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| Two crucial official wings aren't healthy | | Home Ministry for effective surveillance on calls to Pak | |
B L KAK
NEW DELHI, AUG. 3: The government of India admits that highly robust is the terrorists' world. Equally robust is the comunication network available to the terrorists, local and foreign. What seems to have perturbed the government is that in spite of the existence in India of a number of security and intelligence related agencies, the number of terrorist attacks has only increased.
The government, signifcantly, does not refute the 'fact' that the lack of coordination between different intelligence agencies has, more often than not, led to successes by the 'enemy'--the infiltrator, the militant, the terrorist, the fidayeen. While the Intelligence Bureau (IB) is the apex domestic intelligence-gathering agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) is India's external intelligence apparatus.
The Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) is also in existence. The DIA's task is to collect, interpret and disseminate all defence-related information to the Indian Army. India being a vast teritory inhabited by over 100 crore people, the task of the IB continues to be both risky and rigorous. No wonder, the oft-repeated allegation: Most intelligence failures are largely because of lapses in the IB.
After the Centre was forced, over the years, to put in place a multi-agency to effectively counter terrorism, two wings were put in place under the administrative and operational control of the Intelligence Bureau. These wings are: (1) Multi Agency Centre (MAC) and (2) Joint Task Force on Intelligence (JTFI). MAC is in charge of collecting terrorism-related information from across the country. And JTFI is responsible for passing on this information to the state governments in real-time.
Authoritative sources told EARLY TIMES that even after it was officially made clear that the duty of MAC and JTFI was to ensure that intelligence gathering from across the country" is aggressive, correct and to-the-point", results have not been strikingly encouraging and encouragingly striking. It is now admitted that both MAC and JTFI are not in the best of health.
A pointed reference is made to two factors. One, the MAC and the JTFI are under-staffed, over-worked and ill-paid. Two, confusion persists over who--the Union Ministry of Home Affairs or the respective state governments--should pay for the expenditure of these two bodies. Hence, the outcome: There is no nation-wide anti-terrorism database and intelligence-gathering.
Worse still, police intelligence wings in almost all States and Union Territories are not even trained in routine counter-terrorism procedues. And one of the crucially important procedures relates to the ever-increasing requirement of knowing the number of calls and identity of callers to Jammu and Kashmir and to Pakistan and Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK). In other words, surveillance of calls to J&K, Pakistan and PoK needs to be upgraded and made more effective and result-oriented.
No wonder, M K Narayanan, National Security Advisor, has been asked to ensure the various security agencies work in tandem to boost intelligence-gathering. This apart, Narayanan has also been tasked to revamp the intelligence set-up thoroughly this time.
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