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With the Supreme Court’s dismissal of Prashant Bhushan’s November 2012 PIL, seeking legislative oversight and auditing by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), all resistance to encroachment on citizen privacy and civil liberties has melted away.
The government, which has a clear preference in the liberty vs security debate, told the court on 20 August 2015, that the three intelligence agencies in question – the domestic-oriented Intelligence Bureau (IB), the external Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) for signal intelligence – had sufficient internal audit mechanisms. It also opposed legislative oversight of the agencies. The court duly declined to interfere in the country’s security apparatus.
News has focussed on the auditing. The IB is said to have an annual budget of around Rs 700 crore and the R&AW, it is speculated, has a budget of about Rs 2000 crore. The NTRO relies on heavy hardware (it has customs exemption on imports) but even then approximate budgeting numbers are difficult to estimate.
The agencies are squeamish about their operational funds, known as the Secret Service Fund, estimated at about six percent of the total budget of each agency. It is a misconception that huge secret monies are involved, says an insider; the IB’s operational fund for instance, spread across the country does not amount to more than five-star coffees or fancy dining for sources.
In “Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years”, former R&AW chief, AS Dulat, revealed that money was spent on “buying” separatists and militants (and that it was more effective than a “kill policy”), and that money has played a big role in Kashmir since the 1950s. Such expenditures, however, are not the norm; in the IB, special sanction is required even to pay off militants.
It is not the money that is a big deal. “It’s all linked to oversight,” says Dulat. “Once that happens, auditing and other things will follow.”
“India is not yet ready,” says Dulat about legislative oversight. “It’s not like the US, which has the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Here, things will come out in the public.”
The US Select Committee was set up in 1976 as a permanent continuation of the Senator Frank Church committee hearings into excesses by the US agencies. This legislative oversight has been useful to the intelligence community. George Tenet, the second-longest serving CIA chief, came to the agency after serving as a staff director of the Senate Committee.
This committee also facilitated the government’s passage of the PATRIOT act in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which expanded intelligence powers.
Bhushan’s PIL also called for de-linking the National Security Advisor from intelligence oversight by creating a National Intelligence Advisor, and for the agency chiefs to provide quarterly briefings to a parliament committee. The PIL was motivated by reports of corruption – a Rs 800 crore procurement scam in the NTRO – and long-running allegations of political misuse of the intelligence apparatus.
Bhushan was also concerned about technological advances in eavesdropping and the carte blanche given to agencies to snoop on citizens. There are concerns all over the world on this score – not only was the US community riled by revelations of domestic snooping by whistleblower Edward Snowden (who said only 1.2 percent of such intelligence was actionable), but even tech giant Apple is currently embroiled in a dispute with the FBI on its refusal to break open a terrorist’s phone as that would make iPhones vulnerable to government surveillance.
The Supreme Court judgement, not to mention the intelligence community’s views, are out-of-sync with such debate in the West – even though the debate rages here as well. In India, the Software Freedom Law Centre finds that there are about one lakh phone taps a year.
And lost in the din of the current culture wars was the news this week of the setting up of a National Media Analytics Centre, a cyber-snooping agency. The government seems contemptuous of legislative oversight, and the court’s decision shows there is no resistance to the government’s creeping encroachment on individual rights.
(The writer is a senior journalist and co-author with AS Dulat of “Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years”)
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Published: 26 Feb 2016,06:23 PM IST