On the internal security front, the first year of the United Progressive Alliance government's second term at the Centre has ended on a particularly unfortunate note, with a succession of Maoist attacks on security forces personnel creating an enveloping sense of failure. Since the term began on an aggressive and boastful posturing on the subject by the Union Home Ministry, these reverses must seem devastating to its authorities. It must be conceded at the very outset that the Ministry's strategies and initiatives against the Maoists have been an unmitigated disaster, not only in their implementation and outcomes, but in their very conception.
The Home Ministry, however, is not the Ministry for anti-Maoist operations (though it has, for some time now given such an impression through an unrelenting stream of statements and projections). While an assessment of its performance on the Maoist front must be integral to any assessment of UPA-II's performance, there is much more to internal security, and recognition is due to the fact that the present Home Ministry has done far more in a single year than any preceding government in recent memory. Home Minister P. Chidambaram has pushed and dragged an unwilling and often obstructive bureaucracy to clear a veritable barrage of decisions that had been kept in abeyance for years and has launched a succession of new initiatives though not all of these withstand critical scrutiny. For effort and intent, the Chidambaram Ministry cannot be faulted.
There is, moreover, significant relief to be found in the broad trajectory of the principal threats and challenges to security. Between May 2009 and April 2010, total fatalities in terrorism- and insurgency-related violence fell to 2,142, (720 civilians, 457 security force personnel and 965 militants) compared with 2,570 (953 civilians, 421 security force personnel and 1,196 militants) in the preceding 12 months (all data obtained from the South Asia Terrorism Portal). The decline has been particularly sharp in Jammu and Kashmir and in the northeastern region, with fatalities dropping from 506 to 380, and from 1,047 to 691, respectively. Even troubled Manipur (see story on page 114), which has seen a steady rise in fatalities, from 190 in 2002 to 485 in 2008 and 496 in 2009, saw the figure drop to 318 in the first year of UPA-II.
An avoidable fracas was, of course, created by the Centre's permission to the general secretary of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim-Isak-Muivah (NSCN-IM), Thuingaleng Muivah, to visit his ancestral village, Somdal, in Ukhrul district in Manipur, enormously exacerbating tensions between the Nagas and the Meities in Manipur and drawing strong opposition from the Manipur government as well. Muivah's visit was perceived as intending to consolidate Manipuri Naga support for the proposed Greater Nagalim. Muivah backed off, although only after the Prime Minister's Office requested him to defer his visit until things settled down. Imphal virtually went up in flames in June 2001, when the Centre, once again without consulting the affected States, announced the extension of its ceasefire with the NSCN-IM without territorial limits.
Given this history, granting Muivah permission to visit Somdal without taking the State government into its confidence was certainly a faux pas though in the present case the price paid was not excessive. The risk taken, however, was unacceptable, since counter-insurgency gains are tentative and remain reversible, there was little evidence of functional civil governance in the State, and there was a violently polarised political environment.
With a population of just 2.4 million, Manipur accounts for the largest number of fatalities for any State in the country despite a decline in violence.
Assam, the other major theatre of violence in the northeastern region, despite an early spurt of incidents and fatalities in 2009, has seen a decline in fatalities from 391 to 340 under UPA-II. More significantly, virtually the entire executive committee of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) is now in custody, barring the group's commander-in-chief', Paresh Baruah. Much of this has been the consequence of a dramatic volte-face by Bangladesh, which had long supported insurgents and terrorists operating against India. It has now arrested most of the leaders of these groupings and handed them over to the Indian authorities.
Another virulent terrorist formation operating in Assam, the Black Widow, was forced to surrender en masse after the capture of its commander-in-chief', Jewel Garlosa. The year has also witnessed the mass surrender of the cadre of the United People's Democratic Solidarity. While Assam's troubles are far from over, most insurgent formations in the State have suffered dramatic reverses.
In Jammu and Kashmir, trends in declining violence since the peak of fatalities in 2001 have continued under UPA-II. Total fatalities under UPA-II declined to 380, from 506 in the preceding 12 months. This, of course, is the consequence of external factors, particularly the gravity of Pakistan's own increasing internal security challenges, as well as a shift in Pakistan's immediate priorities to its proxy war in Afghanistan. There is little evidence of a coherent UPA strategy on Pakistan, the source and sponsor of Islamist terrorism in India, other than the constant vacillation between talks and no-talks.
However, since the Mumbai 26/11 attacks there has been just one major Islamist terrorist attack outside Jammu and Kashmir. On February 13, 2010, 17 civilians were killed in Pune. This, once again, is substantially the consequence of the pressures on Pakistan, though there has been a continuous succession of alerts, arrests and exposures of terrorist networks and conspiracies in India suggesting that efforts to engineer new mischief have not weakened. Crucially, India's vulnerability remains high, and Chidambaram has repeatedly conceded that despite the many initiatives to improve security, the country remains as exposed to attacks as it was on 26/11.
Crucially, there has been a tremendous sense of urgency within UPA-II to address the existing threats to internal security and the endemic deficits in capacities that undermine the country's response capabilities. Successive governments have, over more than half a century, done grievous harm to the country's internal security apparatus, and the enormity of the cumulative deficits, the institutional decay and the disarray that afflicts every limb and organ of the system are staggering. Take, for instance, the crisis of leadership in the Indian Police Service (IPS). Between 1998 and 2001, recruitment was arbitrarily reduced to just 36 a year, down from 88 in 1997. The UPA government has initiated an extraordinary effort to address the cumulative deficits that have resulted, raising the intake to 130 a year in 2008 and 2009 and projecting an annual intake of 150 from 2010. Nevertheless, according to the government's own projections, even on this accelerated schedule, existing deficits will only be met by 2017, by which time requirements can be expected to have risen, perhaps, exponentially.
