Towards a more professional IB

Accountability of the Intelligence Bureau to parliament will prevent misuse of talented IB operators.

The Intelligence Bureau is a black hole. No civilian knows what’s inside that body. Apart from the Prime Minister, the Union Home Minister, top police officers and some people in the military and the paramilitary, the rest of the population, and even a majority of those in the government set-up, generally have no idea what the IB does.

The only information in public domain that believably tells something about the IB is a memoir penned by a former senior IB officer himself. ‘Open Secrets’ by ex-IB joint director Maloy Krishna Dhar is part autobiography, part history and totally scary.

In 2005, former Punjab DGP KPS Gill said of Dhar in Outlook magazine that the book would make an interesting read even for other ‘insiders’ to intelligence, politics and governance in India, and would probably be entirely fascinating to the lay reader.

At the core of the IB’s function is to be India’s first line of defence against a variety of threats– domestic as well as external to a certain extent – by pre-empting hostile activities. This is done by collecting information, tonnes of them. Long before the age of Internet, the IB understood that information was power.

The thing is information about anyone, including those who were on the same side, were routinely sought and consumed by other people on the same side. It gets confusing here. But it will become clear if you look at the long history of opposition members in successive governments accusing the ruling power of the day of misusing the IB to spy on them.

Consider the hullabaloo over Jawaharlal Nehru asking the spooks of his day to monitor the activities of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s family. Amid the shrill demands for declassification of files, one thing that everyone has missed is this: could someone use the IB to spy on political opponents? The vocalists of TV media must ask this question on prime time instead of trying to correct history, which they cannot change.

In ‘Open Secrets’, Dhar said that he was told to go through records and collect papers on Indira Gandhi and her family that IB had prepared during the Janata Party’s heyday. At some point in the book he did ask himself whether he would be violating the Official Secrets Act. But his motivation was simple: “[A]fter 57 years of Independence, the time has come to liberate the intelligence and investigation establishments from the stranglehold of petty and visionless politicians...”

As recently as April 28, 2015, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on a public interest litigation questioning the legality of intelligence agencies exercising police powers in the absence of any law. The Centre for Public Interest Litigation told the court that the “Intelligence Bureau, Research and Analysis Wing and National Technical Research Organisation are functioning without any oversight of Parliament”.

Accountability matters

The plea said that India is the only democracy in the world whose intelligence agencies have no legitimacy in the eyes of the law, and are not accountable to the people or Parliament, unlike in the US or the UK. It should be quite clear that no one is asking the IB to stop securing the country. But accountability to Parliament will prevent misuse of talented IB operators by successive governments, especially by the Home Ministry.
Since there is no parliamentary oversight for the IB, battle-hardened politicians must live with a twinge of fear in the back of their mind of being under surveillance for no good reason. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was adamant that he did not need protection from the Delhi Police, which reported directly to the Home Ministry, also the parent ministry of the IB. Whether Kejriwal was an idealist or a pragmatist who wanted to keep the Home Ministry at more than an arm’s length, we will never know.

Apart from rescuing the IB from the clutches of petty politicians, there really is no need for any more changes. Parliamentary oversight of intelligence agencies in the US and the UK is also not perfect. These countries do not have to deal with the type of cross-border terrorism that India faces, in a sense that there is no enemy physically present just across their borders.

But making the IB accountable to the people and Parliament, in the Indian security context, needs more debate because our enemies themselves may not be answerable to anyone. The IB operatives cannot work like policemen. Widely scattered groups, from Kashmir to the North-East, that are trying to destablise this country, improvise their methods as they go. So it is silly to expect intelligence agencies to take permission from some committee to pursue them in a way the agency thinks fit.

The people of this country deserve a more professional IB for their own security. As for politicians, they can always hire priests and godmen to predict the trajectory that their career would take. But leave the IB alone to do what it does best.