Opinion The power of secrecy

The government has been given ample time to respond. There is,therefore,a window of opportunity to see to it that what ought have happened long ago — making the tangled skein of intelligence agencies accountable to the people — takes place at least now. Sadly,despite the horrendous experience during the Emergency,the number of Indians worried about the state of the intelligence machine is woefully small. The public has to be made aware of the urgency of the problem.

Among the world’s leading democracies,India has the dubious distinction of never making its intelligence network accountable to the public or even subject to parliamentary oversight. Consequently,these agencies tend to become a combination of a law unto themselves and meekly subservient to their political masters,who seldom hesitate to use or misuse them for political or partisan purposes. There has to be an end to this ugly and dangerous state of affairs,and that would require an effort that is nothing short of the campaign Aruna Roy and other activists conducted to secure the Right to Information Act. Specific directives to the powers that be from the apex court,as it hears the relevant PIL,would be invaluable.

Independent India inherited its intelligence machine,like almost everything else,from the British Raj. This became the Intelligence Bureau in 1947 and had the sole control of all sectors of intelligence,external and internal. Under the dynamic,if personalised,leadership of B. N. Mullik,who enjoyed Jawaharlal Nehru’s full confidence and remained in the job almost through the Nehru era,the IB built itself up into a major power centre. It also had to share a large chunk of the blame for the debacle in the 1962 border war with China.

In 1968,Indira Gandhi decided to separate internal and external intelligence. Thus came into being the Research and Analysis Wing,better known by its acronym,RAW. Its founder director was the legendary spymaster R. N. Kao,earlier in charge of the IB’s external operations,who later built up a great reputation. Soon enough,offshoots of RAW sprouted,and only a few years ago,the agency for technical intelligence,the National Technology Research Organisation (NTRO),was formed. There is one common feature in all these powerful entities,which came up from the late-19th century to the early-21st century: none of them has been set up under a law of Parliament. All of them draw their authority from executive orders.

In the aftermath of the 1962 disaster,when concerned citizens wanted intelligence agencies to be supervised credibly,the then home minister,G.L. Nanda,rebuked them. Affairs of agencies protecting national security “could not be discussed in the market place”,he said. In the radically changed atmosphere after the Emergency,the Shah Commission,appointed by the Janata government,drew attention to the gross misuse of the intelligence agencies by the Emergency regime. The government then appointed a committee,headed by the outstanding civil servant who had also served as governor,L.P. Singh,to suggest reforms of the IB and the Central Bureau of Investigation. But by the time the committee came out with its report — recommending that the government spell out not only what the spying outfits were permitted to do but also what was “specifically prohibited” — the Janata was history and Indira Gandhi was back in power.

In January 2010,Vice-President Hamid Ansari became the first,and so far only,leader publicly to call for parliamentary scrutiny and public accountability of intelligence agencies to prevent their “misuse”. He specifically recommended the formation of a standing committee of Parliament on the lines of the US Congressional committees,which have been functioning effectively since the end of the Vietnam War. A democratic society,he added,must ensure that the secret intelligence apparatus never becomes “a vehicle for conspiracy” or “a suppressor of (people’s) liberties”.

Soon thereafter,Manish Tiwari,now minister for information and broadcasting,then a Congress MP,took the welcome initiative of introducing a private member’s bill to implement Ansari’s wholesome suggestions. However,the bill lapsed and nobody has done anything since. Let not the opportunity provided by the PIL in the apex court be wasted.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator

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