Offstumped – Commentary on Indian Politics

Originally published in The Pioneer on Monday 12th September 2011 - To be read in conjunction with this blog post after Mumbai 13/7 blast and this one on the Delhi HC blast.

As terror returns to Delhi we may be dangerously close to having exhausted talking about every possible diagnosis, prescription. The anti-terror discourse is close to being reduced to a giant cliché while planned counter-terror initiatives are still-born, much-needed policing reforms continue to be delayed and legislations passed by elected legislatures remain stalled by unelected Governors.

The list of unsolved terror cases is long as is the number of undertrials awaiting convictions, not to speak of those who remain safely ensconced in havens beyond our borders. In successive debates after every terror attack we have attacked Government delinquency, Opposition insensitivity, lethargy in agencies and citizens’ apathy. We have complained about media sensationalism too. One area we have not focussed as much on is victim advocacy and the role media could have played in promoting it.

Noted counter-terror expert B Raman has often written on victim advocacy and the role it could potentially play in 26/11 lawsuits in the United States. Some sections of the print media have carried victim profiles in the past. In the immediate aftermath of 26/11 at least one major national outlet vowed to maintain a sustained focus on terror, a promise that was forgotten even before the Lok Sabha election of 2009.

The Pavlovian manner in which most political debate on terror is conducted has come to mean that nothing any politician or political party says is taken seriously anymore. Every suggestion and critique is viewed through the lens of politicisation. The ‘politicisation’ label has come handy for the Government of the day to escape critical scrutiny. A pliant 24×7 media in Delhi has allowed itself to become an accessory by amplifying the ‘politicisation’ label, in the process of providing ample political cover to the Government.

The culture of leaks has not helped either. The manner in which every case of ‘anti-Muslim terror’ has spawned inspired leaks while not one of those cases has come anywhere close to trial or convictions, is a commentary on the role of the media in putting the Opposition on the defensive, while allowing the Government to deflect hard questions.

It would be facile to suggest that the media has no option but to toe the establishment line when it comes to terror. The media, especially the 24×7 media has proven to be quite adept at exercising a disproportionate influence on public opinion and by extension on the Government. From the high profile media campaigns over mistrials to the high decibel coverage of the anti-corruption fasts, the media has demonstrated that it can be a vehicle for an adversarial agenda.

Why then has the media shied away from a concerted electronic campaign on victim advocacy when most terror attacks impact their prime audience in large metros and urban centers?

If we were to rewind back to 1999 and refresh our memory, the media’s role in victim advocacy even as negotiations were on in the Kandahar hijacking raises interesting questions. Is the media selective in its choice of victim advocacy and mostly errs in its judgement on when such advocacy would be or not be in national interest?

Perhaps victim advocacy is a matter of culture as well with respect to the society at large. The care with which each victim’s identity and memory has been preserved at the site of September 11, 2001 attacks needs to be particularly highlighted here.  Coinciding with the last high profile terror attack in Mumbai were two train accidents that saw far greater causalities. Mumbai of course attracted VIP visits and headline-grabbing political statements from the likes of Mr Rahul Gandhi on how 99 per cent of terror attacks can be stalled but a few will slip through. The irony, of course, was that no such certitude was expressed over the much more fatal train accidents where factors of safety lend themselves to credible guarantees from politicians.

A victim advocacy campaign on terror by the media will perhaps not get us far beyond a high decibel campaign and dramatic assurances from Parliament. A poignant question was posed by Sidin Vadukut on Twitter if anyone (within the voices on social media) had ever lost someone to a terror attack. In as much it was a personal question it was also a profound comment on how distant most victims of terror attacks are to the population at large. Maybe such a high decibel campaign will bridge some of that distance.

A common yardstick to compare the magnitude of terror attacks is to look at the number of deaths when we often forget the large number of casualities and barely even register the larger number of family members whose lives remain impacted for a long time to come. Our big cities have become too big, too dense, numbing our sensitivity to that human cost. If we managed our cities with a greater sense of community with smaller units of governance, perhaps we may become culturally more sensitive in preserving identities and memories as well as in accounting for the human cost.

The geopolitics of our neighbourhood and the demographic fault-lines within our hinterland will continue to offer safe havens to terrorists. We must gird ourselves for a long jihad without any apparent end as we seek short-term fixes and long-term defences. A victim advocacy campaign through the media may be our best bet at sustaining our commitment through this long arduous struggle. It may perhaps be the only solution to holding the Government accountable from a morally unexceptionable vantage point.

Filed under: UPA-II Critical Appraisal, War on Mumbai, War on Terror

As news comes in of the Prime Minister’s statements of intent during his visit to the blast sites in Mumbai one is left wondering if he knows what he is talking for the irony is that the perpetrators of the 20006 Mumbai Blasts are yet to be convicted while we have credible doubts if even the right guys are on Trial. Meanwhile unconfirmed reports on Star News of phone intercepts in February suggest there was intel of likely blasts in July.

