13 May 2015

Intelligence, lost and found


The Modi government's goof-up over Dawood Ibrahim is not only embarrassing but demeaning, writes Subir Bhaumik 

The answer to the written question was cryptic:- "[T]he subject (Dawood) has not been located so far. Extradition... would be initiated once subject is located." But the reply of the minister of state for home, Haribhai Parthibhai Chaudhary, to a Bharatiya Janata Party lawmaker's question not only left his government with egg on its face but also gave the Opposition Congress a huge issue with which to corner the BJP. Chaudhary's colleague, Kiren Rijiju, tried to come to his rescue, telling journalists that his government knew Dawood was in Pakistan but at the moment did not know where exactly. That just did not work. Rijiju was stating what successive Indian governments have said: Dawood is in Pakistan, he is close to its intelligence agencies, he provided logistics support for the 2008 Mumbai attack. Lack of specificity is not a virtue in intelligence because information becomes intelligence only when specific.

No minister with an elementary sense of handling intelligence would have cleared this answer to be tabled in Parliament, drafted by a 'joint secretary' or otherwise. The exact location of a 'national security threat' like Dawood is not something one would table in Parliament, especially if it had other implications, such as, using that intelligence to press for his extradition. So a reply saying he is in a neighbouring country (no hostile reference to Pakistan if one is trying to get them to send him back) and his exact locations cannot be disclosed would have sufficed. Since the question was raised by a BJP lawmaker, it was unlikely he would press hard for a definitive answer. There the matter would rest.

Instead, Chaudhary now stands accused of undermining India's position on Dawood and on the terror question vis-a-vis Pakistan. The criticism that he would make Pakistan, especially the Inter-Services Intelligence, happy and upbeat, is not unfounded. The minister's written answer will surely find its way into future diplomatic encounters between the two neighbours whenever Delhi presses Islamabad hard on trials of the Mumbai accused or on extraditing terror masterminds like Dawood.

Also, why should a BJP lawmaker ask this question when it is well known that the Narendra Modi government has very little to show on the Dawood front, notwithstanding the prime minister's pre-poll boast that "we will bring Dawood back"? Lack of parliamentary group coordination, one would imagine. It is some irony that on the day this government got the stick on the Dawood issue, it saved itself a huge bilateral embarrassment with Bangladesh by going back on pre-poll sabre-rattling against 'illegal migrants' and clearing the land boundary agreement on the swapping of enclaves. Before the polls, the BJP stoutly opposed this deal and now it has a huge problem managing its Assam unit which is clearly unhappy.

If Modi cannot 'bring Dawood back' to India for standing trial or go back on the LBA issue for very practical reasons, does that not raise a fundamental question - should we trust him on what he says before the elections next time? Are his election promises to be taken seriously?

But a more serious issue looms on the horizon - his government's handling of intelligence. The home minister, Rajnath Singh, admitted that he came to know of the Nepal earthquake when told about an urgent cabinet meeting to discuss it. None of the intelligence agencies had bothered to inform him of the earthquake when the minister was on his way back home from, ironically, the National Intelligence Academy. He has missed the tremors in the car.

Two huge intelligence failures have bedevilled the Modi government. Kashmir, where the Modi government had no idea about what its ally, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, was up to, and the Northeast, where the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang's sudden offensive seems to have caught the security forces, long used to the Naga ceasefire, completely off guard. Sayeed's decision to release stone-throwing intifada chief campaigner, Masarat Alam, came as a bolt from the blue for Modi. The chain of events following that decision by the unreliable Sayeed has led to an unprecedented spurt in separatist mobilization, with Pakistani flags flying brazenly at successive separatist rallies. There is no reason to believe Modi would have cleared Alam's release and it obviously happened without his knowledge. Would that not leave some questions to be asked of the Intelligence Bureau's men in Srinagar? Had they given any specific input on this 'about-to-happen' development? Or was it that reports from ground were not put up to the political bosses by the Intelligence Bureau top brass for fear of adverse political reactions? What about Modi's 'party intelligence'? Did the BJP's Kashmir unit bosses have the faintest inkling of what an would-be ally like Mufti was up to? Sometimes, intelligence on allies is as important as on enemies.

