A wild card idea has emerged to slow down the appointment of a successor to outgoing security czar MK Narayanan, who is shifting from the prime minister's office to Kolkata as West Bengal governor.

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It's a proposal to scrap the post of national security adviser and is said to have the backing of home minister P Chidambaram, who wants control of the entire internal security apparatus, including all the intelligence agencies, without any interference from the PMO.

The idea has an interesting history for which we must go back to 1998, when then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee appointed the country's first NSA, his principal secretary Brajesh Misra.

Contrary to popular perception, Misra had opposed the creation of the NSA's post in the PMO on the grounds that it violated the fundamentals of our parliamentary system of governance. Positioning the NSA in the PMO, he argued, meant that he would not be accountable to Parliament while wielding enormous power as an institution mandated to manage the country's security. But because national security was the plank on which the BJP had fought the election and the NSA was a promise in the party's poll manifesto for 1998, Misra was overruled.

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There are only two countries that have a dedicated national security set-up headed by a national security adviser. These are the United States and Russia, and both are presidential forms of government that do not function on the principle of parliamentary accountability.

Our role model, the United Kingdom, for instance, has a diplomatic adviser to the prime minister. His job is to advise, guide, and craft his government's foreign policy, which today is driven largely by the executive head of the country. The president of France, too, functions with a diplomatic adviser.

What Brajesh Misra had suggested to Vajpayee was to make him diplomatic adviser while leaving internal security with the home ministry. Alternatively, for sharper focus on security issues, he favoured the creation of a separate ministry, leaving political issues such as Centre-state relations with the home ministry, which could be re-named the interior ministry.

Interestingly, Chidambaram voiced something similar last month, signalling his frustration over continuing turf issues with the NSA, MK Narayanan.

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TAILPIECEThe irony is that Narayanan became a larger-than-life presence in UPA 1 quite by accident. When Manmohan Singh first became PM, Narayanan was his internal security adviser. He had no line function as such and was merely supposed to use his vast experience as an intelligence man to give inputs to the PM. JN Dixit was the NSA overseeing external policy and strategic matters.

Unfortunately, Dixit died in less than a year and Narayanan became the NSA. With an ineffective man like Shivraj Patil in the home ministry, it was child's play for Narayanan to slowly gain control of both internal and external security management.

He quickly emerged as a major power centre, a sort of super minister for foreign and home affairs rolled into one. He drew up roadmaps to fight Naxalism. He oversaw the navigation of the Indo-US nuclear deal through its tortuous negotiations. He helped cut the deal with Amar Singh and the Samajwadi Party when the time came to dump the Left. And he was the backroom boy managing the fateful trust vote for the government in 2008.

Times have changed. As challenges mount on the security front, both external and internal, it's time for the government to do some serious restructuring to develop strategic depth to tackle myriad problems. The days of one omnipotent presence are over.