Where is public accountability of our intelligence agencies?

Editorial, Governance Now, May 1-15

The vice president has cogently argued in favour of a Standing Committee of Parliament on Intelligence to check potential abuse of power while ensuring national security

Intercepting communication is intrinsic to the functioning of any intelligence agency tasked with the responsibility of ensuring national security and public order, and so is the possibility of misuse of this power as the telephone tapping controversy shows. This is not the first and will surely not be the last incident of its kind but the most reprehensible aspect of this episode is that the way the National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) went about the task – thanks to the technical advances – it renders useless all checks and balances. As the Outlook report says, with an off-the-air GSM/CDMA monitoring system, you don’t need a service provider any longer to facilitate interception legally or otherwise. You just “grab” the signals from the air in a radius of 2 km and nobody, save for those snooping around with this device in a car, knows a thing! Nothing then matters – whether you have an antiquated Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 or a Information Technology Act of 2000 or the elaborate set of conditions laid down by the Supreme Court in 1997 (PUCL vs Union of India case) before privacy of an individual can be ignored for the larger goal of ensuring national security and public order. A new problem calls for a new solution – a radical one at that given the fact that our intelligence agencies are, for all practical purposes, accountable to none.

But first, what is NTRO and what is its mandate? Why has it been snooping around political tattle of Sharad Pawar, Prakash Karat, Digvijay Singh and Nitish Kumar that can hardly pose a threat to national security or public order. Known earlier as National Technical Facilities Organisation, this body came into being in 2004 after the Kargil mishap to provide technical intelligence to prevent another Kargil (cross-border infiltration) and terror or insurgency strikes. It functions under the National Security Advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office. This agency has now earned what can be considered a “dubious” distinction in India of being the first intelligence agency to be subjected to scrutiny by the Comptroller General of India (CAG) and has been accused of nepotism and corruption. That it failed in its main task, that is to prevent 26/11 Mumbai terror attack or a series of terror attacks in Bengalore, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Pune etc is not entirely surprising.

It is precisely this kind of situation that Vice President Hamid Ansari alluded to when he called for public accountability of our intelligence agencies in his R N Kao Memorial Lecture in New Delhi in January this year. He wondered aloud: “How shall a democracy ensure its intelligence apparatus becomes neither a vehicle for conspiracy nor a suppressor of the traditional liberties of democratic self-government?” He was clear that “the traditional answer and the prevailing practice – of oversight by the concerned minister and prime minister and general accountability of the latter to parliament – was accepted as adequate in an earlier period but is now considered amorphous and does not meet the requirements of good governance in an open society.” The Kargil Review Committee had, as he pointed out, exposed the fallacy of this traditional answer by pointing out flaws and the absence of checks and balances and governmental correctives.

The vice president argued for a Standing Committee of Parliament on Intelligence, on lines of the committees in the USA, the UK and many other countries like Canda, Australia, Germany etc to ensure nation’s security and check potential abuse.
While stating that operational secrecy was essential for intelligence agencies, the vice president, nevertheless, insisted that the legislature was “entitled to insist on financial and performance accountability” because of the fact that it is the organ of the state that allocated funds to these agencies.

It is time for our public representatives to take the vice president’s views seriously and think of bringing public accountability to our intelligence agencies. This will not just ensure that the money we spend on intelligence is actually spent on intelligence but also raise the general efficiency of our intelligence gathering agencies.