On Friday N.N. Vohra, governor of Jammu and Kashmir, delivered a speech in New Delhi that was notable for its lucid analysis of the inextricably interlinked external and internal security problems and a series of sound suggestions about how to meet the grim challenges this country faces. Before discussing these it is necessary to point out that both the content and quality of his presentation were influenced by two factors.
The first was the occasion. Mr Vohra was delivering the first lecture in the memory of Air Commodore (Retd) Jasjit Singh, a 1971 war veteran and unquestionably one of the finest strategic thinkers who headed the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses for long years and later was the founder-director of the Centre for Airpower Studies. Secondly, the J&K governor’s credentials to pronounce on national security are so impressive as to be equalled by few. He has served the country as defence secretary, home secretary and principal secretary to the Prime Minister. All this makes it sad that in the nation’s capital little notice was taken of this event even though the strategic community was present in full force.
Against this backdrop let me take three of Mr Vohra’s most important and pertinent suggestions, beginning with the plea that the Modi government should “swiftly finalise” the formulation of a “holistic” national security policy. This process has already been delayed for too long. The last time a broad review of national security management was undertaken was after the Kargil War in 1999 which Pakistan had planned meticulously but had taken this country by complete surprise. (Incidentally, the memorial lecture was on this war’s 15th anniversary.) Thereafter, a committee, headed by the strategic guru, the late K. Subrahmanyam, had made many useful recommendations. A number of them, but not all, were endorsed by a group of ministers, headed by L.K. Advani.
The Atal Behari Vajpayee government accepted all the GoM’s decisions except the critically important one for the appointment of a Chief of Defence Staff. This issue hangs fire still. In 2011, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government appointed a Task Force, headed by Naresh Chandra, a former Cabinet secretary and ambassador to the United States, to take a fresh look at the pressing problem of reviewing the national security policy and reforming the structure to implement it.
The Task Force presented its report with commendable speed. But the Manmohan Singh government sat on it for two years, from May 2012 to May 2014. However, a few days before its exit it casually rejected the Task Force’s crucial recommendation that since the institution of CDS was still surrounded by controversy, the least the government should do is to have a four-star officer as a permanent chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee with a fixed tenure of two years.
At present the system is that the most senior of the three Service Chiefs acts as the chairman of CoSC.
Consequently, he has little time to attend to his additional responsibilities nor does he have a long enough stint. One chairman of the CoSC lasted precisely 30 days.
The Naresh Chandra panel took care to provide that the permanent chairman of the CoSC will not interfere with the operational matters looked after by the Chief of each of the three Services but attend to the humongous problems of ensuring adequate inter-services co-ordination and cooperation, including prioritising of acquisition of weapons and equipment and supervising the Strategic Command. A former Navy Chief who was also chairman of the CoSC, Admiral Arun Prakash, has recorded that though he received the head of the Strategic Command regularly, he “never had enough time” to discuss the latter’s worries.
It is clear therefore that a rapid reversal of the previous government’s last-minute and unwise decision is necessary. Thankfully, the Modi government appears to be able to act fast.
Only last week it cleared the Rs 21,000 crore deal for the purchase of sophisticated equipment for the Air Force and the Navy. It has also allowed participation by the Indian private sector as well as foreign direct investment in defence production in this country, largely as recommended by the Naresh Chandra Task Force. Strangely, it has not yet appointed a full-time defence minister to relieve finance minister Arun Jaitley of his “additional charge”.
This brings me to Mr Vohra’s other two suggestions. One, he stressed that the creation of a “specialised, countrywide security administration” by choosing the best and the brightest from all sectors, obviously including all-India services, is absolutely necessary. Only those trained in specialised areas should be “deployed to run security institutions”. The complexity and the gravity of India’s security situation do require a high degree of specialisation among those implementing the policy. It is no exaggeration to say that the present generalist bureaucracy of the ministry of defence, dominated by the Indian Administrative Services babus determined to lord over the military, has become the bane of Indian national security management.
In some respects even more important is the third recommendation. It is an appeal to the Union government to recognise the need to eliminate the lack of understanding and cooperation between the Centre and the states. This is the reason why the National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC) has not yet been formed. Nor will it be until a mechanism is devised to associate chief ministers, by rotation or through the unused institution of the Inter-State Council of which the Prime Minister is the chairperson.
In my view, the states are right in arguing that the NCTC should be formed through a law enacted by Parliament, and not through an executive order. It also makes sense that the National Investigation Agency should be located in the Union home ministry, not in the Intelligence Bureau. There is a lot more to be said on the subject but that will have to be done some other time.
