Reports that intelligence inputs were ignored has provoked citizens’ anger
The ‘Mumbai Massacre’ evoked a paranoid response – media anchors hyperventilated and screamed for ‘war on terror’ and epicurean socialites demanded ‘carpet bombing’ of Pakistan and asked Indians to surrender their personal freedom and liberty to ‘the State’, threatening to lynch anyone opposing this!
Within ‘the State’ itself, a bizarre blame game, that acquired the form of a theatre of the absurd, was being played out with National Security Adviser MK Narayanan, the repository of all intelligence and security brief, at the epicentre. If at all there is one agency at whose steps the blame for this horrendous incident could be placed, it is the NSA. Yet this entity got away unscathed while the non-Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, became the fall guy.
The NSA gets reports regularly from the Director of the Intelligence Bureau, an officer handpicked by him, and the external intelligence agency, RAW. It is the NSA who decides what he should inform the PM about and what he should hold back. Prioritizing and then guiding intelligence that concerns security and follow-up action are the tasks the NSA is mandated to perform. The failure to do so is manifest.
The NSA in his earlier avatar suffered the professional ignominy of being head of IB when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in May, 1991. The IB under Narayanan, subsequent inquiries showed, had prior information of the assassins moving for the kill, but for some reasons did not do enough to stop them in their tracks.
During the Mumbai terror attack, too, this bizarre pattern has been repeated. Now all the intelligence agencies are claiming that they had tipped off the PMO (read Narayanan) and other security groups, but no one moved. Even the US government is claiming that they had warned the Indian government of the possibility of a seaborne attack by terrorists, but no one paid heed. Statements are attributed to a senior IB official in which he says that all the intelligence was provided to the PMO and NSA, but there was no follow-up action.
A recent editorial in The Statesman endorsed both disastrous failures of the present NSA and charged that during his watch the country has reportedly lost about 6,500 lives in terrorist attacks and billions in asset damages. It concluded: “His track record establishes beyond any doubt that India is unsafe in his hands.” These serious and pointed charges have not been repudiated.
It is learnt that after the ‘Mumbai Massacre’, the NSA was forced to tender his resignation. For a while, the national channels kept on “breaking news” that his resignation had been accepted. Intriguingly, shortly thereafter reports began streaming in that there was no basis to these reports. There are reports that the NSA managed to wriggle out from this tight spot by leveraging his considerable clout with Sonia Gandhi.
This brings us to the point made by François Gautier, a French resident of Auroville, in The New Indian Express: “Now it is time for the people of India to say openly that which many, including within the Congress, think secretly and may utter in the privacy of their chambers…. It is not about Manmohan Singh, it is not even about Shivraj Patil, the fall guy; it is about that one person, the Eminence Grise of India. She who pulls all the strings, She whose shadow looms menacingly over so many, She who holds no portfolio, is just a simple elected MP, like 540 others, but rules like an empress… I’ accuse (I accuse) Sonia Gandhi as being responsible for the tragedy of Mumbai, having emasculated India’s intelligence agencies by stopping them from investigating terror attacks in the last four years, including the Mumbai train blasts. She has also neutralised the ATS by ordering them at all costs to ferret out ‘Hindu terrorism’, which if it exists, has wrought minuscule damage compared to what Islamic terror has done since 2004….”
Now to the National Security Guards, the creme-de-la-creme of India’s commando force. From Day One of the euphoric ‘recapture of Mumbai’ by the NSG, I could sense ‘something wrong’ somewhere. My enquiries revealed that NSG has five battalions ie about 6,000 men. All personnel are on deputation from the Army, BSF, CRPF and ITBP for a full term of five years and not one is recruited directly. The force is commanded by an assortment of senior officers belonging to these services headed by an IPS officer of the rank of DGP. The original NSG Charter (1984) has a mandate for establishing two bases at Bombay and Madras of a batallion strength each. This mandate has not been acted upon.
What is appalling, about 20 per cent of the force is deployed for providing Z+ security to VVIPS. These ‘elitest commandos’, meant for crack anti-hijacking and anti-terror operations, are protecting and running errands for some of the most corrupt politicians and busy-bodies of India! Will it ever happen in a civilized country?
Taking a full 10 hours for 200 NSG commandos to arrive on the scene, while hundreds were being butchered by the terrorists, is gross inefficiency. It is now revealed that this commando force used weapons and communication equipments that were inferior to that of the intruding terrorists! This is crass incompetence.
With the core institution – the PMO – abdicating and the key instruments –NSA and NSG – decaying, the Indian ‘State’ is failing in the most fundamental of its duties: providing security to its citizens. In the event, vocal Mumbaikarshave voted out the politician, bureaucrat and the police. A campaign for ‘no security, no taxes’ is being mooted! Former Attorney General of India Soli Sorabjee has filed a PIL in the Supreme Court on the ‘failure of the State to protect its people’ and the court has put the Central Government on notice!
Is Friedrich Engel’s premonition of the State withering away coming true? Is it time we handed over ‘the State’ to hyper-ventilators, liberty-killers and ‘Artists-against-Terror’?
If at all there is one agency at whose steps the blame for this horrendous incident could be placed, it is the NSA. Yet this entity got away unscathed while the non-Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, became the fall guy
The NSA in his earlier avatar suffered the professional ignominy of being head of IB when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in May, 1991
IAS (retd) with a distinguished career of 40 years - worked in Army, Govt, Private, Politics & NGOs.
