Had the proposal of the Home Minister been accepted in totality, the national focus could have well shifted from investigation/postinvestigation of terrorist acts to prevention of terrorist acts, which is the need of the hour

After 22 months of excruciating delay, the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) was finally approved by the government. The 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai revealed deficiencies in our counter-terrorism architecture in terms of inadequate intelligence and lack of coordinated follow-up action even on the intelligence that was available. In fact, the responsibility for follow-up action on available intelligence was found to be diffused.

The NCTC is to start functioning from March 1, 2012, but for it to become of worthwhile real-time operational use, it will require a couple of months, if not years. The fact that the NCTC will subsume the Multi Agency Centre (MAC) implies that in real terms the NCTC will build upon the core of the MAC.

The MAC of the Intelligence Bureau has been dealing with terror-related inputs till now. The NCTC is to coordinate with all intelligence and security agencies, getting terror related inputs, collating them and optimising this intelligence for use against terror threats. However, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), the main central agency to investigate terror related cases, is to continue functioning ‘independently’.

NCTC will be the yet another new major antiterror set up after NIA and the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID). NATGRID, approved by the union cabinet in June last year too will work separately albeit provide inputs to the NCTC. The million-dollar question is how much of a difference will the NCTC make considering the shape it is to come up? The belief that it might not go beyond an inflated MAC may well be true despite the fanciful name akin to the US NCTC at Washington, D.C.

While mooting the proposal, the Home Minister’s ideas differed from the counter-terrorism architecture created in the US, in that while in the US, the Director National Intelligence oversees the functioning of the NCTC, the Home Minister wanted that the entire counter-terrorism architecture, including the proposed NCTC, should function under the Home Minister till his idea of creating a Ministry of Internal Security was accepted and implemented. There was considerable merit in what the Home Minister was proposing – creating a Ministry of Internal Security akin to the Ministry of Home Land Security in the US. If this was being proposed by the Home Minister himself, it was obviously taking into account difficulties in coping with counter-terrorism holistically in the current avatar of the Ministry of Home Affairs including handling the nine major intelligence agencies, all of which do not follow the same command and control channel. Had the proposal of the Home Minister been accepted in totality, the national focus could have well shifted from investigation/post-investigation of terrorist acts to prevention of terrorist acts, which is the need of the hour. However, the proposal got diluted in the tussle between the sphere of responsibilities of the National Security Advisor and the Home Minister. Political fear of letting the Minister of Home Affairs Minister of Internal Security become ‘too strong’ would have also contributed towards such dilution – the same imaginative fear that prevents them from appointing a Chief of Defence Staff despite being strongly advocated by the Kargil Review Committee and the Group of Ministers.

Resultantly, the NCTC is going to come up as a cross-breed with the NIA, NATGRID, etc. functioning independently, permitting full interplay of the Indian crabs in pulling down each other in the familiar game of one-upmanship. Notwithstanding this, the NCTC in the proposed shape too can only be optimised if state counter-terrorism centres are established in all states and connected for real-time passage of intelligence both ways.

The views expressed herein are the personal views of the author.