In the Northeast, the Burmese Naga rebel chieftain, S.S. Khaplang, has been pulling fast ones on Delhi for several years. The home ministry had a ceasefire with him in place since 2001, knowing all the while that Khaplang's group was sheltering several other active separatist groups from the region in his base area in Myanmar's Sagaing region. In fact, after Bhutan and Bangladesh threw out the northeastern rebel groups, this region is the only remaining trans-border base area for rebels in the Northeast and therefore should be high priority in Delhi's efforts. No 'Look East' can unfold if the land bridge to Southeast Asia remains disturbed by a plethora of insurgencies .

In 2012, Khaplang secured a similar (in some ways more favourable) ceasefire deal with the Myanmar government that allowed his fighters to move around with weapons and control local trade in the Naga self-administered zone in Sagaing. With Delhi planning to discontinue the ceasefire this year, Khaplang pulled the plug and went on an offensive after reneging on the ceasefire much before it was due to expire on April 28. In a swift move that caught Indian intelligence unawares, Khaplang expelled two Indian Naga leaders of his faction, Wangting and Thikak. Even as Delhi planned a ceasefire with the faction formed by these two to isolate Khaplang, like they had signed one with the Kitovi faction when it broke away from him, the Burmese Naga leader came up with a new united front of nine northeastern rebel groups (including the United Liberation Front of Assam and Manipuri rebel groups) and followed it up with a spate of attacks on Indian security forces. In one such attack in Nagaland's Mon district, eight paramilitary troops were killed. One got the feeling that the wily septuagenarian Burmese Naga rebel leader was a step ahead of the Indian security-intelligence establishment.

In July last year, the Modi government was also embroiled in an embarrassing controversy over a failed intelligence operation that involved touching base with the Mumbai attack mastermind, Hafeez Sayeed. An aide of Baba Ramdev, the 'journalist' Ved Pratap Vaidik, was caught on camera in a meeting with Hafeez Sayeed. He denied later that he had met Hafeez Sayeed at the behest of the Modi government and boasted meeting "many enemies of India" in his career to "understand their minds" - among them Velupillai Prabhakaran - wasn't he close to Indian agencies before the Rajiv Gandhi-J.R. Jayawardene accord? Then the defence minister at the time, Arun Jaitley, told Parliament that the government had "absolutely nothing" to do with the Vaidik-Hafeez Sayeed meeting and the Lashkar-e-Toiba chief was a terrorist and a threat for India. It would be unusual for Hafeez Sayeed to meet an Indian 'journalist' believed to be close to the sangh parivar unless he saw it as an parley. Assuming Vaidik's claim of meeting Hafeez Sayeed on his own is true, it raises the question of whether the Indian government was unaware of someone close to Baba Ramdev meeting India's enemy no 1 in Pakistan - would that not be treated as an intelligence failure? If Indian intelligence cannot monitor someone like Vaidik in Pakistan, can it monitor the likes of Hafeez Sayeed or Dawood in that country?

Pakistan has, however, been increasingly nervous about the activities of the Research and Analysis Wing in Balochistan and elsewhere in the country. At the end of an army commander's conference, a statement from the army headquarters talked of "RAW's growing aggressive operations in the country" and promised to back these allegations with concrete evidence. Pakistan's defence minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, described RAW as an "enemy organization created to destroy Pakistan" and blamed it for supporting "all enemies of Pakistan" from the Pakistan Taliban to Baloch groups to backing Mohajir groups in Sindh. But Islamabad could be finding a scapegoat in RAW for its own failures to control Frankenstein's monsters like the Pakistan Taliban.

The Modi government has slept over a bill placed by the Congress member of parliament, Manish Tiwari, during the United Progressive Alliance II regime for enforcing parliamentary monitoring of intelligence agencies. Indian intelligence czars have always opposed any oversight, citing security and operational reasons, but the question keeps coming up when intelligence failures as large as Mumbai 2008 occur. Even legendary spymasters like RAW's B.B Nandy (before his death) have strongly advocated parliamentary oversight and accountability for the intelligence agencies. If Modi has to live up to his strongman image, he has to make reinvigorating Indian intelligence one of his top priorities. And he has to forget about bringing Dawood back. Developing India's covert action capability to fight terror, in which intelligence occupies a central role, is as important as getting the country Rafale fighters and new submarines. 

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