent national interests, they
will be publicly validated; where they are seen to serve partisan
and perverse political interests, they will bring the broader powers
of the agencies under increasing and intense scrutiny.
This raises the question
of one of the most glaring lacunae in India’s present system of intelligence
gathering: the very limited quantum of evidentiary intelligence –
intelligence that can stand up to the scrutiny of the Courts. Such
evidentiary intelligence, and the meticulous documentation of processes
that lies at its foundation, has now become an urgent imperative for
all intelligence operations, both to secure the visible outcomes that
are a necessary component of legitimacy, and to exclude the misdirection
and abuse of intelligence resources. The future legitimacy of agencies
will depend on the integrity of process and the broader integrity
and credibility of the agencies and their operations.
It is abundantly clear
that, given the very wide mandate of intelligence agencies within
the framework of Indian democracy, and the rising imperatives of a
greater efficiency and integrity of processes, current capacities
across the board – human, technological and material – are all drastically
insufficient. Given their present profiles, it is simply impossible
for existing agencies to fulfil their necessary functions, and to
develop processes and records that would meet the demands of integrity
and professionalism. This deficit of capacities lies at the very heart
of the failure to meet the requirements of democracy – both in terms
of the tasks that are to be concluded and of the nature of processes
that must be maintained. This problem also lies at the heart of many
of the abuses that are criticized, particularly by the human rights
lobby. The short cut and the cheat become a necessity when the capacity,
capability and endurance to run the full course are lacking. It has
been noted, in another context,
|
The established
judicial and human rights narrative in India has attributed
the denial of freedom and suppression of rights to an excess
and consequent abuse of power vested in state institutions,
and has thus sought to progressively constrain and emasculate
these. A counter-narrative demands greater and greater impunity
for state agencies to counter rising threats to security. Both
these positions are a complete misreading of both reality and
the imperatives of constitutional governance. The cumulative
brutalisation of the Indian state is a consequence, not of any
excess of power, but of a progressive erosion of capacities
and capabilities. It is not power but infirmity that brutalizes
the Indian State and its agencies. Endemic deficits of capacity
in every State institution have made it impossible to secure
the necessary and legitimate ends of governance through due
process, and the result is a progressive resort to short cuts
and quick fixes. As the state weakens, power becomes progressively
randomized, uncertain, malignant.7
|
Intelligence agencies
and their activities have been demonized within the democratic framework,
largely as a result of their abuse or misdirection by an unscrupulous
executive – and such abuse and misdirection is a reality, not only
in India, but in varying measure, all over the world. The occasional
perversion of the essential functions of intelligence agencies cannot,
however, take away from the inherent necessity of intelligence work
within any complex and large system of management, including democratic
governance. It remains, nevertheless, crucial to recognize that democracy
is built on an extraordinary tension, a very fine balance, between
freedom and restraint; the slightest unevenness, and freedom hurtles
into licence, or restraint into tyranny. The greatest endeavour of
civilization is to find ways of being strong without being oppressive.
This is a time for pragmatic
and effective, not idealized or Utopian, solutions. At a time of extreme
uncertainty and risk in India’s internal and external security environment,
the demands for greater flows of enormously detailed and reliable
intelligence can only grow. At this time, moreover, the enemies of
India’s democracy will use the very instrumentalities and freedoms
of the country’s legal and constitutional processes to attack the
structure and operation of the Agencies. In these circumstances, the
most certain measure to preserve the legitimacy and effectiveness
of these Agencies will be to establish and maintain the highest standards
of probity and professionalism, of demonstrable efficiency and effectiveness,
and of comprehensive capacities and capabilities to serve and protect
the state and her citizens. In failing to do this, the Agencies would
not only fail themselves; they would fail India’s democracy.
-
Ajai Sahni is
Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management and
South Asia Terrorism Portal; Editor, South Asia Intelligence
Review; and Executive Editor, Faultlines.
-
See,
Ajai Sahni, "Global Terrorism in an Age of Uncertainty", Presentation
at the Seminar on War Against Global Terror, Centre for
Joint Warfare Studies, April 15, 2009, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/ajaisahni/09AS-14CJOWS.htm.
-
See, Ajai Sahni,
"Weakness Compounding Weakness The Centre and the States in India's
Internal Security", Presentation at the Nehru Centre, Mumbai,
June 8, 2012.
-
See, Ajai Sahni,
"NCTC: National Confusion on Terror by Centre", South Asia Intelligence
Review, Volume 10, No. 34, February 27, 2012, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/Archives/sair10/10_34.htm;
Ajai Sahni, "Counter-terrorism: The Architecture of Failure",
Paper Distributed at the National Seminar on Counter-terrorism
Organised by Force 1, Mumbai Police; BPR&D; and the Strategic
Foresight Group at Mumbai, November 24, 2011, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/ajaisahni/11AS-19Mumbai2611.htm.
-
SARTORI, Giovanni,
Democratic Theory, Greenwood Press Publishers, 1962, pp.
109-10.
-
Ajai Sahni,
"NCTC: National Confusion on Terror by Centre", op. cit.
-
Maloy Krishna
Dhar, Open Secrets: India's Intelligence Unveiled, New
Delhi: Manas Publications, 2005, p. 518.
-
Ajai Sahni,
"Freedom in Security", July 2011, http://infochangeindia.org/agenda/freedom-of-expression/freedom-in-security.html.
(Published in The Indian
Police Journal, Vol. LIX No. 4, October-December 2012)
