Author: Praveen Swami
Publication: The Hindu
Date: December 5, 2011
URL: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2687373.ece?homepage=true
Large part of Intelligence Bureau remains
deployed on political tasks, not national security duties
Early this summer, India's intelligence services
were facing the most serious internal security threats since 26/11: new urban
terror cells, on which there was little information, were known to be planning
strikes; Maoist insurgents had expanded their reach and lethality to unprecedented
levels; Pakistan's descent into chaos had threatened renewed violence in Jammu
and Kashmir.
Few people at the North Block headquarters
of India's domestic intelligence service, the Intelligence Bureau, cared:
dealing with these national problems, strange as it might sound, isn't their
job.
Instead, highly placed intelligence sources
have told The Hindu, a large part of the IB's resources were committed, and
remain committed, to providing the government raw information and assessments
on its increasingly bleak political prospects. In the summer, the IB carefully
monitored Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's public meetings in Uttar Pradesh
after the events at Bhatta Parsaul; later it sought to penetrate Anna Hazare's
anti-corruption mobilisation in New Delhi.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Union Home
Minister P.Chidambaram, the sources alleged, both received briefings on these
events, in part based on passive communications intelligence monitoring -
technology capable of intercepting staggering amounts of voice, text and e-mail
data, without legal authorisation. Earlier this month, The Hindu, in partnership
with a media consortium brought together by WikiLeaks, revealed India's intelligence
services and police forces had made large-scale acquisitions of such equipment
since 26/11.
It is improbable that either the Prime Minister
or the Union Home Minister knew what the basis of the information provided
to them was - and neither, the sources insisted, had authorised its use. The
equipment had in fact been deployed with a legitimate objective - ensuring
that at large rallies political leaders were not targeted by terrorists. There
are, however, no firewalls in the IB to ensure that data obtained for counter-terrorism
aren't available to political analysts; nor is there a system to ensure that
the interception of information is first logged, and then destroyed.
Less than a third of the IB's estimated 25,000-strong
manpower, two former high-ranking officers told The Hindu, is dedicated to
what might be described as national security tasks - like monitoring terrorist
groups or extremist organisations. Even that ratio, one serving officer said,
was "a charitable assessment."
There are at least two joint directors -
officers of a rank equivalent to inspectors-general of police and joint secretaries
to the Government of India, who sit at the apex of the permanent bureaucracy's
operational systems - devoted to analysis of the activities of Congress dissidents
and non-Congress parties. Five other joint directors have the job of making
assessments of the political landscape across India, with the help of the
stations the IB has in State capitals, which in turn help the Director brief
the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister on potential political challenges
emerging across the nation. There are only one or two joint directors for
the operations division that deals with counter-terrorism.
Even though it is improbable that the Home
Secretary would issue warrants to tap the conversations of opposition leaders,
the IB was able to use technology to build a picture of who had been talking
to whom and when - and, in some cases, what their conversation had been.
For politicians in power, this kind of information
is invaluable; for everyone else, it ought to be a nightmare.
The East India Company's political officers,
the seeds which gave birth to the modern IB, saw mass movements as the main
threat: for them, state and government were one and the same thing. Little
changed in the years after Independence: except in the North-East and Jammu
and Kashmir, the IB invested the bulk of its energies on monitoring revolutionary
communists. The IB's anti-communist unit, the "B-Wing," was its
most prestigious division; the former National Security Adviser and now-West
Bengal Governor, M.K. Narayanan, spent much of his career in the unit.
In 1969, though, after Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi broke with the right wing of her party, the B-Wing diminished in size.
Mrs Gandhi believed that the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,
not the Left, was the principal threat to India - and also, weakened by the
rifts in her party, began to use the IB as an independent channel of information-gathering
on adversaries and the bureaucracy. "There were plenty of people in the
intelligence services who built careers out of feeding her paranoia,"
one contemporary recalls.
Following the end of the Emergency, her abuse
of the IB led some officers to be hounded out - but there was no effort at
structural reform.
In 1987, on the eve of the outbreak of the
long jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, the IB station in Srinagar had fewer than
100 personnel - most of them focussed on the Congress' troublesome ally, the
National Conference, not the Islamist networks that would soon send thousands
of people across the Line of Control for training at Inter-Services Intelligence-run
training camps.
Punjab had a far larger IB station - but
much of it was, again, committed to watching the many factions of the Shiromani
Akali Dal through the 1970s. India, as a result, had next to no information
on the training of Khalistan terrorists and their links with the ISI until
the early 1980s.
