Rethinking the National Counter Terrorism Centre

Those opposed to an unconstitutional National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC) with a dangerous combination of Intelligence and Police powers should propose an alternative: a National Intelligence Centre (NIC) with statutory powers over all other civilian agencies and a Director reporting directly to the Prime Minister.

This will result in the entire Intelligence establishment being brought within a constitutional framework and made accountable to Parliament. It will also ensure that reforms necessary for coherence and efficiency will get continuing attention at the highest level.

The legislation on the matter should:

• Provide for reform: Parliament should mandate the NIC to carry out a thorough review and appraisal of existing Intelligence agencies and arrangements and recommend comprehensive changes to improve their coherence and effectiveness. Changes should aim to create dedicated capacities to monitor the full range of strategic developments in economic, social and political sectors within the country and outside, with the NIC integrating information flows and making overall analyses. That broad approach will throw into high relief the motivations and means driving significant trends and point to countries, groups and individuals that merit special attention. This process should also make clear the requirements in terms of personnel, training, technical development and budgeting for the continuous improvement of Intelligence activities. In sum, the reforms will build capacity for pro-active policy and action.

• Require public reporting by the NIC: In an open democracy public understanding is critically important to counter domestic anti-national forces and foreign subversion. Parliament must mandate that relevant portions of the analytical work of the NIC be made public in regular and special reports. These must be subject to debate by central and state legislators and in the media.

• Require cooperation with civil society: No Intelligence agency can be effective without cooperation from members of the public. At present such cooperation is ad hoc, and can depend on anything from a general fear of officialdom to intimidation and blackmail, Parliament should mandate the NIC to create a regular, structured relationship with civil society, especially in gathering information on communal issues. On other matters affecting national security such as corruption in defence procurement and financing of violent groups within the country the NIC should have a mandate to inform and educate the media so that reporters know basic facts and policy parameters and cannot be manipulated by “leaks” from interested parties. The NIC should also work with other statutory bodies such as the National Press Council to call public attention to issues of systemic anti-national bias.

• Create an Appeals Mechanism: If Intelligence operatives infringe on the rights, liberties and lives of Indian citizens there should be a mechanism to address problems without public disclosures harmful to national security. Parliament should create an easily accessed and responsive Grievance Mechanism providing for appeals up to a Parliamentary Standing Committee with confidential procedures that could, when necessary, bring matters to the attention of the Prime Minister and President. Use of this mechanism should not preclude legal options for affected parties.

• Promote understanding of India’s strategic interests: Intelligence agencies can only be effective within a clear strategic framework. Most developed countries, especially those with global interests, have such frameworks but few spell it out. Britain, for instance, has its famous “permanent interests” that are unspecified but boil down to the benefit it can draw from any situation. The United States is unique in publicly defining its overall national strategy as the promotion of democracy globally. That reflects the country’s anti-colonial foundation and its evolution on the basis of a set of inalienable values. The Indian constitution draws heavily on the American and so the global expansion of democracy is also its fundamental strategic interest; but it is not the only one. Equally important is increased social equity as the country's diverse communities move ponderously from many different stages of development into a shared economic and political system. So is the maintenance of India's traditional values at a time when the verities of Western "progress" must be overwritten in the interests of a liveable planet. The strategic picture is further complicated by the existence of many foreign proxies within India, an unavoidable legacy of colonial rule. Under these conditions a primary national imperative is broad public awareness of what is necessary for the country's continued evolution according to its own best lights. Parliament must make provision for these issues to be debated nationally in a continuing and constructive process that draws in educational and training institutions, including those that shape government officials and Intelligence operatives.

 With these parameters the NIC can be more than an effective guard against foreign and domestic enemies; it can be a powerful support for India's vast transition to a new age.

The Extreme Danger of the NCTC

On 27 February 1933, four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany, there was a devastating fire in the national Reichstag (parliament) in Berlin.

Firefighters trying to save the building found in it a mentally disabled Danish bricklayer who confessed under questioning to be a communist who had come for "political work" in Germany.

Under the pretext that the nation was under assault by international communism, Hitler then invoked emergency powers to arrest members of the party en masse, including all its representatives in parliament. With their seats empty, the Nazis became the majority party, allowing it to consolidate power and set in motion a new wave of oppressions.

