Comment

National security adviser (NSA) MK Narayanan briefed the Union cabinet last week after a visit to troubled Kashmir valley that it was not a police bullet that killed Hurriyat leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz.

According to him, the fatal shot was fired by someone yet to be identified. He has also told the cabinet that Pakistani elements were playing mischief in the Valley. It was reported on Tuesday that it was he who has laid down the latest policy of cracking down on hardliners. He has over the last four years spoken at various points about terrorists including about their involvement in financial markets. He has been focused on terrorism, which is unexceptionable. The question is whether that is the job of a NSA.

The NSA is expected to provide a big picture of the problem of security, which cannot be confined to the activities of terrorists. Monitoring terrorists is a job that is best left to the various intelligence organisations, to the Union home ministry. Their input would be crucial for thinking on security.But should the NSA be involved in intelligence gathering and decisions pertaining to law and order issues?

The NSA should be looking at security from the strategy point of view, which includes external and internal aspects, and which also goes beyond mere military and policing matters. Security also includes ideas of gaining and exerting influence in political, economic and cultural spheres. What is expected from the NSA is an articulation of national policy. That is, the NSA does not lay down policy, but gives voice to what the party or coalition in office has agreed upon. That is more or less how it works in the American system, from where the idea of the NSA has been borrowed.

The office of the NSA has been in existence for about a decade now. It was first created by Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1998 who appointed Brajesh Mishra, a former IFS officer, to the job. Vajpayee had used Mishra as his special envoy for talking to the Americans, the Pakistanis and the Chinese. In the case of Pakistan, Mishra was also supposed to have interacted closely with the intelligence establishment in Islamabad.
(Though asked about it at the 2004 SAARC summit, he dismissed it saying that he was certainly talking to intelligent people.)

In the Vajpayee set up, the NSA was meant as the prime minister’s face and voice on foreign policy issues. This was problematic enough because the foreign minister and foreign secretary, who are supposed to be dealing with such issues had to tread carefully. Mishra did not cause much apprehension in the foreign office because the diplomats saw him as their man in the PMO.

Prime minister Manmohan Singh made things complicated by having two NSAs, Narayanan (internal security), and the JN Dixit (external security). Unfortunately, Dixit died in 2005 and Narayanan was given both the jobs. It is reliably known that Dixit was not comfortable with the existence of two NSAs, and is supposed to have shared this with Mishra. Dixit was earlier a critic of a single NSA, but later he realised that it was not a good idea to have two people for a sensitive, high profile job.

It has to be made very clear that the NSA is a policy man, an ideas man, a spokesman of sorts of the government on strategic affairs, which includes security. There is certainly need for that kind of a points-man as India takes its position in the world as a power to reckon with. There is need for someone who keeps a watch not just of the geographical, but of the strategic, neighbourhood.

Both Mishra and Dixit kept the foreign policy orientation, each in their own way. There were problems, no doubt, especially with regard to the foreign office. Narayanan brings the orientation of an experienced intelligence man and he is turning the NSA into a chief intelligence officer. There is thus confusion about what the job is, and should be. It is not a good idea to let that confusion persist.
Email: r_parsa@dnaindia.net