UPA-I, in the months after 26/11, cleared a tremendous backlog of sanctions and projects that had been blocked for years by a recalcitrant bureaucracy and indifferent political leadership, and this process has continued in its second tenure. Among the most significant of these initiatives is the effort to strengthen the central intelligence mechanism by operationalising the Multi-Agency Centre (MAC) and Subsidiary Multi-Agency Centres (SMAC) under the Intelligence Bureau (I.B.) in at least 30 locations across the country. Simultaneously, the I.B. has been granted sanction to recruit 6,000 personnel against the existing vacancies and newly sanctioned posts. Financial and technical resources have been increased to the States for strengthening the Special Branches of the police.
There has also been some augmentation of capacities of the Coast Guard and the coastal police stations and posts following the glaring lacuna exposed by the Mumbai attacks. The strength of the Central paramilitary forces has been increased with the sanction of 75,000 personnel, including 38 additional battalions in the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the key counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency responder.
The National Intelligence Grid project has been initiated, although its implementation is still in the rudimentary stages. Substantial allocations have been made for the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System, but the project is hobbled by technical difficulties and conflicts. The Unique Identification Project, which is expected to have a tremendous impact on almost every aspect of internal security capabilities, is another initiative that has been fast-tracked. The Centre continues to underwrite police modernisation and security related expenditures in the States, although total allocations for these have remained stagnant and utilisation has been well below optimal. While the States are to blame for the poor offtake of available funds, the Centre's Kafkaesque procedures of financial approval are at least partially to blame.
The actual implementation of most of the Centre's initiatives tends to drag along within a bureaucratic response paradigm. Of the 38 battalions sanctioned for the CRPF, for instance, no more than two were scheduled to be raised in 2009-10. There are, moreover, a number of poorly conceptualised projects that will cost a great deal but that would have only limited impact on overall security.
These certainly include the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which, with a budget of Rs.16.33 crore for 2010-11, was intended to be like the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation, with a budget of $7.86 billion. The NIA, moreover, has cannibalised its leadership resources from other functional police organisations, each of which was hobbled by manpower and leadership deficits. The impact of the establishment of four National Security Guard (NSG) hubs in metropolitan centres, similarly, will be more symbolic than operational.
There have been other problems along the country's micro-fissures, including communal riots in Hyderabad and significant missteps on the Telangana issue, which have resulted in enormous and avoidable political destabilisation. Temperatures have been rising on the Gorkhaland issue for some time now, and the murder of the Akhil Bhartiya Gorkha League president, Madan Tamang, can only worsen conditions.
Dantewada massacreUPA-II's core failure, however, remains in its handling of the Maoist rebellion. The Maoist rampage has pushed fatalities through May 2009-April 2010 to 1,045, including 350 security forces personnel and 416 civilians, as against 643 (including 254 security forces personnel and 208 civilians) in the preceding 12 months. Crucially, this sharp escalation has been the direct consequence of strategic blunders and boastful incoherence on the part of the Centre. Worse still, after the massacre of 75 CRPF personnel and one State policeman at Chintalnad in Dantewada on April 6, 2010, in what can only be seen as a disgraceful act of finding a scapegoat to cover up the Centre's failures and to protect those responsible for the deployment of the force, the Home Ministry has gone far beyond anything justifiable on the basis of the report submitted by E.N. Rammohan to humiliate three exceptional officers with records of voluntarily accepting some of the most dangerous assignments in the country.
While the Chhattisgarh government has refused to succumb to pressure from North Block to transfer Inspector-General of Police T.G. Longkumer and Dantewada Superintendent of Police Amresh Mishra, Deputy Inspector-General of the CRPF, Nalin Prabhat, has been summarily repatriated to his cadre, Andhra Pradesh an undeserved disgrace following a malicious campaign of leaks from the Ministry.
The fate of the Centre's incompetent, under-resourced and misconceived massive and coordinated operations against the Maoists has, of course, now been sealed. Unfortunately, with the Ministry's indefensible action against the police leadership in Dantewada, it is unlikely that police officers are going to engage with particular enthusiasm in any future, even if better conceptualised and planned, initiatives against the Maoists. There has been a critical breach of faith here, and it will certainly be an uphill task to restore confidence in the present Home Ministry.
The Ministry has made a major strategic error in positioning itself at the core of internal security and counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism responses. In doing so, it has provided uncooperative States where the real responsibility actually lies with an alibi to do little or nothing, and, at the same time, set the Ministry up for a fall. A major Islamist terrorist or Maoist attack was inevitable, and, with the Ministry's ill-advised bragging over the past year, political opportunists and a sensational media were hardly going to ignore an opportunity to take down a high-profile Minister.
Despite crucial errors of strategy and projection, there has been some stabilisation in various theatres of protracted violence under UPA-II. Several projects and programmes initiated in this phase will bear fruit in the years to come. Nevertheless, the crisis of capacities that afflicts the intelligence, enforcement and administrative apparatus remains substantially unaddressed. Instead of complaining about limited mandates, UPA-II needs to focus on urgent efforts to build, consolidate and reorient the state's capacities for internal security management.
Ajai Sahni is Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management & South Asia Terrorism Portal.
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