#NaMo365: Get a Grip, Make Intel Accountable!

India needs coordinated efforts from all its intelligence agencies for getting accurate information on Dawood.

Dawood Ibrahim is India’s most wanted criminal. (Photo: Reuters)

I was asked to fly to Pretoria in December 1994 to meet senior South African intelligence officials to discuss President Nelson Mandela’s security during his India visit in January 1995. Pretoria had conveyed to our Government that they wanted a senior intelligence officer to meet them since they feared a possible white supremacists’ attack on him in India. At that time the South African intelligence was still segregated. The apartheid regime’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) was continuing although their Intelligence Services Act was passed in 1994.

As a result I had separate meetings on this subject with the NIS and also with the non-official but assertive African National Congress (ANC) Intelligence. After this was over, the next session was devoted by the NIS to give me a presentation on the mandrax smuggling by Dawood Ibrahim and his gang. They said that the entire African continent was used by him with local help as destination and transit point for Europe and America.

Dawood’s 18 passports

They showed me a list of Dawood’s 18 passports under different names/ nationalities used by him to visit the region. Their difficulty was that they often came to know about these visits after his departure since their security and intelligence were under major overhaul. They wanted our help in giving them any advance information on his movements to nab him. I was to convey an operational plan after getting approval from New Delhi.

In my report to our government I mentioned the South African offer, which as far as I knew, was the first solid proposal of cooperation from a foreign country, who suffered from his foot falls. Somehow nothing came out of this. Although I tried to pursue my proposal, my report was tossed around for discussion at various levels and came to land among heaps of pending files.

On my own I could not have offered them composite intelligence since our other departments were involved. The South Africans also did not follow up as the NIS was split into National Intelligence Agency (NIA) for domestic intelligence and South African Secret Service (SASS) for external intelligence in 1995. Also, I retired from government service on June 30, 1995.

Since then, the proposal to capture Dawood has become a yearly ritual among our politicians. Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s statement in Parliament on May 11 placing the onus on Pakistan is another such instance. Since the 1993 Bombay blasts, has any government in New Delhi put our intelligence agencies on notice that they have to get the location of Dawood? I know for certain that New Delhi had never made this as Priority No 1 of any agency till at least 1995. Since 1993 many of our retired intelligence chiefs have been rewarded with plum post-retirement postings for their good performance. Was Dawood ever placed as “Priority No 1” for such chiefs to judge their performance while in service?

Need for Coordination

It is true that we need tightly coordinated efforts not only within our national intelligence agencies but also among the Customs, police and narcotics intelligence wings for getting accurate intelligence on him. This was perhaps difficult before we had set up our National Security Council in 1998. However the question is, have our NSC and the powerful NSAs since 1998 ever tasked any intelligence agency that this issue should be priority No: 1 for the country? If not, why this charade?

The reason for this is the absence of institutional mechanism for oversight and performance review of intelligence agencies. Merely briefing the top political leadership on intelligence is not enough as they have no time for performance review. India has not even thought of codifying the role and activities of our intelligence agencies. Our successive leadership of security bureaucracy had shied away from this attempt for fear that outside scrutiny would “expose” their “operations”. Our political leadership is also ignorant on the utility of such a measure.

Need for Oversight

The former UPA government took no action when their own MP, Manish Tewari, introduced a private bill (“The Intelligence Services-Powers and Regulation-Bill 2011”) trying to codify oversight on our three major intelligence agencies (RAW, IB and NTRO) on the same lines as the British laws. The draft bill provided fairly clear charter for each agency. Like the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee whose reports are available publicly it was proposed to have a “National Intelligence and Security Oversight Committee” under the Chairmanship of our Vice-President.

Their annual reports were to be tabled in the Parliament. Unless we do something like this, we shall hear only ritualistic promises.

(The writer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, and also member of the High Level Committee which enquired into the police performance during 26/11 Mumbai attacks)