Security first
Centre and states cannot be adversaries in terror cases. A unified NCTC is crucial.
Centre and states cannot be adversaries in terror cases. A unified NCTC is crucial.
It would not have hurt the Tamil Nadu government to agree to a Central probe into Thursday’s twin blasts on the Bangalore-Guwahati superfast express at the Chennai Central station. Instead, the J. Jayalalithaa administration’s rejection of an investigation by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), even as it allowed a National Security Guard (NSG) team to help with forensic analysis, hints at the sort of political point-scoring that prevents, or compromises, the coordination of counter-terror probes and preventive action among states and between a state and the Centre. Moreover, the state government reportedly also delayed informing the Union home ministry and when it did, it allegedly provided “minimum information”.
A train’s journey is not confined to a single geographic area. In India, a long-distance train often traverses more than one state. The fact that these explosions occurred during the long process of the Lok Sabha elections makes the incident too serious a matter to assert jurisdiction and state prerogative and posit the state as an adversary to the Centre. The blasts occurred within a few minutes of the train arriving at Chennai Central and the fact that the train was running an hour-and-a-half late allows for the possibility that the IEDs might have been meant to go off elsewhere. Under such circumstances, the state ought to have let the Centre decide whether a scheduled offence had taken place under the NIA Act, especially when an NIA probe had already been offered.
India’s national security matrix has undergone reform since 26/11, but the political failure to set up the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) continues to obstruct counter-terror efforts, leaving gaps in the process as Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram noted in the aftermath of Thursday’s blasts. The collection and collation of intelligence need to be streamlined, without them falling prey to competing bureaucracies. The NCTC would have done precisely that. The use of the federalism-in-danger argument by states still opposed to the body — fearing encroachment on their turf — may be politically convenient, but it limits our responses to security challenges to ad hoc, uncoordinated actions. State police forces, regardless of their ability, suffer from poor infrastructural support. When an incident has to automatically factor in a cross-state probe, questions of coordination and investigative comprehensiveness become paramount. Even without the NCTC, much of that could be ensured with an NIA probe into the Chennai blasts. Before the NCTC expires even as a concept, the next government at the Centre must revive the project and consult the states to set up this umbrella agency.
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