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Journalism of Courage
The decision on constituting the National Security Council was at last taken on November 19. The task force set up to make recommendations submitted its report in June, but the government took four and a half months to decide.The delay was criticised. Yet there must have been procedural and tactical considerations which made Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee take so long to constitute the NSC.
The over-arching criticism is that the Council is a repetition of what V. P. Singh did as Prime Minister, and that the recommendations of the task force chaired by K. C. Pant were not taken note of. The question is whether the Council is a repetition of the V. P. Singh arrangement. It does not seem to be entirely so. The V. P. Singh arrangement, as I recall, was that the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs CCPA would be the apex body of the national security establishment. A committee of concerned secretaries would be the advisory body and the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee JIC would besecretary to the NSC which consisted of the CCPA, the Advisory Group of Secretaries and the chairman of the JIC.
The V. P. Singh arrangement, combining the CCPA plus the advisory body as the Council was different. An individual has been designated National Security Adviser. Nobody was so designated by V. P. Singh. The previous Advisory Group has been designated as the Strategic Policy Group. This consists of concerned secretaries, armed forces chiefs and chiefs of technical organisations who will collectively advise the Council, based on collated information the Strategic Policy Group gets from the JIC, which will function as the NSC Secretariat.
A separateNational Advisory Board is envisaged which is to consist of experts from the different disciplines which impinge on national security issues. These would be drawn from both inside and outside government. No such formal arrangement was envisaged in the V. P. Singh dispensation.
Calling for experts8217; advice from outsiders was to be an ad hoc arrangement. The Advisory Board will presumably be a group of experts nominated for three to five years and on permanent call to assist the NSC.
The second criticism is that the Strategic Policy Group is a secretaries8217; committee which can only give generalist advice. This is not valid. Of the 16 members of the Strategic Policy Group, only five would be generalists the cabinet secretary, the home secretary, the defence secretary, the secretary defence production and the finance secretary.
The remaining 11 are specialists the three service chiefs, the foreign secretary, the secretary, RAW, the director of IB, the scientific adviser to the defence ministry, thechairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the secretary of the Department of Space, the chairman of the JIC and the governor of the RBI. So to predict that the primary analysis and advice given to the NSC would not have expert inputs is incorrect.
One presumes that the service chiefs, the intelligence chiefs, the heads of scientific organisations, the foreign office and the RBI, each of whom would have three decades or more of specialised professional experience, would be able to give expert advice on national security issues. The five generalists would provide balance. If the National Security Advisory Board is constituted on an institutional basis with eminent experts from outside with a definite tenure, it could provide a solid foundation and expert knowledge for long-term planning and assessment.
Regardless of anticipated shortcomings, the point is that the first step has at last been taken to institutionalise a national security apparatus. Whether it is functionally practical or desirable to have theprincipal secretary to the Prime Minister double as the National Security Adviser can be debated. The Prime Minister has given two clear signals by nominating his principal secretary as the National Security Adviser. First, that he wishes this to be a non-political post. Second, that the post should be located within the Prime Minister8217;s secretariat, that its occupant should have the Prime Minister8217;s trust and that this should be generally so perceived. This will make the NSC8217;s functioning overcome initial bureaucratic turf battles.The fragmented way in which security issues were being discussed in government will be largely overcome.
The basic question, however, is whether a single individual can discharge the onerous responsibilities of being principal secretary to the Prime Minister and also being National Security Adviser. Ideally, the two posts should be separate. Perhaps the Prime Minister considered it administratively more practical not to create a new post generating jurisdictional competition,which was the main reason why the NSC did not function in V.P. Singh8217;s time and faded away afterwards.
Obviously just establishing the Council and its supporting agencies is not enough. The NSC8217;s functions have to be detailed in the Rules of Business. Its supreme coordinating role in collating intelligence and transmuting it to policy recommendations has to be clearly stated in the Rules of Procedure. The procedures for information flow to the JIC from the various central intelligence agencies, civilian and military, should be stated on a mandatory basis.
The procedures of interaction between the Strategic Policy Group and the National Security Adviser have also to be formulated in precise terms. The terms of reference for the National Security Council8217;s Advisory Board and its interaction with the Strategic Policy Group and ultimately with the NSC also have to be clearly formulated.
In fact, the National Security Adviser would function with more formal institutional sanctions compared to the chairman ofthe Policy Planning Committees, like D.P. Dhar and G. Parthasarthy, who functioned as policy-level security advisers to Indira Gandhi in the 8217;70s and 8217;80s. The way they functioned in relation to the Prime Minister8217;s Office could provide precedents for the functioning of the National Security Adviser.
The JIC functioning as Secretariat of the Council will necessitate a more multi-disciplinary and multi-departmental representation on this Committee. It is logical to presume that these matters are being attended to. It is more logical still to give the NSC a chance to function for six months to a year before pronouncing negative judgments.