This brings back the question on what could have been done differently on such leads ?

The botched Christmas plane bombing Detroit offered many lessons which were compiled in this column in the Pioneer with inputs on what the proposed NATGRID and NCTCT ought to do.

Reproducing the column below for the benefit of Offstumped readers given the relevance to the present context.

Column in The Pioneer on January 12th 2010

The botched Christmas bombing of a Detroit-bound flight clearly indicates that the proposed National Intelligence Grid will suffer the same deficiencies and limitations as in the US. India must sufficiently address the need to correlate structured information available with its agencies

The spectre of jihadi terror against the United States within the homeland returned with the botched Christmas bombing in a Northwest Airways flight bound for Detroit. Much has already been written on the background and circumstances leading up to the radicalisation of Nigerian born Farouk Abdulmutallab and his links with Al Qaeda in Yemen. The incident while bringing to light the continued attempts by Al Qaeda at innovation also exposed the steep challenge in pre-empting and preventing jihadi terror from striking at soft targets.

US President Barack Obama must be complimented for his purposeful and transparent response in not just taking bottomline for the lapses in the system but for also going public with the details of these lapses. We in India have not been as lucky to be blessed with a leader that has the political courage to stand up and say, ‘the buck stops with me!’ However, there has been a sense of purpose with which Home Minister P Chidambaram has been advocating a revamp of our internal security architecture. One such purposeful endeavour is the setting up a National Intelligence Grid combining multiple public databases. With the appointment of former head of Mahindra Special Services Group Raghu Raman as chief executive officer of the Natgrid project, it is expected this key element in our Internal Security Architecture will be put on a fast track.

As the Home Ministry sets about the consultation process on the Natgrid there are many useful lessons to be learnt from the details made public by the Americans on lapses in their ability to connect the dots on information already available across multiple intelligence databases.

The review ordered by the US President of the systemic failures leading up to the botched December 25 attack revealed the following significant lapses. First, it was revealed that there was a failure to identify, correlate and fuse into a coherent story all the pieces of intelligence inputs already available across multiple databases and systems. Second, there was a failure to assign responsibility and accountability for follow-up of high priority threats to track all available leads to completion. Last, there were shortcomings in the process by which Abdulmutallab could have been prevented from boarding the flight bound for the US.

Further expanding on the failure to connect the dots, the review provides a useful insight into the various agencies involved in analysing counter-terrorism intelligence. It describes how the National Counter-Terrorism Centre was tasked as the primary agency for bringing together and assessing all-source intelligence. It also reveals that the NCTC had the bottomline for enabling a full understanding and formulating a proper response to terror threats. The review further goes on to explain the overlapping roles between the NCTC and CIA to make the point that the intentional redundancy in functions between the two agencies ought to have provided an additional layer of security.

Highlighting how this redundancy failed to connect the dots, the review reveals that there were discrete pieces of intelligence on threats from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula operating in Yemen which were not correlated with information from Abdulmutallab’s father on his son’s alleged radical activities in Yemen.

The other significant revelation from the review was that no single agency within the counter-terror community assumed responsibility for following up on the terror threat leading all the way to its disruption. In a very poignant remark, the review recommended that a process be put in place to track a terror threat and to ensure accountability across agencies in its follow-up.

The review concludes by observing that there was a failure to aggressively identify and correlate threat indicators using all the analytical tools and expertise at the disposal of the agencies.

Two significant technological deficiencies emerge from this review by the Americans. First has to do with faulty and incomplete databases on account of mispronunciation or multiple-pronunciations names. A more significant technological limitation had to do with the inability of technology to help correlate discrete elements of data already available.

Both of these are of immense of significance to the Natgrid project. As has been observed by this columnist previously, the Pakistan military-jihadi complex has been quite adept at operating beneath multiple layers of deceit using multiple false identities. The growing use of Internet and social networking websites by anti-India jihadis has also been highlighted by this columnist on previous occasions. The proposed Natgrid would suffer the same deficiencies and limitations as has become evident from the American experience, if it does not sufficiently address the need to correlate structured information already available in Government databases. The Natgrid must go a step further to also correlate unstructured information gleaned from the Internet and from conversations in social networking websites.

If one were to list two critical success factors for the Natgrid project. First, it would be the ability to correlate and identify emerging threats from across structured and unstructured sources of information. Second, it would be a process by which responsibility and accountability are established for following up on these emerging threats leading all the way up to their pre-emption and disruption.

India’s best and brightest minds are today servicing the world’s Information Technology needs. It would be a shame if the Natgrid project does not benefit from their intellectual prowess. The Home Ministry would do well to call upon the patriotism of India’s best technology minds by devising innovative ways for public participation in the Natgrid project.

Filed under: UPA-II Critical Appraisal, War on Mumbai, War on Terror