New Delhi: The latest
terror bombings that ripped through India's financial and
entertainment capital have shifted the focus back on the
much-awaited police reforms and the absence of preventive
intelligence gathering in India.
Reforms would mean doing away with the colonial legacy in the form
of the archaic Police Act of 1861, if the nation is to be saved
from terrorist outfits and homegrown subversive elements, say
experts who have been working on bringing about these changes. The
blasts have once again exposed known flaws in India's internal
security structure allowing a silent growth of homegrown
terrorists, experts say.
The main problems India faces are the vacancies in police forces
and inadequate training of force personnel. These problems are
only aggravated by the poor intelligence gathering model that is
being followed.
According to official figures, India's police-population ratio is
just 120 per 100,000 people. Globally the ratio is an average of
270.
India has over 20 big and small central intelligence agencies -
including the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) -
apart from state police intelligence wings.
India's capacity to repel a terror attack may have improved, but
the country still lacks the ability to pre-empt such strikes,
experts say. Ground-level intelligence gathering is too poor to
prevent modern threats, according to them.
When Ajai Sahni, a known security expert, was asked if he thought
there are chinks in India's security establishment, he quipped:
"There are gaps, enormous gaps."
"Can you believe that India's main internal spy agency, the
Intelligence Bureau, has less than 5,000 field agents to gather
ground information from a population of 1.2 billion?" Sahni told
IANS.
"And their primary job is to do political intelligence for the
ruling parties."
Police officer-turned-activist Kiran Bedi has a question for the
government, particularly India's union home ministry, which looks
after internal security management.
"How much did the Indian police forces reinvent themselves after
the (2008) terror attack in Mumbai? You are managing a crisis by
creating these intelligence agencies, not preventing a crisis. How
will you prevent terrorism in the absence of a trained policeman
who is your eyes and ears on the ground?"
Bedi told IANS that if normal policing "is absent and you don't
have people on the ground to collect information, these things can
happen".
Sahni, who runs the Institute for Conflict Management that focuses
on internal security research in India, said if ground-level
intelligence gathering were there, then of course "we wouldn't
have taken so long to know who did the Mumbai blasts again".
"Haven't we identified the subversive elements that need constant
surveillance? If so, how do we allow them to grow and strike
again?"
He recalled an old intelligence gathering system in the country of
having a watchman in every village. Those village watchmen used to
report to intelligence officers at the local police station every
day with whatever information they had.
"This system has been done away with. But we need a system like
this. Not the redundant meta-institutions like the NIA, which are
wasteful energy hubs. Nothing prevents terrorism than local
intelligence gathering.
"You can have a whole web of technology to aid these agencies. You
can have a grid or a data centre linking 21 databases. You can
have National Counter Terrorism Centre. But if the input doesn't
come from the ground, what will you feed them with and what will
you work on?"
Since 1979, governments have set up a number of commissions to
reform the police but their recommendations have been largely
ignored because politicians, especially in the states dont want
them, as they want to keep the police under their thumb.
In October 2005, the union home ministry constituted the Police
Act Drafting Committee (PADC) - commonly known as the Soli
Sorabjee Committee - which submitted a model police act a year
later.
The Supreme Court on Sep 22, 2006, acting on the former police
officers' petition, asked the central government to kickstart
reforms which included separating the investigation and law and
order functions of the police and have a system of preventive
intelligence gathering system in place.
But all that is still awaited.
(Sarwar Kashani
can be contacted at s.kashani@ians.in)
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