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

Counter-Terrorism Centre, ‘accountability’, and,in a critique arising from a different direction,the interface with human rights and fundamentaldemocratic freedoms.While many of these concerns are legitimate,they can only be considered secondary, within aframework of priorities, to far more urgent issuesthat plague India’s intelligence establishmentin an environment of rising security threat.Indeed, unless the more pressing imperatives offocus and efficiency, legitimacy, capacity andcapability – including manpower profiles andtechnological resources – are addressed, thebroader ‘architectural’ discourse will remainunproductive, even meaningless.More crucially, all these concerns, both the ‘higherorder’ discourse on meta-institutional reforms andthe more pragmatic considerations of capacity,collapse into the more fundamental enquiry:what are the legitimate concerns and limits toan intelligence apparatus within the frameworkof democracy – and more specifically, India’sdemocracy? And its corollary: how are theseto be realized? If a clear, coherent and detailedanswer could be found to these questions, mostof the remaining conundrums would easily meltaway.Within the theory of democracy, there is apowerful stream of justification that argues thatdemocracy is, itself, to be maximised as an‘ultimate value’, as opposed to the contrastingoptions of ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘tyranny’. Such aframing of the question is obviously emotionallyloaded – for how could authoritarianism ortyranny be preferred to democracy, freedom andthe rights of man? Advocates of this thesis tendto emphasise the value of certain processes, suchas elections, deliberation, and the separationof powers, and various relational and ethicalcriteria, such as freedom, equality, justice, rightsand participation, which are regarded as goodand desirable in themselves, without reference tothe objective circumstances of their operation orthe results they produce.Such an orientation has resulted, in India’simperfect democracy, in an excessive emphasison form, and an enduring neglect of substance,with a new institution or new legislation beingproposed to ‘resolve’ every new – or newlyperceived – problem. The abundance andimpotence of existing institutions and laws tosecure their purported objectives has done nothingto discourage this orientation, which appears tohave deep roots in the highest institutions of thestate, as well as in what passes for the intellectualelite in this country. Within such a framework,clearly, the inherent secrecy of operations ofintelligence agencies would find little legitimatespace, unless it was superimposed with layers ofoversight which, in present circumstances, wouldeffectively paralyse the agencies from performingany but the most innocuous and ineffective offunctions.Such a perspective, however, militates againstfar more vibrant and realistic traditions ofdemocracy, which have never shied away fromthe fundamental truth that democracy is, inessence, a system of government. Few, in India,understand and appreciate the tremendouslyhard-headed realism that underpinneddemocratic theory in its early contours, andthese origins have been buried deep under theincreasingly deceptive and diversionary populismof contemporary electoral democracies, not onlyhere, but, increasingly, across the world. Thetruth is, the idea of democracy as an end in itself,rooted in the intangibles of ‘popular sovereignty’and the ‘will of the people’, cannot provide anysatisfactory justification without reference tooutcomes. Democracy must find its justificationin the world of hard facts. Politics, in our world,is ultimately concerned with the relationshipbetween the governing and the governed, and ittakes little wisdom to conclude that it is aboutpower, and about the outcomes of the distributionand exercise of power. No system of governmentcan be an ultimate ideal without reference towhat it can do, or does, for the governed. AsGiovanni Sartori notes, “a democracy cannotpass the test, in the long run, unless it succeeds asa system of government. For if a democracy doesnot succeed in being a system of government, itdoes not succeed – and that is that.”If democracy is to succeed in practical – and notmerely notional – terms, it must, first and aboveall, be secured. It must recognize the variousthreats to which it is exposed, and acquire thecapacities and capabilities to confront andneutralize these.44The Indian Police Journal, October - December, 2012, Special Issue