Editorial Board Contents - Bureau of Police Research and ...

Intelligence Agencies inIndian DemocracyDr Ajai Sahni,Executive Director, Institute for Conflict ManagementThe frontiers of criminality in India have beenexpanding exponentially since Independence,with terrorism and the changing internal securityscenario adding a dramatic new dimension tothe character and scale of the challenges facedby the intelligence and enforcement apparatusof the state. Apart from insurgent and terroristviolence, there has also been a noticeableupsurge in organized and transnational crime inrecent decades, including disturbing tendenciesto collusive operations, covering complexeconomic offences, as well as linkages withpowerful politicians and the bureaucracy, on theone hand, and with international criminal andterrorist groupings, on the other.A combination of demographic, technologicaland geopolitical factors suggests that theseproblems have the potential for significantaugmentation in the foreseeable future. Already,many movements of extreme violence are led bymen who are obsessed by apocalyptic visions ofgenocide and omnicide, and who, increasingly,are approaching the possibilities of securing themeans to achieve these ends. Indeed, intelligenceand security agencies across the world nowconcede not only the possibility, but, in fact,the imminence of a future catastrophic attack,potentially involving WMD technologies; amongthese, the most devastating and accessible couldwell be biological terrorist attacks that couldleave millions dead.Terrorism is undergoing radical, generationalshifts, and when this transition manifests itself ina new wave of catastrophic attacks, the resultantshocks could destroy almost all capacities ofresponse within the target systems. With rareexception, however, India’s strategic and policyestablishment continues to prepare to counternothing more than the last terrorist attack,substantially oblivious of the continuous processof reinvention that terrorists are engaged in.There is, in India today, little comprehensionof the magnitude and the evolving nature of thefuture threat of terrorism, consigning much of thediscourse on the subject to the realm of makebelieve.Terrorism, however, does not exhaust the threatthe country faces. India’s democracy is, today,under sustained attack from within and without.In 65 years of independence, the institutions ofgovernance have never appeared as fragmentedand fragile as they seem today. Even as thecapacities for governance appear to be insufficientto fulfil the most rudimentary mandate of modernadministration, the institutions of governance areconfronted with a tsunami of rising aspirations,and by a divisive, criminalized and polarizedpolitics that exacerbates centrifugal tendenciesacross the country.It is within the complex dynamic of these risingdisorders that India’s intelligence apparatus hasto respond, and is to be evaluated. Despite itsconsiderable achievements, there is evidentlya crisis in the intelligence establishment in thecountry today, and it is obvious that the system isunprepared to deal with the projected threats ofthe future. Indeed, it has seen significant failures,even in its efforts to confront the problems of thepresent.There has been much talk of intelligence failureand intelligence reform over the past years,particularly since the Kargil debacle of 1999.Nevertheless, the contours of the crisis ofintelligence in the country may not be those thatexhaust much of the public discourse. The currentdebate on intelligence has overwhelminglyfocused on ‘coordination failures’, centralizationor integration of command and control, includingthe controversial proposals for the NationalThe Indian Police Journal, October - December, 2012, Special Issue 43