From just a handful of intelligence alerts, India’s security agencies are flooding the home ministry with hundreds of information dockets on a daily basis after 26/11.
It is as if the floodgates have been opened. From just a handful of intelligence alerts, India’s security agencies are flooding the home ministry with hundreds of information dockets on a daily basis after 26/11.
According to central government sources, the state police, the paramilitary forces and various intelligence agencies are pouring in dozens of alerts, adding up to a few hundred per day. Before the Mumbai attacks, there were just a handful of alerts daily from all of them put together.
With P Chidambaram now at the helm of affairs at the home ministry, a new system is taking shape to sort out these security alerts by grading them on the basis of significance and credibility before passing them on to various state governments for action. A senior official said the home minister has already ordered the beefing up of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) with more officers to “improve reception, analysis, classification and distribution” of these alerts.
This beefing-up is specifically happening at the Multi Agency Centre (MAC), a nodal agency created during the NDA regime for improving intelligence sharing but ineffective all these years because of inter-agency clashes and obsessive possessiveness about individual inputs. Under a new executive order of the central government, starting January 1 all intelligence agencies, including state police arms, are duty bound to share all intelligence inputs with MAC, and MAC, in turn, with all agencies.
Under the new system, the MAC sorts out the alerts, checks their veracity, if need be, and sends out most of the credible ones to the state police forces and other agencies concerned. The most important among the daily alerts are discussed the next morning at a meeting between the home minister, National Security Advisor MK Narayanan, the chiefs of IB and R&AW (Research and Analysis Wing), the home secretary and others.
Officials say some of the inputs deemed important are monitored by the home minister personally. In a recent case, a specific input from the Karnataka police spoke about twin-brothers from near Mangalore who had appeared in western dress after being absent for over six months from their impoverished village. A man linked to the brothers was, meanwhile, trying to buy a fishing trawler. The brothers disappeared as fast as they appeared.
The input was processed at the highest levels and constantly monitored. Under the Delhi scanner, the Karnataka police swung into action and picked up the brothers finally from a public transport location. Though there was nothing concrete to link the brothers to terrorism, it turned out that they were running a recruitment firm for some Saudi companies.
Officials admit that though the IB has a way of sorting out the intelligence alerts, it is necessary that a national standard is put in place immediately. “Every agency receiving a particular alert should know from its grading the responses they have to take. This system has to be a national standard,” says one source.
Today, one of the worries of the central government is to ensure that all agencies concerned carry out real-time coordination over an intelligence alert. “To meet every threat, several agencies need to be involved, from state police to central agencies and others. Their coordination has to be a seamless affair,” he said. “Before we forget the Mumbai attacks, a national system has to evolve,” he adds.
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