Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India (28 page)

4.30  Our armed forces are operating below their sanctioned strength. According to one estimate the army alone has as many as 12,000 vacancies. This is an unacceptable situation. The RM must immediately constitute an internal committee and come up with a plan to aggressively reduce these vacancies.

4.31  With the magnitude of defence-related threats that India faces, the armed forces’ legitimate needs for expansion, personnel and modernization cannot be ignored. Budgetary constraints and other competing priorities have naturally to be taken into account, but within these limitations, the defence budget should be commensurate to meet our basic offensive and deterrent needs. It is realistic to admit that we may not be able to match the defence capabilities of China; however, we should spend enough to give China or Pakistan—or both together—more than enough reason to think many times over before deciding to open hostilities with us.

4.32  It is imperative for India to accelerate its nuclear weapons programme. We may have become a nuclear weapons power, but that does not guarantee security unless it is part of a considered nuclear doctrine. India may have voluntarily announced a policy of no-first-use, but what use is this if Pakistan on its part refuses to subscribe to such a policy? Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the uncertain nature of its nuclear weapons command-and-control system, a symptom of its volatile internal politics, essentially means that there is every possibility of Pakistan resorting to nuclear weapons if defeated in conventional war. To counter this threat, India must immediately focus all its energies towards developing an assured second-strike capability along with an effective missile defence system. This would be a deterrent to China as well.

4.33  To take care of internal security effectively, a separate ministry of internal security (MIS) headed by a cabinet minister should be hived off from the ministry of home affairs. A minister with this portfolio has been a feature of some previous cabinets but without specific focus or clout and always subordinate to the minister of home affairs.

4.34  The new ministry will have two primary wings: one, an anti-terrorism unit which will unite under one umbrella to direct the nation’s war against this threat; and two, an anti-insurgency department, which will single-mindedly tackle the threat of left-wing extremism and other insurgencies. With the creation of these two wings, the need for the IB, as it currently exists, must be seriously reviewed. The IB with generalized intelligence responsibilities is something we inherited from the British. The nature of the challenge and the specific tasks that need to be tackled have changed greatly since then. It is, therefore, only logical that the IB itself must be restructured, and replaced by specific units that exclusively target specific threats.

4.35  The wing to tackle terrorism must be a strengthened version of the NCTC. It would be headed not by an additional director of the IB, but the director of the IB himself, usually the seniormost police officer. This would help to overarch bureaucratic turf wars and give the agency the heft it needs. The NCTC would have three major subordinate agencies under it: one, the Natgrid, which will provide a nationwide data base to sift through information and track terrorist threats; the Natgrid must have much more access to information than it currently does, including banking and financial transactions; two, the NIA must have a nationwide jurisdiction and should be authorized to rigorously—and preemptively—investigate and prosecute terrorist-related offences. If the enabling law, currently the effete Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), has to be strengthened for this purpose, it must; the NIA must have adequate powers to arrest and interrogate suspected terrorists; and three, the NSG, the elite special response unit should be based in multiple hubs around the country so that it can be mobilized quickly against terrorist activity.

4.36  In order to obviate the unnecessary debate on the interface of the NCTC with the states, the NCTC will work with specially-trained Anti-Terrorism Squads—as proposed under the NCTC Act—embedded in the police infrastructure of the states. Through this mechanism, the heads of police in the various states will become part of the process to maintain national and regional internal security; these police chiefs will be kept informed of the NCTC’s work. The powers of seizure and arrest proposed to be vested directly with the NCTC could be exercised as a last resort; in normal circumstances the detention of suspected terrorists should be made by the state police. A standard operating procedure, as has been proposed by Chidambaran, the former home minister, could guide the interface between the central nodal agency and the states.

4.37  The ridiculous controversy on whether the NCTC erodes India’s federal fabric must end. Given the fact that terrorists do not recognize boundaries between countries or states renders any such debate unnecessary. Every part of the national security apparatus must work.

