The recommendations of four task forces which reviewed the functioning of India's security establishment hold out the prospect of a radical transformation of the way it is structured and the way it functions.
IF the Union government means business, India's defence and intelligence services are in for their most radical transformation since Independence.
Union Home Minister L.K. Advani announced in February that the government had accepted the findings of four task forces set up by a Group of Ministers (GoM) in May 2000. Advani spoke in his capacity as chairman of the GoM, which had been created by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that April to study the recommendations of the Kargil Review Committee (KRC). The other key members of the GoM were then Defence Minister George Fernandes, External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh and Finance Minister Yashwa nt Sinha. The four task forces were to study intelligence, defence management, internal security and border management respectively, and address critiques made of India's security establishment in the KRC Report.
Most of the immediate consequences of Advani's announcement will be for the military and intelligence services. Six months from now, if events run to plan, India will have a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), chosen on the basis of seniority from among the ch iefs of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. The CDS will command a new intelligence service, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), which in turn will be commanded by a three-star General. This General will have overall responsibility for coordinating the directorates of military, naval and air force intelligence.
The Intelligence Bureau (I.B.) will have complete responsibility for internal security operations, and its Director, currently less powerful than most Secretaries of Ministries, shall be given wide and autonomous powers. The Research and Analysis Wing (R AW) will see a significant sharpening of its external intelligence gathering role.
Even State governments will feel the impact of the proposals. State-level joint intelligence task forces are to be set up, and specific proposals have been made to upgrade the capabilities of police anti-terrorist units. The Jammu and Kashmir Police's Sp ecial Operations Group (SOG) has been held out as an example of the kinds of anti-terrorist units that must now evolve. No one seems entirely certain yet about who will be tasked with the implementation of this mass of proposals, and how the substantial financial resources needed to realise the task force recommendations will be realised. With the Union government crippled by Tehelka's arms and bribes scandal, few people in the Ministry of Defence or the Ministry of Home Affairs have institutional refor m high on their agenda right now. There is little dispute, however, about the need for urgent reform, particularly of the intelligence establishment.
Jammu and Kashmir Governor Girish Chandra Saxena's report on the area of intelligence is without doubt the most substantial of the four documents the GoM has accepted. Prepared with former Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath, former I.B. chief M.K. Narayanan, former Special Secretary, Home, P.P. Shrivastava, former RAW Additional Secretary B. Raman, and R. Narsimha of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, the meticulously researched report calls on India's intelligence establishment to take "an honest and in-depth stock of their present intelligence effort and capabilities to meet challenges and problems". The report calls for a wholesale upgrading of technical, imaging, signals, electronics counter-intelligence and economic intelligence capabilities, as well as a system-wide reform of conventional intelligence gathering.
Saxena's report gives the I.B. a formal charter for the first time in its history. It will now have responsibility for the collection and dissemination of all intelligence on internal security, making it the nodal organisation for counter-terrorist and c ounter-intelligence work. The organisation has also been tasked with ensuring the security of information systems. This charter should free the I.B. from much of its political surveillance work, and the election-related information gathering it has been pushed into doing by successive governments. In six months, the organisation should also have created India's first dedicated police computer network and terrorism database. A similar database project, called Polnet, had been conceived of over a decade a go, when the civilian Nicnet went online. Although a Border Security Force Inspector-General continues to be in charge of Polnet's execution, nothing concrete has come into being.
Among the major paradigm shifts envisaged in the I.B.'s functioning is that the gathering and generation of intelligence and its analysis will be separated. Since the late 19th century, when the organisation was set up under a different name, the I.B. ha s placed a sharp emphasis on analysis of information. The hard businesses of micro-intelligence gathering, running sources, and producing actionable intelligence has on occasion, therefore, been relegated to the background. Part of the reason is that, af ter the creation of the RAW, the I.B. was stripped of its technical intelligence assets. Now it is to get independent communications intelligence capability, which would enable it to monitor all forms of cellular, land line, radio frequency and Internet traffic. It will have its own cryptographic resources, along with state-of-the-art direction-finding equipment to locate transmissions, including those by terrorists in areas like Jammu and Kashmir.
With these new resources will come new responsibilities. Until now the RAW has been the only organisation permitted to conduct espionage operations abroad. The I.B. had personnel in neighbouring countries like Pakistan and Nepal, but these agents were wh at are termed "declared" ones. This means the governments of the countries they are posted to are notified that they are intelligence officers, and their duties are restricted largely to ensuring the security of diplomatic missions and the staff. Now the I.B. will be empowered to conduct covert work relevant to its new charter, including deep penetration operations. This, the Saxena report points out, will mean that the I.B. will have to upgrade considerably the quality of its personnel and their traini ng, and that the Ministry of Home Affairs will have to stop treating the organisation as an "appendage or subsidiary unit".
