Book exposes ugly side of IB

Calls for the agency’s revamp on the lines of British M15

NEW DELHI: Yet to come out of its colonial mindset, it’s time the intelligence bureau (IB), the country’s premier intelligence agency, is revamped and remodelled on the lines of the British MI5, says a new book.

The agency has become a tool in the hands of the ruling party although it is supposed to be responsible for coordinating and supplying information on matters concerning security of India, says K S Subramanian, IPS (Retd) in his book

Political violence and the police in India.

IB’s bugging devices were used not only against journalists, communists and others but were also planted in the parliamentary office of a ruling party member in the 1980s and later on even in the Rashtrapati Bhawan,” the author says citing memoirs of former IB Director M K Dhar.

Subramanian observes that the functioning of UK’s MI5, is based on “a clear unambiguous legal basis”. Moreover, MI5 is directly responsible to an independent and empowered “Parliamentary Oversight Committee”, the security service having a statutory duty to provide the Committee with any information they require.

The Indian intelligence agency as such has no independent monitoring organisation, he says. The book says the Indian intelligence agencies pursue their own “information agendas” and suggests the need for the ministry of home affairs to cultivate its own sources of information instead of depending on intelligence of state agencies. “The government’s response (to problems of political violence) is essentially guided by classified intelligence reports. A more realistic appraisal is possible only if the ministry creates its own sources of information rather than depending exclusively on the reports of the IB,” he said

According to Subramanian, the premier intelligence agency not only exhibits ‘lack of impartiality and objectivity in reporting’, it has also failed to acquire a non-colonial outlook under the regressive Indian political system even after years of independence. The book, that in the words of the author, took three years of writing, but 30 years of preparation, strongly reiterates the fact that political problems cannot have military solutions.

Analysing the causes of sectarian violence in the country, the author concludes that the state response to political violence has not only been inadequate, but largely half-hearted. “In a major state in the country, a Dalit woman is raped every 60 hours; a Dalit is murdered every nine days and the conviction rates are as low as 3 per cent,” he states.