Now that the politicians have been held accountable, it is time Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took urgent steps to ensure administrative accountability. Indications that the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) passed on credible intelligence, based on Lashkar-e-Toiba intercepts, to Narayanan’s secretariat about an impending terrorist attack on Mumbai luxury hotels are worrying. Narayanan is experienced: he was director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) during Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership; he looked at intelligence reforms following the Kargil war for the NDA. He will see that the picture at present is not pretty.

What are the RAW and the IB? Established in 1968, RAW is today one of the biggest government employers, collecting intelligence from abroad about threats to India and its strategic interests. Reporting directly to the PM with the cabinet secretary taking care of its administrative requirements, the RAW has a special operations wing and a specialised counter-terror cell manned by a joint secretary at its headquarters. The IB, the oldest intelligence agency in the world, collects information — political, industrial, insurgency or terror-related — about threats to India’s internal security. Although administratively under the home ministry, the IB’s director can directly brief the PM if necessary. The Bureau has substantial discretionary funds and an operational wing specifically designed to tackle Islamist terrorism. 

Now if the RAW and IB, currently headed by Narayanan’s protégés, did have prior intelligence, why did the two chiefs not go directly to the PM or make efforts to pre-empt or prevent the strike? Was the alert passed on to the PM in the daily intelligence brief? The most serious problem would be if the tradition of the

PM holding one-to-one meetings with the chiefs has given way to the NSA alone vetting intelligence.

In all likelihood, the crucial intelligence alert, if at all there was one, was buried under tonnes of so-called unofficial letters containing generic but not actionable intelligence that are dished out by the two agencies daily. Did the IB or the RAW station agents at the Taj or the Oberoi? Did the RAW undertake any covert operations to nip the attack in the bud? Did the IB brief the home secretary or the director general of the Maharashtra police? There are many questions that may never be answered, just as after the Kargil fiasco the IB, the RAW and the NSA got away scot-free.

If the intelligence agencies have failed miserably in alerting the massive internal security establishment to the Mumbai attack, the navy, coast guard and the state police too must come under the scanner. Under the maritime security charter, it is the state marine police’s responsibility to patrol up to 5 nautical miles from the shore. The coast guard’s job is to survey up to 200 nautical miles, India’s exclusive economic zone; and the blue water beyond is with the Navy. Yet the terrorists managed to hoodwink all three and land at Budhwar Park, a stone’s throw from the base of the Western Navy, and minutes away from the state police headquarters. Given the free hand they were given, it is presumably a matter of choice — theirs — that they did not attack Bombay High, the nuclear facility in Trombay or the RBI. And in the furore over the delayed response, one point is often overlooked: in theory, a commando team of National Security Guards, India’s only counter-terror force, is ready 24x7 to deal with such events. Russian IL-76 aircraft are supposed to always be on standby at Palam air base and Mumbai is only one hour and 35 minutes away by a jet. This was ignored in practice: all the wisdom learnt from IC-814’s hijacking to Kandahar went waste and the government and its enforcement arms fought de novo. 

Before the urge to classify the Mumbai massacre as a systemic failure or a collective government failure, as described by A.K. Antony and Hansraj Bharadwaj at the CWC, becomes dominant, the Manmohan Singh government must use this attack as an opportunity to undertake drastic reforms of the security apparatus. The majority of reforms suggested post-Kargil remained only on paper. Singh must go back to basics: starting with the surgical removal of political patronage from internal security, as even the senior police inspector at Colaba’s police station and the beat constable at the Gateway of India are equally accountable for the blunder. If there was synergy between the Colaba police and its residents, then the terrorists would have found hard to do reconnaissance of the Nariman House and the hotels prior to the attack. And as for the intelligence agencies: with turf wars a never-ending routine, the government should seriously think about a counter-terror unit that has specialists, not the generalists of the Indian Police Service, to deal with fundamentalist terror. Apart from the core specialists, both the IB and the RAW have become sinecures for All India or Allied service officers on deputation from state cadres hit by insurgency or political victimisation. This leads to inter-agency wars with intelligence cadre personnel fighting with those on deputation.

The need for specialists is illustrated by the fact that nearly four billion hours of footage is generated by 26 million CCTV cameras in the United States every week and the counter-terror set up under the Homeland Security department is trained to pick up the unusual. To put it bluntly, intelligence collection is drudgery and has little to do with gossip picked up at golf courses. Similar problems of coordination and jurisdiction lie between the navy and those lesser mortals, the coast guard. Rather than get into a jingoistic mood about weakly governed Pakistan, New Delhi first needs to have a standard operating procedure that comes into action in case of a terrorist threat or attack, one that requires no political clearances whatsoever. Pakistan is only a part of the problem.

shishir.gupta@expressindia.com