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A RAW look at India's intelligence gathering effor |
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By: Aakar Patel |
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Date:
2008-12-14 |
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Place: Mumbai |
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 Aakar Patel analyses how Indians can be so efficient and yet so anarchic all at once
In October 2001, I went to Afghanistan to cover the war after 9/11. I returned defeated in 10 days. I was too fat for my horse, which shrugged me off during a crossing of the Oxus river, wrecking a Rs 4 lakh camera. Sadly, this was just after I shot some extraordinary pictures of American B-52s bombing Taliban positions, and I wondered what to tell the office ("Hello boss, I've some good news and some bad news").
I had no visa for Pakistan so I had to work my way backwards through Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. I collected my stuff and stood at the Hotel Dushanbe's porch, but the taxi hired to drive me to the Uzbek border broke down on its way from the parking lot. It wasn't really a taxi, it was a little hatchback owned by a Bihari medical student in Tajikistan who was making some money ferrying passengers. I thought of what to do next and began shouldering my rucksack.
"Chal yaar," said Uncle 1, who clapped my neck and urged me into the white Mercedes-Benz waiting by the side. He and another man call him Uncle 2 I knew from the breakfast table. They would be there before me, in suit and tie, and stay till after I had left. At night, they'd be at the bar before I came and stay till after I'd left, throwing back whiskies and cracking jokes.
They did not tell me their names or reveal much about their work. Uncle 2 would give me an insider's smirk when I asked and Uncle 1 would say: "Ha, ha," always adding, "Hain?"
I had assumed they were quality reporters, wary of giving information I worked for a tabloid and had no problem sharing the story.
The Mercedes-Benz was surprising. As was the fact that at the Oxus, where they were also present (war reporting is actually a sort of guided tour) Uncles 1 and 2 were sent back by the tough, unspeaking Russians patrolling the border on the Tajik side. They made the long drive back to the Hotel Dushanbe and stayed there while the rest of us saw action.
At the Uzbek border, they didn't get out of the car. The stamps on my passport, which was in my pocket when I took the dive, were one big black smudge. I had prepared my story, which revealed just enough fact to make it truthful while also preserving my honour ("And then the horse was startled by falling bombs!"). I opened my mouth to explain and point, when the Uzbek looked up at the Merc and just waived me through.
I closed my mouth and went back to the car.
That's when I figured who Uncles 1 and 2 were, and what they were doing where only reporters tread.
I had thought of the men of RAW as ruthless, hard and competent. These men were... nice. The kind we Indians know as uncles. Would they be able to James-Bond their way into Balochistan and lead an insurgency against ISI and kidnap Dawood and bring him back in triumph?
No. They couldn't even fool unspeaking Russians manning a border. Their Afghan adventure was, like mine, a junket. It would be fascinating to know what they filled up in their debrief form back at Lodhi Road.
Why did I ever think of RAW as made of characters from Men in Black? Perhaps because that's how we imagine our spies are. Perhaps because RAW's founder Rameshwar Kaw looked like a spy should. Wiry, with a pockmarked face, thin lips and a frown.
But from that image I had made a leap into fantasy.
On November 26, Mumbai came under a savage attack from people who knew more about the city than we knew about them. Did our intelligence agencies have the capacity to preempt the brutality of those three days? The answer is no. Even if they could, it would be because they stumbled upon it.
It wouldn't come from the methodical process of surveillance, of collecting information and sifting through data, of connecting dots, of imagination things that the world recognises as intelligence because our government is not particularly good at that.
On Thursday, the new home minister P Chidambaram announced in Parliament his solution to this problem: the formation of another government body, the National Investigation Agency, along the lines of the FBI.
All our intelligence agencies will be they are as efficient as anything else touched by our government. Think of the quality of our airports, our railway stations, think of the income tax office, our judicial system, the municipal office, the police station. That is what our intelligence agency is.
We cannot expect small pools of excellence to materialise and exist undiluted in the ocean of incompetence that is our culture. The courage of commandos willing to die in combat with terrorists is no indication of the quality of those who direct them.
Are we wholly a nation of incompetents?
Of course not. Indians run the airline rated second best in the world: Jet Airways. We have some truly world class managements: Tata, Infosys, Wipro, Reliance, the Oberoi.
But these have the best-paid minds in India operating in a controlled environment: corporate accountability.
They function in a universe whose individuals employees, clients, suppliers, financiers voluntarily follow rules. A corporate version of the Social Contract that western civilian society follows.
There is no tolerance for rule-breaking, and little deviation in behaviour, in this universe. It is principled, unlike the world the corporate executive enters when he steps out of his office.
There the anarchy of the Indian city takes over. Three thousand people in Mumbai die every year, 10 each day, because they cross the railways tracks in defiance of the law and are run down by oncoming locals. Few democracies have this level of disorder.
That's the chaotic environment the spy agency is up against. Even if it had the ability to monitor deviation from the normal in the population which is what spy agencies do most of the time their effort would founder in a nation that's so low on order.
Human intelligence in India is also broken.
The conduct of the police after the 1993 blasts still makes the Mumbai Muslim seethe. S Hussain Zaidi, the author of Black Friday, a history of the 1993 blasts, says that the khabri culture of the Mumbai police ended that year. The riots following the Babri demolitions severed many links that policemen had with gang informers.
The war on terror and the Gujarat riots further widened the gap with Muslims, who feel, rightly or wrongly, under siege. Rakesh Maria, the officer investigating the savage Bombay attacks of November 26, also investigated the two blasts at the Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazaar on August 25, 2003, which killed over 50. He predicted more attacks would come because terrorism in India had slipped from being the acts of organised criminals to the acts of angry, ordinary people.
There is no way to preempt these attacks, he told me. There was no network to tap into the dozens of plots that he suspected, rightly, were underway.
Will this change? Yes, it will. But it will take decades.
One great thing about India is that while we may be incompetent, we are truly an open and secular society. And that reality is all around us.
After the attacks in Mumbai it was speculated that Muslim resentment at being left behind in India's economic growth is spawning terrorism. This view does not understand India. The barrier for entry into India's stream of success is not religion; it is language. Those who do not speak English are discriminated against by the market.
This is easily demonstrated to those who live in India.
Indians working for call centres servicing the west must have a Christian name and an American accent. Indians working for call centres servicing India do not hide their identity. You are as likely to be speaking to Mohammed, Fareeda or Shakir as you are to anyone else.
This is of course because the universe of the corporate is widening in urban India and engulfing ever more people in its culture of excellence.
We're not a nation at war with ourselves. India will convince her alienated citizen; she always does.
This means that while we will not be able to avoid the terrorist hit, and no nation can, it will always be an aberration.
And that's something we should remember even as Bombay still smolders. We should not assume either that the attacks will stop or that we will develop the capacity to ever fully stop them.
To develop that capacity would be to go against our nature.
A few months after my return from Afghanistan, an officer from the Intelligence Bureau's Fort office in Mumbai called and asked to meet me.
He was young, in his 30s, and tried to make small talk before making his point. "Sir, you go to foreign parties?"
Yes, I said, I was invited to some diplomatic parties because of my work. "Sir, can you tell me what happened?"
What? "Can you tell me what happened at next party?" No! Why?
"We need information about foreign people." No!
"Sir, please," he whimpered.
I said OK, and soon forgot. And so did he. |
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