Had the Mumbai terrorist attacks not taken place, 1970-batch Indian Police Service officer PC Haldar would have retired in glory. This Bangla-speaking Madhya Pradesh cadre officer’s first posting was in Nagaland and it is in this region that he earned his laurels in fighting with insurgency and bringing insurgents to the negotiating table.
In 1991, Haldar was instrumental in resolving a three-month hostage crisis by Ulfa militants in Assam, soon after a new government under Hiteshwar Saikia assumed charge. Later, when the government decided to start secret negotiations with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Issac-Muivah) in 1997, Haldar played a major role again. Though retired Home Secretary K Padmanabhaiah was asked to carry out the negotiations in Bangkok, it was Haldar who established the initial links and took the NSCN rebels into confidence. A low-profile person, it was Haldar’s track record that helped him become the head of the country’s top intelligence organisation on January 1, 2007.
As things happened, however, along with National Security Advisor M K Narayanan and Research & Analysis Wing Director Ashok Chaturvedi, Haldar has presided over India’s biggest intelligence failure in recent times. With Home Minister P Chidambaram admitting there were serious lapses, an early, and inglorious, retirement could well be on the cards for Haldar. Which is why the blame game between the intelligence agencies and the Navy continues. While Chaturvedi probably has primary responsibility since there was no ‘actionable intelligence’ provided (in the words of Navy chief Sureesh Mehta) by RAW’s network of agents abroad, Haldar’s failure is equally large since it is now clear the terrorists had done a recce of Mumbai several months ago and had local support in Mumbai.
Haldar’s supporters credit him with having ushered in reforms and modern technology in the Intelligence Bureau. Ironic, then, that various intelligence inputs like the capture of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist Fahim Ansari last February — Ansari had drawn detailed maps of locations in Mumbai with the time taken to travel between them — did not get pushed up to the levels they needed to. This, of course, is the same problem the intelligence agencies are claiming happened with the alerts they supplied to the Navy and to the government of Maharashtra — that is, the alerts they supplied got lost along the way, in the plethora of dusty files and paperwork that line government offices.
The final chapter in Haldar’s career will, however, have to wait for a while, till a final investigation is made into how each security agency botched up. With a new federal agency being planned to deal with issues like terror (akin to the Department of Homeland Security in the US), even the powers of the Intelligence Bureau could well undergo a sharp change.