The key to Nazi success in moving from a parliamentary plurality to absolute domination of the German political landscape was an an intelligence apparatus with unaccountable powers of search, seizure and arrest. It allowed Hitler to keep tabs on all opposition figures, to cow them with threats, confiscate their property, arrest and torture at will, and murder those who would not bend.

Indians should consider that history before supporting the National Counter-Terrorism Center the UPA government is pushing again in the wake of the Hyderabad terrorist attack. It too will centralize dangerous power in an unaccountable intelligence operation wide open to political misuse. It too will have powers of search, seizure and arrest outside the existing legal framework.

They should also ask two questions about the renewed push for the NCTC:

• Why did Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, days away from presenting the 2013 Union budget, break from that critically important task to urge action on the NCTC?

• Why have all the Big Business media organizations suddenly become cheerleaders for our incipient SS-Gestapo?

The answer is the same for both questions: India is under great pressure to open its doors to foreign investment. The super-rich investors who turned China into a collection of "cancer villages" with the widest rich-poor gap in the world, are looking for another poor and populous place to put their money. But they are wary of the fractious unpredictability of Indian democracy.

The NCTC will be their control mechanism. It will not just target "terrorists;" it will define who is a terrorist.

Just as the SS-Gestapo widened Nazi targets from communists to political dissidents of all kinds, Jews, Gypsies and other undesirables, the NCTC can tar, contain and eliminate anyone who stands in the way of its masters.

And its masters will not be a free parliament; it will be the fat cats who run the global black market and manage organized crime worldwide.

If Indian democracy is to survive, not only must the bid for the NCTC as currently envisaged be turned down, there should be a popular drive to bring all of India's several intelligence agencies into a constitutional framework that provides oversight and has provisions to enforce accountability.

More, there should be a cabinet minister in charge of Intelligence, answerable to parliament, and a recourse mechanism for Indian citizens victimized by overzealous gumshoes.

If "intelligence professionals" shake their head and threaten inaction against foreign and domestic dangers, perhaps it is time we turned away from the whole idea of a centralized organization with vast powers. A community-based reporting system linked nationally and enabling a real-time flow of information and analysis that will empower local action might prove far more effective. An NCTC without police powers could be the national hub of that system.

My 2011 proposal for a CCTV czar overseeing a national drive would be an essential part of such a system.  

Undemocratic Anti-Terrorism

The threat of a draconian National Counter-Terrorism Centre combining Intelligence and Police powers seems to have been beaten back, at least for the moment.

All major state leaders, including those supportive of the Manmohan Singh government seem to have opposed the move at the 5 May meeting in New Delhi.

I have to say “seem” because the meeting was closed to the media.

On a situation of critical importance to the future of Indian democracy the government chose to veil debate and keep citizens in the dark.

For this government that is par for the course.

It sneaked in changes to legislation on law and order to create a secretive and unaccountable Intelligence apparatus and is now trying to pretend that is no big deal.

The NCTC “will merely arrest and hand over people to the State police” the Home Minister was quoted in news reports.

He makes it seem so smooth, so law abiding, so impervious to the thuggish proclivities that have characterized “anti-terrorist” activity.

It is as if he never heard of encounter killings or custodial deaths of people manifestly innocent of anything but attracting the interest of gum shoes who think they are storm troopers.

So far, such malignancies have been confined to some states and rogue cops; the NCTC will make that phenomenon national and concentrate abusive power in very few hands.

Even without police powers our Intelligence agencies behave with scant respect for the civil rights of Indians.

I speak from experience about that, as can most journalists whose writings and attitudes have been noticed by the authorities. (The late lamented Dharam Shourie, PTI correspondent at the UN for two decades, told me that whenever he was putting together a politically sensitive story in Delhi a "telephone repairman" would magically appear to work on the connection outside his house.)

What part of my writings and attitudes has attracted the attentions of some agency of the Indian government I cannot say, but it has kept me under surveillance and periodically rifled through my belongings ever since I returned to India in 2008 after four decades in the United States.

The operatives involved have not been masters of their art, so it has been hard to ignore their efforts. In one case my tail followed me into a camera shop and stood behind me gesturing to the salesman not to sell me what I wanted; his image was clearly visible in the glass case we both faced.

At a meeting convened by Pondicherry’s “Progressive Writers,” I was examining my eyelids for holes when the speaker paused to observe that the “spy was asleep;” evidently he hadn’t got the memo that “progressives” should take the assertions of government agents with some salt.

