Set up specialised body to tackle terror: Counter-terrorism expert

“Intelligence may be collected by 18-20 different agencies, but there should be one agency to collate the intelligence, and this agency should be the one that investigates and initiates preventive action. It also should be accountable to the people”, Swaminathan, former special secretary and director general (Security) in the Union government, said.

Addressing a conference on “counter-terrorism and security solutions for India”, organised by Aviation Watch and Independent Power Producers’ Association of India here, he noted homeland security and counter terror operations could not be done entirely by the government.

On the National Investigation Agency (NIA), set up after the Mumbai terror attacks, Swaminathan said: “It is a post-mortem exercise, not a medical treatment. Though many people think it will solve all the problems, it is just like improving post-mortem facilities at the time of an epidemic.”

No coordination

He added: “Within the government itself various agencies do not coordinate. The government does not coordinate with private agencies. The private agencies do not coordinate among themselves. You may have three different organisations, but each one is talking differently. They do not want to work together.”

The NIA, he said, was not yet functional because of the lack of infrastructure.

Lt Gen V G Patankar of the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, proposed a three-tier organisational structure to act at local, regional and national levels. He added there was no need to activate the National Security Guards as a first course of action.
According to him, terrorist threat came not only from land, sea and air but also from sub-surface, space and cyber space.

Noting that the effort should be to contain, control and crush or capture, which should the sequence to deal with a terrorist strike, he said of the NIA: “We need to formulate a strategy and concept first and then create an organisation to carry it out rather than first create an organisation and say what job can we give to these people...”

Brig Pradeep Sharma, who had served in the Indian Military Academy and NSG, said: “The genesis of terrorism is the conflict of economic interests that has left parts of the world disgruntled; that there are 174 registered terror groups in India, and that it has to contend with real threats from groups like Naxalites, Bodos and ULFA elements.”

He added profiling and human mapping had been found successful wherever introduced, and that it was an option for India to successfully identify and tackle the problem of terrorism.