Nation’s security hotshots are feeling terribly insecure of each other

For over a year now, National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra and Convenor of the National Security Advisory Board K Subrahmanyam have been sparring in private, duelling in public, sniping at each other in the media.

Sample these. On October 28, while delivering this year’s Cariappa Memorial Lecture, Subrahmanyam took Mishra head-on. “It is difficult to do justice to both the responsibilities of the offices of the principal secretary to the Prime Minister and that of National Security Advisor,” he declared.

That was just the first bomb, he lobbed several more. “In our system, the buck stops with the Prime Minister. Therefore the responsibility for the present unsatisfactory situation of casual approach to national security rests with the Prime Minister and his immediate advisors in matters of national security,” Subrahmanyam declared.

Two days later, in his regular newspaper column, he repeated the charges. “Perhaps the Prime Minister should call a meeting of the NSC (National Security Council) to introspect why it is not able to function. The problem today is who will tell the emperor that he is not wearing any clothes. No one in his own court, it would appear,” he concluded.

The very next day, he wrote another vitriolic piece, this time in a business newspaper published by the same group. “It would appear that the NDA leadership is unable to free itself from the culture of reactive adhocism in decision making. So nothing has changed and the NSC has proved to be stillborn to the relief of all potential adversaries and competitors of India,” it said.

Within a few days, Mishra retaliated. He chose a private television channel. It was up to the Prime Minister, he proclaimed, to decide who should be his principal secretary and his National Security Advisor. Both would have to be persons he “trusts implicitly”. In other words, “Read my lips. The PM trusts me and only me.”

In no time at all, Subrahmanyam was on the same channel. The moodwas surprisingly mellow. Maybe in the inital stages, it was necessary for both posts to be held by one man whom the Prime Minister trusts, he acknowledged.

But there was a sting in the tail. Subrahmanyam added that it could only be a short-term measure. In the long run, the NSC needs a full-time NSA if it is to function properly, he reiterated.

Embarrassment apart, the tug-of-war and the Prime Minister’s silence is worrying experts. Says former Foreign Secretary Mani Dixit, who was a member of the previous NSAB: “The controversy will affect coordination and functioning between the NSAB amd other entities in the national security setup. The institution which is being sought to be built will fray.”

In a way, this began with the first NSAB itself. Its draft nuclear doctrine and draft strategic defence review lie buried under government dust. It took the Government a full six months to reconstitute the NSAB after the first one lapsed last December.

The new Board has no clear brief, unlike the last one. It meets regularly with the presumption — and it’s only a presumption — that it is supposed to update last year’s strategic defence review. Sources in the Board admit that they seem to be functioning in a vacuum.

Subrahmanyam is right when he complains that the NSC has not met even once since its formation two years ago. In fact, the composition of the Council has ensured that it is merely a pseudonym for the Cabinet Committee on Security Affairs.

Dixit’s explanation for the failure of an independent security setup to take off properly is that the system is so structured that the nodal point for everything is either the Cabinet Secretary or the Principal Secretary. It would be difficult to give the NSA a status that’s equal to or above that of these two agencies, unlike in the American system.

“These are the realities of administrative powers in the Government of India which probably made the Prime Minister decide in his wisdom to put both the posts (Principal Secretary and NSA) in the hands of one person,” he says.

Perhaps the idea was doomed from the beginning. The day after the NSC was created, Subrahmanyam wrote a vituperative front-page article, once again in the newspaper where he is a columnist, in which he blasted the Government for “digging a mountain and bringing out a dead mouse”.

Ironically, he was offered the post of NSAB Convenor almost immediately after the article appeared and he accepted. It seems that’s when the trouble began.