4.38  The second wing under the newly created ministry of internal security will be the Anti-Insurgency Department (AID). It will be headed by a secretary-level officer. Its first and foremost priority will be to stem and reverse Naxalite activity in the country. For this, AID will be empowered to raise a crack operational unit of sufficient strength (an improved version of the Greyhounds in Andhra Pradesh) in each of the states where Naxalism is rampant; the possibility of exclusively assigning the CRPF to anti-insurgency activity could also be considered. Individual units of this force will be under the central command of AID, but the planning and execution of operations will be done in consultation with the state director-general (DG) of police and the chief minister.

4.39  However, before any punitive action is taken, the government must make an offer of amnesty to all those in the Naxalite movement who are willing to give up arms and work within the framework of the Constitution. While there should be no ambivalence when the use of force is essential to safeguard the security of the state, armed force must always be the option of last resort. Hence the need for a political approach which is persuasive rather than punitive. The amnesty should, where effective, be accompanied by incentives. These could include cash grants, jobs in government, scholarship for children, housing and land allocations.

4.40  The government must also be willing, as part of a conscious policy, to negotiate with the Naxal leadership on such of their demands that can be met within the framework of the Constitution. To support this strategy, AID will have an intelligence wing to study the Naxalite movement, its planning, leadership, modus operandi, communications and ground support. It will use this intelligence to divide the movement where possible, or to induce its cadres to forsake the movement when feasible. The aim must be to break the movement through whatever means are most effective.

4.41  If the political approach fails, AID will use minimum but effective punitive force to systematically redeem areas under Naxal influence as part of a coordinated and efficiently executed nationwide plan.

4.42  It is clear that such a nationwide campaign cannot be run by state police units which lack equipment, expertise and training and are distracted by normal law-and-order duties. It is equally clear that the intelligence required for dealing with an enemy that transcends individual state boundaries needs to have a federal agency.

4.43  The moment an area is cleared of Naxal control, the Centre and the state government in question must move in with funds and infrastructure to cater to the developmental needs of the populace. This is absolutely essential. It must not be the aim of AID to follow a scorched-earth policy because this will not solve the problem and will make it easier for the Naxalites to retake the area. For this purpose a separate cell, possibly located in the ministry of rural development and working in tandem with the chief minister of the state, can be created with a development plan ready for areas liberated from Naxal control. The government’s past performance in developing areas formerly under Naxal control has been very poor, partly also because, as pointed out earlier, it is next to impossible to implement such an agenda if the government does not have any jurisdiction in this area. In 1995, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao gave a package of
4,600 crore to Orissa specifically for the development of Naxal-dominated areas but of this only a meagre
20.49 crore was actually spent. Prime Minister Vajpayee gave a fresh package of another
5,600 crore but this too never reached the intended beneficiaries. A similar grant of
2,000 crore by Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh went mostly into the pockets of corrupt officials and middlemen.
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4.44  The new AID department would also be the nodal agency to coordinate interaction with identified insurgent groups in the Northeast. Such interaction would include punitive and preemptive action where necessary, and negotiations where desirable. The important thing is to have a focused agency at the apex level to deal with all insurgency-related matters, because there are obvious areas of overlap, both in terms of collusion between different insurgent groups and the methodology to be adopted in containing them.

4.45  For the above strategy to succeed, the Constitution must be amended. The subject of law and order, which is now inexplicably only in the state list must be put on the concurrent list. This would provide the Centre the legislative sanction to act on law-and-order issues which are ‘federal’ in nature. Federal crimes are those which are not restricted only to states but which affect the safety and security of the union as a whole. Both terrorism and insurgency fall squarely in this category. It is imperative, therefore, that we empower the Centre to take action against them. The placing of the subject on the concurrent list would also give states the powers they need to have to work in conjunction with the Centre.

4.46  It is also essential to review the working of the current UAPA, first enacted in 1967. Even after its relative strengthening in 2008 in the wake of the horrific Mumbai attacks, it is clearly a weak law. To tackle terrorism and insurgency, the State must have laws that allow it to act firmly. The repealed TADA was a stronger Act. An all-party-meeting should be convened to consider this aspect, and the ministry of internal security charged with bringing forward an appropriately strengthened legislation within three months. This legislation should subsume state laws such as MCOCA in Maharashtra, and GUJCOC proposed by Gujarat. A common enemy of the nation needs an overarching, nationwide legislation, not several and differing enactments.