This is an era when the number of Black Cats and pilot vehicles an eminent personage can muster measures his or her value in the political market-place. Other sundry indices include the time for which the city traffic is held up to allow a VIP cavalcade with its screaming siren.

Similar, too, is the purpose served by the Jumbo as part of the paraphernalia of the Prime Minister on a foreign tour. This status symbol of security is being shed at last by I. K. Gujral. Every time well-meaning attempts are made to scale down these meaningless charades based on illusory threat perceptions, there are loud squeals of protest. When Home Minister Indrajit Gupta decided some months back to delete 90 VIPs from the Z-plus security category, he had to jettison the plan swiftly in the wake of the din created by the Securely Threatened. Citizens, however, can be forgiven if they find the snarling Black Cats and flashing kalashnikovs of the VIPs only of great nuisance value and an abysmal waste of public money. The Prime Minister's moves to scale down his own security should send the right signals to the lesser but more security-conscious mortals in the political hierarchy.

This is not to argue that people occupying sensitive posts must not be protected. The question is how such a cordon sanitaire is to be achieved.

Can political assassinations be prevented by stopping traffic and putting more police personnel on the roads? Do we really need to close down an airport 45 minutes before a VIP flight takes off or lands, leading to numerous flights being delayed? As intelligence experts have argued, it is not the number of Black Cats on duty that makes the difference. It is purposeful intelligence that does. In the age of the deadly RDX, VIPs are safest when their movements are swift and secret. In India, however, once a bureaucratic structure is set up, it goes on functioning till kingdom come in a blind, mechanical fashion, sometimes totally out of sync with the objective requirements it is meant to address. The fact that politicians today are much less threatened by terrorist attack than were those in the 80s is nowhere reflected in the present security arrangements.

If anything, the demands on the elite National Security Guards and the Special Protection Group are increasing by the day. Recently, there was the eminently sensible proposal to amend the Special Protection Group Act of 1988 in order to restrict the select security cover to the incumbent Prime Minister and his immediate family, rather than to all five former Prime Ministers. The latter are, according to this proposal, to be provided with ``proximate'' security instead, keeping in mind the threat they face from potential attacks. At least two former Prime Ministers -- V. P. Singh and Atal Behari Vajpayee -- have indicated that they are more than happy with such a proposal. Yet, to date, there have been no further developments on that score. We could learn from the British. The moment John Major lost his post as Prime Minister, after his party's defeat, his entitlements from the State were quickly and efficiently scaled down. Gujral who, as an ordinary citizen, had expressed his unhappiness over traffic chaos should, as Prime Minister, ensure that his security arrangements do not add to it.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.