Ever since then, the numbers of IB personnel
committed to national security tasks has slowly grown - a process that has
been further nudged along by the organisation's current chief, Nehchal Sandhu,
himself a career-long counter-terrorism operative.
'A product of history'
"I think the problem was the product
of history," says A.S. Dulat, a highly regarded career intelligence officer
who retired as chief of the Research and Analysis Wing after serving in the
IB for over two decades, "the product of time when we could not take
our survival as a nation for granted. It is unforgivable that it still goes
on today - and it needs to stop, now. It is in the interests of neither our
intelligence services nor our polity, just a handful of self-serving individuals."
Not a few serving intelligence officers agree
with that - but national security still hasn't become the IB's principal task:
it only began monitoring the Maoist movement late in the day, and police officers
in West Bengal, Orissa, and Chhattisgarh told The Hindu that the organisation
has only just begun to put together a serious body of intelligence.
Expending staff resources on political intelligence
gathering is all the more reprehensible because the IB is desperately understaffed.
In 2008, the Union government announced it had sanctioned 6,000 additional
staff - expanding the organisation by almost a quarter. In practice, though,
the strength of the 25,000-member organisation has stayed static, in part
because it hasn't found the kinds of staff it needs, but also because it can
train only some 1,200 personnel a year, barely covering for retirement.
Does this mean the IB's political intelligence
work should end?
Complex questions
Back in March 1658, Henry Cromwell, Lord
Deputy of Ireland and Oliver Cromwell's son, offered an evocative description
of what intelligence services are called on to do, in a letter to England's
spymaster, John Thurloe: "picking the locks leading into the hearts of
wicked men."
In a thoughtful 2009 volume on domestic intelligence-gathering
in the United States, the scholar Brian Johnson pointed out that the reason
to have intelligence agencies in the first place was to gather information
"not related to the investigation of a known past criminal act or specific
planned criminal activity." That is the job of police services; intelligence
organisations must search for crimes no one has - as yet - committed.
The core of the problem is this: we do not
all agree on who Henry Cromwell's "wicked men" might be. From 1975,
following allegations that the United States' intelligence services were spying
on its own citizens, an official committee led by Senator Frank Church issued
14 reports revealing that peaceful dissidents had been targeted for surveillance.
Even in countries like the U.S. and the United Kingdom, where oversight mechanisms
exist, credible fears of abuse still exist.
"I think we should not have a simplistic
view of this issue," argues Ajit Doval, who served as IB Director in
2004-2005 and was the first civilian to be awarded a Kirti Chakra, for a daring
undercover operation that led to the successful conclusion of the second siege
of the Golden Temple. "The fact is that in India, there are many political
movements which may not be terrorist in character, but are none the less real
threats to the nation. The Khalistan movement was not, after all, initially
violent - but better intelligence on its intentions would have saved lives."
"The distinction I would draw,"
Mr. Doval says, "is this: political intelligence should be focussed on
gathering information on actual and potential national security threats, and
the despicable behaviour of some individual intelligence officers, who seek
to curry political favour."
MI5's history
It isn't always easy, however, to know precisely
what political intelligence actually is. From the eminent scholar Christopher
Andrew's Defence of the Realm, MI5's authorised history, we know that MI5
monitored left-wing politicians and the trade union movement. In an article
written this summer, The Guardian's Martin Kettle recounted reading now-declassified
MI5 files on his father, Arnold Kettle. Arnold Kettle had been a lifelong
communist and, back in university, a friend of the Soviet Union's double-agents
inside MI6, Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess.
MI5 carefully followed Dr. Kettle's activities,
down to recording his lectures on Shakespearean literature, and his intellectual
debt to F.R. Leavis. Their only substantial discovery was, however, that Dr.
Kettle was homosexual - a "secret" his family had known for years.
Mr. Kettle, interestingly, said he believed
MI5's decision to spy on his father was correct: in its early years, after
all, the party he belonged to wanted to overthrow the regime and was receiving
foreign finance to do so. By the 1950s though, he pointed out, the communist
party "wasn't going anywhere as a revolutionary force, and was increasingly
looking for democratic and liberal legitimacy." His father remained under
surveillance, though.
There is no simple answer - but in India,
where political parties have shown little interest in understanding and debating
even a private member's bill seeking oversight of our intelligence services,
the first steps towards one are yet to be taken.
