Spooked

Terrorists set off a bomb, ministers rush in with clues and pointers, the police looks busy, and then everything settles down. This dreadfully familiar routine needs to change because it symbolises much of what is wrong with India’s internal security management, especially under this government. Take the ministerial eagerness to drop hints. If the security establishment does get a solid clue within hours of a blast, it must follow that the terrorists will be caught, sooner rather than later. In fact, they are seldom caught. What ministerial overenthusiasm — both the home minister and his minister of state have exhibited this trait — does is to severely reduce the credibility of the internal security apparatus. Especially when we hear ministers say that the planning for this or that explosion was probably done across the border. No one’s saying that can’t be the case. But these glib ministerial soundbites point to poor political planning. Just to recall, during the NDA’s time cross-border relations were far worse for most of that government’s term. Yet senior UPA figures seem to think that a certain kind of finger pointing can be blithely done every time. Their motive of course is to find a cover for this government’s failures on internal security. UPA leaders should know that cover is not fooling voters.

Indeed, whenever polls happen, and whatever the state of dysfunction in the BJP, the party will find it easy to tell the story of the UPA’s security-related follies and it will find listeners. The loudest message that comes through from the UPA’s security management is that the current set-up won’t do. Since the government seems to think it is worth going through the full term, it must at least try to reduce the monumental ineffectiveness of the home ministry.

To begin with, India needs a separate department for internal security that should be led by a politician who’s hungry to make his or her name in a new, high profile job. Old timers or time servers (sometimes both adjectives fit the same people) can’t be picked for this. It needs to have prestige and a wide remit. That remit must include getting our Intelligence agencies into shape. Some of the stuff about RAW that’s in circulation now makes for both embarrassing and scary reading. Spies don’t have the luxury of behaving like Keystone cops. And, just to remind the government, domestic Intelligence will be more effective if some of its energies are not diverted to figuring out what political enemies, and more important, political friends as well as some in the media are thinking or doing.