Come news of a police encounter, snooping on politicians and activists or a botched terrorist operation, shrill voices are promptly heard and agitated opinions raised, damning the intelligence agencies and calling for their accountability to an oversight committee of parliamentarians on intelligence and security (OCIS) matters.
A highly voluble politician, known for overgrown ideas, would even want the IB, RAW and NTRO to be answerable to an ombudsman, preferably a retired Supreme Court judge. These are cases of misplaced enthusiasm, born out of ignorance of the functioning of agencies and what goes into conceiving, planning and executing operations. Occasionally, a few retired intelligence officers also join the chorus, demanding OCIS to scrutinise the legality and propriety of functioning of intelligence and security agencies. They probably do so, driven by their high sense of probity and disillusioned by the steep fall of values in professional life of a handful of intelligence officers.
The question is what they really want the agencies to account for. If the purpose is to inquire into administrative complains and malpractices, then the PMO, Cabinet Secretariat, CAT and courts are there to address these infirmities unless one dismisses these institutions as wholly partisan and unreliable. If the motive is to check the expenditure incurred on purchase of devices, equipment and property, each agency has a senior financial advisor with sweeping powers to go into the justification of the requirements and whether all procedures have been strictly adhered to.
As an abundant precaution, the CAG can be involved at the pre-acquisition stage with a caveat that the concerned papers will remain protected. Lastly, if the objective is to look into the expenditure incurred from the secret service funds on intelligence activities, the agencies alone are better equipped to plug the leak.
Plugging the Leaks
There is no denying that secret funds are misused by some officers who run fake operations to build personal assets and live a lavish lifestyle. The remedy of this malaise lies in investigating them for holding disproportionate assets. Till that happens, let this greed be checked by in-house officers whose integrity is proven and are known to monitor the outflow of secret service funds as hawks.
For anyone imported from a different background, it will be impossible to realistically assess the need for mounting an operation or verify the quantum of expenses incurred, because there are no straight-jacket methods of evaluating the cost and benefit of intelligence missions. For example, he is bound to view payments made to buy out Hurriyat leaders, a Baluch warlord, chief of an insurgent outfit or punishing a democratically elected government in the neighbourhood with alarm. He will have another handicap. Operations often fail to meet objectives or get aborted, but expenditures are incurred to plan and set them on course. In all such cases, it will be tempting for him to indict the agencies for wasting resources, little realising that torn threads can be used later to stitch another operation.
Politicians at Cross-purposes
The clamour for accountability becomes really worrying when you bring in politicians to question the justification of an operation and expenditure incurred on it. In a country that is infested with a ‘million mutinies’ and ‘argumentative Indians’, you can hardly ever have consensus on the desirability of mounting or having mounted an intelligence operation. The secular and communal divide is so passionately contrived and the leftist and rightist positions are so aggressively pursued that no group of parliamentarians will ever agree on engaging militants, insurgents and Naxalites in encounters, conducting cross-border raids or bringing dubious targets under clandestine surveillance.
A particular political party’s terrorist will be another party’s martyr. If one set of parliamentarians seeks approval for forcibly evicting illegal immigrants, others will fight tooth and nail invoking human concerns. If a section of legislators insists on secretly and steadily settling non-Kashmiris from other parts of India in J&K, the keepers of the nation’s conscience will call it betrayal to commitments given to the UN and Kashmiris.
Similar will be the fate of proposals to unseat a government in the neighbourhood or intercepting calls of politicians, businessmen and film celebrities in nexus with underground criminals. Accustomed to maintaining status-quo and taking individual democratic rights to ludicrous extent, the parliamentarians will procrastinate endlessly, accusing each other of demonic intent. This is if you seek their prior approval of an intelligence project.
Sharing Classified Information
But if you give them access to classified documents pertaining to operations that were concluded, they are most likely to spill the beans because of their hyper convictions, risking lives and anonymity of operatives and assets. One senior politician did exactly that in his heyday, dismantling a spying infrastructure built over years, for incapacitating a neighbour’s terrorist infrastructure.
The experience of entrusting the supervision of agencies to prime ministers and home ministers, irrespective of their party affiliation, has so far been good and need not be tinkered. Except for the US, where House and Senate legislators are given access to all classified material, in no other country has this license been extended to politicians. Let us not forget that India is not the US. Were it so, Dawood Ibrahim and the likes of Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Hurriyat leaders would have been staring at the heavens by now.
In the UK, Canada and Australia, where some accessibility to classified material is available to legislators, ‘sensitive’ information and papers are not shown in ‘the interest of national security’. This part-time approach to accountability is self-serving and delusional and actually humiliating for legislators.
Let’s wait till our legislators begin looking at intelligence requirements more realistically, setting aside the baggage of their phoney ideologies. And, never make the mistake of bringing a judge as an ombudsman. He will be seriously hamstrung to handle this task which is characteristically covert and shrouded in illegality. Besides, he won’t have the benefit of a legislator’s sagacity, curiosity to learn and an earthy, commonsense comprehension of issues at stake in India’s larger security interests.
(The writer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat)
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