The most recent evidence comes from an experiment I conducted: before leaving Pondicherry on 3 May I locked the door to my bedroom. In New Delhi on 5 May my bag was rifled in my Ashram room and the small bag containing all my keys taken. For some obscure reason they also took all my pens, including a marker I was using to highlight passages in a biography of Sri Aurobindo. 

If pure paranoia can drive agents of the Indian government to act with such breathtaking brazenness towards a senior citizen and life-long votary of Gandhi, what will they not do?

If this piece should be followed by my developing sudden multiple organ failure as happened with pacifist J. Sri Raman a few months ago, chalk it down to anti-terrorism.

In case readers think that is being overly dramatic: in Pondicherry on two occasions motorcyclists who had the look of cops ran into my bicycle quite deliberately and then took off. It was sheer luck that I escaped with only bruises and a concussion.

For the sake of balance I should add that in the United States I was also a person of interest. After 9/11 that was very much an in-your-face phenomenon, with my telephones broadcasting racist talk radio and periodic assaults on my car and house.  At one point a posse of plain-clothes and uniformed police appeared at my door at night and conducted an impromptu cross examination in the living room, vastly thrilling my young children.

Both in the United States and in India I interested the authorities not because of anything I have ever done but because I fit a profile they dreamed up. Perhaps it was simply that their cynical calculus could not compute my independence or idealism.

In such a world it is only prudent to refuse when a government demands an increase in its powers of abuse.

Missing the Point on the NCTC

All the political noise about the National Counter Terrorism Center completely misses the point.

The real danger the NCTC poses is not to India's federal structure but to its democracy and the rights and liberties of its citizens.

And the NCTC is not "proposed" as our "elite" media persist in characterizing it.

It already exists as an intelligence agency with unsupervised powers of surveillance, arrest and interrogation -- a KGB-ISI in the making.  

It was brought in under the political radar by a series of administrative steps invoking the 1967 "Unlawful Activities Prevention Act" as amended in 2004 (to extend its coverage to counter-terrorism), and 2008 (to give the NCTC operational control of counter-terrorism activities).

As Kapil Sibal told journalists last February (when he was Minister for Human Resources Development), the powers of the NCTC are "already there."

He traced the origins of the NCTC to the Inter-State Intelligence Support System created after the Kargil War to improve spy operations. Following a recommendation of the Administrative Reforms Commission the ISISS (a deeply ominous acronym if ever there was one), was converted into the NCTC.

Sibal did not attempt to explain how the drive to improve intelligence operations mutated into anti-terrorism activities and then into law enforcement.

The net result of that evolution is a secret agency without either legislative authorization or operational accountability, with vast intrusive and interrogatory powers that will certainly be subject to abusive use.

Few will take comfort from that fact that the NCTC at the Centre will be supervised by an officer "not below the rank of Joint-Secretary" and at the state level by someone "not below the rank of Secretary."


What is to stop ambitious politicians, spy masters or bureaucrats in the pay of the über rich from misusing the NCTC for political/social surveillance and blackmail?  What is to prevent the torture of "suspects" and the coverup of extrajudicial killings? What is to prevent the emergence of an undemocratic and unconstitutional power centre under the aegis of the NCTC? What is to prevent India becoming Pakistan?

Nothing.

There are no oversight mechanisms, no appeals process for suspects/victims, no judicial much less public accountability. If a secret process of oversight and accountability does exist, it can be no more than a cozy arrangement to protect insiders.

Spokesmen for the UPA, including the Prime Minister and Home Minister have tried to make the NCTC controversy seem as if it is something that can be smoothed away by explanations and clarifications.

It would be fatal for Indian democracy to buy that argument.

We need a complete overhaul of the intelligence establishment, which now operates without legal authorization or constitutional safeguards.

The NCTC does not belong under an Act meant to maintain the country's internal security. To frame its activities within that limiting framework is to guarantee failure.

Terrorism is not a homegrown problem. Even though we have some homegrown terrorists, they are the domestic face of external enemies. Unless we keep the focus of NCTC and RAW firmly on external enemies all action within our borders will be reactive second-guessing.

The UPA government must abandon its ill advised move to create a NCTC that is bound to be subversive of our national interests. It must consult with the Opposition to bring in a piece of consensus legislation that will for the first time in Indian history provide a constitutional floor and framework for the work of our Intelligence agencies.