THE RAW, like the I.B., should emerge from the restructuring a leaner and more focussed organisation. Much of its deadweight could be cut away. Organisations like the moribund Shanti Suraksha Bal (SSB), now under the charge of the Secretary, RAW, in the Cabinet Secretariat, are to be rationalised. Most of the SSB's 30,000-odd personnel, originally recruited to act as a paramilitary force along the border with China, will be inducted in the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP). Some of the SSB's covert oper atives will be handed over to the I.B., and the rest retained by the RAW to meet its in-house security needs. This will free officer level personnel for the organisation to concentrate on its main job, gathering external intelligence and running transbor der operations.
One notable victory for the RAW is the GoM's decision to agree that it should retain the high-profile Aerial Reconnai-ssance Centre (ARC), set up with the assistance of the United States in the wake of the India-China border conflict. The Army had demand ed that it be given control of the ARC, which operates a fleet of aircraft especially equipped for high altitude operations and precision imaging equipment. At the moment RAW designs a year-long agenda for the ARC, based on broad assessments by the Army of the kinds of surveillance flights that are required. Now the Army will have more direct representation in the ARC, in the form of a Military Intelligence Advisory Group which shall be involved in day-to-day operations. Control of the organisation, how ever, remains firmly in the RAW's hands. This is because the organisation is best equipped to assess broad threat perceptions.
Military Intelligence, however, has little cause for complaint. While the RAW will retain primacy in external intelligence, the new DIA will be empowered to conduct transborder operations. Based, sources say, on a secret authorisation granted by Prime Mi nister V.P. Singh in 1990-1991, the DIA will now be able to conduct operations for tactical intelligence coverage in all of Pakistan. It will also be allowed to execute independently what intelligence operatives call "port-to-port" and "airport-to-airpor t" operations - technical terminology for the movement of agents across national borders.
It is also clear that the DIA's head will have more power than any military intelligence bureaucrat of the past. The General will be the principal military intelligence adviser to the Chief of Staffs Committee and the Defence Minister. This means that in theory the three Chiefs of Staff will have no direct control over the intelligence services of their respective forces. The DIA chief will also directly control two of the military intelligence establishment's most powerful institutions, the Signals Int elligence Directorate and the Defence Image Processing and Analysis Centre (DIPAC).
THE influence of the DIA will also be felt at the field level, where it will participate in intelligence support groups, run jointly with the I.B. and the RAW to provide coordinated information to Army Corps Commanders in areas where the Armed Forces Spe cial Powers Act is in force. The idea is that regular interaction among field personnel of all the three organisations will help minimise friction, and create what the Saxena report has described as "the concept of an intelligence community". The Arun Si ngh-led report on defence restructuring, however, has not given the Army overall control over the civilian administration in disturbed areas, a power that it has for long sought. Police and intelligence officials had furiously resisted proposals put out by the Union government in 1998 asking them to report to Brigade commanders operating in their respective areas.
Arun Singh also appears to have rejected calls to set up new theatre-level commands, giving overall control of all forces in an area to a single officer. At present India has only one joint tri-series command, located on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which is hardly an example of harmonious inter-services working. The Andaman Fortress, which is headed by a Vice-Admiral, is Navy-dominated. The Army has just one battalion based in Port Blair, while the Air Force operates a single Mi-8 helicopter squadr on. Other important military demands, however, have been met. Arun Singh's recommendations include granting the services more financial authority, as well as freeing the need to secure the approval of the Cabinet Committee on Appointments for the appoint ment officers of the rank of Brigadier.
Other proposals endorsed by the GoM, however, seem certain to run into more than a little resistance. The Saxena report, for example, speaks of the need to revive Joint Interrogation Centres (JICs) in States like Jammu and Kashmir. JICs run by all forces operating in a given area were common in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, and provided a valuable point for information-sharing among different agencies. They, however, developed a reputation, perhaps an overblown one, for brutality and torture. Among the first actions of the government of Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, which took power in 1996, was to disband the JICs in Jammu and Kashmir. The best known among the JICs in the State, Papa-II in Srinagar, is now Chief Secretary Ashok Jaitley's summer home . Abdullah is also likely to be appalled by the praise given to the SOG, which is under intense pressure on the grounds of human rights violaolations.
In the months to come, much will depend on just how serious the Union government is about turning into reality the recommendations it has approved. One immediate issue will be funds. A technical coordination group, sources say, is to be set up to regulat e new intelligence hardware acquisitions, including upgrades to the existing multiple e-mail targeting system, code-named DIRT. Should purchases like these become mired in bureaucratic delays and wrangling, the task force recommendations will prove fruit less.
More important, it is far from clear whether the recommendations on their own will resolve the often-petty personality clashes and turf battles among the services, and within organisations. What legal framework will be put in place for the new system, to o, remains unclear. I.B. officials, for example, have frequently protested against the unwillingness of governments like the one in Uttar Pradesh to act on specific information on the presence of terrorists. It is important, though, that a beginning has been made. One can only hope that it does not prove to be the end as well.
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