The lessons
India hasn’t learned from 26 – 11, PRAVEEN SWAMI
Five years after national outrage led
governments to make big promises, the police and intelligence services are
still battling chronic deficits of capacity
There’s no date called 9/1 imprinted on our memories, the anniversary
when School Number 1 in Beslan opens its doors so parents can walk past its
peeling walls, all the way through the long corridor lined with the photographs
of the children who were killed. That morning, on September 1, 2004, heavily
armed men from the jihadist group, Riyad ul-Saliheen (the
Gardens of the Righteous), walked in through the door of the Beslan school soon
after the students and their parents did, and took 1,100 hostages. Three days
later, when the siege ended, 334 people were dead; 186 of the dead were
children, many executed at point-blank range, as the school was stormed.
In security services across the world, Beslan sparked off serious
thinking on what is now called mass-casualty terrorism, leading to investments
in special forces training, police capacity building, and
intelligence-gathering. India didn’t care.
Five years ago, 26/11 provided a murderous wake-up call, this time, next
to our beds. The bad news is this: no one woke up. India’s counter-terrorism
response to 26/11 has consisted mainly of fighting words. For the most part,
the flagship counter-terrorism projects launched after 26/11 now amount to
little more than tattered flags, flapping in the wind.
POOR RECORD
The government’s key post-26/11 projects have, almost without exception,
floundered. NATGRID, intended to enable the monitoring of terrorist operations
through existing banking, finance and transportation, hasn’t yielded to a
single prosecution, and, according to intelligence officials, is years away
from becoming a real time tool. The Crime and Criminal Tracking Network &
Systems Project (CCTNS) was to have linked all police stations across the
country two years ago. It will soak up Rs.2.76 billion in 2013-2014, but is, so
far, operating only on a pilot basis due to design and software issues. Former
Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s Rs.640 billion National Counter Terrorism
Centre has been put on hold, following objections from State governments.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has done somewhat better:
sanctioned some 650 officers — though there are just 388 on the rolls so far —
the agency has been able to lavish resources on the 72 key terrorism-related
cases it handles. It bears mention that just two convictions have been secured
so far.
It’s worth considering, though, that the NIA will at best prove an
island of excellence, with a peripheral impact on the country’s investigative
capacities as a whole. For one, the NIA’s numbers are tiny when compared to
international standards. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which
serves a much smaller population, has 34,019 staff, of whom 12,979 are agents,
or trained investigators. More important, India’s State criminal investigation
departments had a total of 11,279 personnel at the end of 2011, with 6,252,729
cases to handle. That means each officer, administrative and support staff
included, was supposed to have been investigating a staggering 533 cases — a
workload guaranteed to result mainly in failure.
Things haven’t gone much better for the government’s force enhancement
programmes, either. The National Security Guard (NSG) has hubs in four major
cities, as promised by the government after 26/11. The stark fact is, however,
that the force is over 20 per cent short of its sanctioned strength of
officers, stripping it of key command-level leaders in a moment of crisis.
India’s central paramilitary forces, or CPFs, have expanded to
gargantuan proportions, rising from 906,504 personnel in 2012, up from 838,893
in 2008. The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) alone is up to 2,22,000 armed
personnel — 3,00,000 including administrators and support staff — up from
1,67,367 in 1999, when it was assigned a lead role in central counterinsurgency
operations.
Yet, efforts to modernise the CPFs have floundered. In a thoughtful
analysis, the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management’s Ajai Sahni
has shown that the Ministry of Home Affairs has made available just Rs.900
million of the Rs.23.6 billion the CPFs said were needed for modernisation. The
CRPF sought Rs.8.73 billion but has received Rs.200 million; the Border
Security Force said it needed Rs.6.94 billion, but has got just Rs.200 million.
Even worse, police forces in the States haven’t grown or been
modernised. Mumbai has the same numbers of personnel, for example, who proved
so inadequate on 26/11. Efforts to expand police forces to the 220 police per
1,00,000 population norm advocated by the United Nations are nowhere near
realisation. The police-population ratio has risen only modestly, to
138:1,00,000 from 120:1,00,000 in 2006.
OUTDATED
CURRICULA
In most police academies across the country, curricula are still based
on pre-independence patterns, leaving forces desperately short of skilled investigators,
analysts and technical experts.
The government’s much-vaunted coastal security initiative, too, doesn’t
seem to have done much to secure India’s sea borders. India’s fishing fleet
still hasn’t been fitted with a satellite-based tracking and identification
system, necessary to stop attacks coming in from across the high seas. Earlier
this year, the Comptroller and Auditor General said that “72 per cent of the
fast patrol vessels (FPVs)/inshore patrol vessels (IPVs), 47 per cent of the
advanced offshore patrol vessels (AOPVs) and 37 interceptor boats (IBs) were
either on extended life or their extended life had expired.” It recorded that
36 of 50 coastal police outposts remained non-functional, since no police were
posted there.
Earlier this year, the weaknesses of the system were brutally exposed
when it was revealed that a 390-tonne armoury, the Seaman Guard Ohio,
had operated in Indian waters for 45 days without detection. It evaded multiple
coast guard patrols, as well as a search at Kochi port in August. In June 2011,
the MV Wisdom ended up undetected on Juhu Beach in Mumbai; the
next month, a Panama-flagged vessel,Pavit, ended up in the same place,
again undetected.
TIME RUNNING
OUT
The Ministry of Home Affairs’ annual reports have dutifully recorded its
determination to act—and then nothing has been done. In 2011-12, the Home
Ministry’s annual report said it had asked all States to “carry out
vulnerability/gap analysis in consultation with Coast Guard to firm up their
additional requirements.” However, its 2010-2011 report, had said they had
already “carried out vulnerability/gap analysis in consultation with Coast
Guard to firm up their additional requirements.” The 2009-2010 report “carried
out vulnerability/gap analysis in consultation with Coast Guard to firm up
their additional requirements” in 2009-2010. The only thing that changed was
the page numbers the text featured on.
It isn’t that nothing has gone right. In the year since then, police
forces have made substantial investments in addressing those problems.
Maharashtra’s Force1, after a poor beginning, is now rated among the best in
the country, ranking alongside the NSG and crack military units in competitive
commando exercises. Hyderabad has the 250-strong OCTOPUS force, drawing on the
experience of the State’s feared counter-Maoist Greyhounds. Delhi set up a
similar special weapons and tactics units in 2009, initially trained by
military experts from India and abroad.
The bad news is this: these local interventions are just not enough. The
figures show India’s main response to the events of 26/11 has been big talk.
There still isn’t a policy document to guide police modernisation, nor a road
map for intelligence reform and capacity-building.
For the past decade, India has had circumstance and luck on its side.
Terrorism has declined steadily in all theatres, from Jammu and Kashmir to the
North-East. Even Maoist violence has fallen in recent years, belying dark
warnings of a red tide washing over India. These gains, though, have been predicated
on three historically anomalous circumstances: the restraining presence of the
United States after 9/11, a war between Pakistan and the jihadists it
long patronised, and a favourable international climate, driven by record
economic growth.
Each of these circumstances is giving way to new realities: tensions on
the Line of Control are rising,jihadist groups across the border
are resurgent, and fissures within India are throwing up new, violent
challenges to both the Indian state and civil society. Each day, the breathing
space India has had to prepare itself to address these challenges diminishes.
Today is as good a day as any for New Delhi to wake up.
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