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Some bit of it is effective diplomacy: Jundal was deported from the United Arab Emirates, despite intense pressure from Pakistan, Mahmood from Saudi Arabia and Bhatkal was caught in Nepal. Foreign office sources admit that the governments in these countries as well as in Bangladesh have been “worked on”.
In Bangladesh, the tide turned in India’s favour five years ago when Sheikh Hasina returned to power. On its part, India gave her the Indira Gandhi Peace Prize (2009), opened credit lines worth $1 billion to her country and substantially cut the negative list of imports — a lifeline to Bangladesh’s textile industry. In spite of unresolved issues like the Teesta waters and exchange of enclaves in each other’s territory, the Hasina government has responded in kind and has handed over a score of ULFA (United Liberation Front of Asom) leaders to India: Arabinda Rajkhowa and others.
That apart, Shinde’s confidence stems from the work done by 600 men and (a handful of) women of the National Investigation Agency, or NIA. They have collected profiles of as many as 10,000 terror suspects and have an equal number of interrogation reports in their vaults and hard-disk drives. NIA is housed on the 6th and 7th floors of the NDCC-II building on Jai Singh Road, close to Jantar Mantar, in central Delhi. It was only last month that NIA shifted here from a commercial complex at Jasola in southeast Delhi. (Apart from inadequate parking, it would take officers forever to reach central Delhi where key government offices are located. S C Sinha, who headed NIA from February 2010 to March 2013, would often take the Metro to work, throwing his security team in a spin.)
Four lifts lead you to a dimly-lit courtyard lined with flowerpots. The agency’s name and emblem is written in bold on the wall across the reception —it looks like any other department of the government, nothing cloak-and-dagger about it. The security bandobast of the Central Industrial Security Force looks solid. The senior officers have their cabins on one side, while the junior staff sit in open cubicles. This is where the interrogation reports of Bhatkal are being analysed threadbare. (He is being interrogated in a safe house somewhere in northwest Delhi.) Not all he says can be taken at face value. Still, officers say they are now sitting on a goldmine of information.
Every morning, senior NIA officers travel to North Block for a meeting of the multi-agency centre at the home ministry. Also present are people from other agencies like Intelligence Bureau and Research & Analysis Wing (RAW). All information gathered from field agents in India and abroad, from other friendly agencies and from electronic surveillance is shared here. These nuggets of information are the basic building blocks of NIA’s work. It can intercept telephone calls, after taking permission from the home secretary, and operates a specialised cyber-forensic laboratory and a cell to detect terror funding and counterfeit currency.
Before Independence, the colonial police used to run a well-oiled network of informants in order to keep tabs on freedom fighters and revolutionaries. Much of that fell into disuse in the newly-independent country. So when terrorism struck in the 1980s and 1990s, the investigating agencies found themselves short of intelligence. Since police is a state subject under the Constitution, it was left for the states to tackle the problem. But states would often indulge in one-upmanship and, therefore, not share information.
The rivalry between the Delhi and Mumbai anti-terrorism squads is legendary. There is friction even between the crime branch and the anti-terrorism squad of the Mumbai Police. The terrorists made full use of it. The Second Administrative Reforms Committee in 2007 had talked of a central agency to tackle terrorism, but the states didn’t agree because this would have diluted their powers. It was the 26/11 terror attacks in 2008 that led to consensus on the issue.
A month after the attacks, on 31 December, 2008, NIA was born, at least on paper. Radha Vinod Raju, a known counter-terrorism expert and Indian Police Service, or IPS, officer, was appointed the first director-general. The infant force was asked to operate from the government-owned Centaur Hotel near the Indira Gandhi International Airport. “P Chidambaram (then home minister), who had also joined a few days back, personally interviewed many IPS officers for this coveted position,” discloses one of the officers who was in the fray. “Raju was his obvious choice because of his sheer experience in counter-insurgency and his involvement in the investigation into Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. He was an ace investigator.”
Chidambaram, after seeing it through the early hiccups, backed NIA to the hilt. In June 2010, when the United States allowed India to investigate David Coleman Headley, accused in the Mumbai terror attacks, Mumbai Police’s anti-terrorism squad wanted to do that. Chidambaram put his foot down and NIA officers flew to US to record Headley’s statement.
As the new force had less than 10 officers in the beginning, the government thought it would be wise if NIA cut its teeth in the northeast and then moved on to bigger targets like Indian Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Toiba. One way to go after the big fish straightaway was to take over the cases from the states, but there was no way the states would have agreed. Also, the special NIA courts were yet to be notified. Its first assignment was to investigate cases related to the Jewel Gorlosa-led Dima Halam Daogah, an extremist group popularly known as the Black Widow.
Raju and his small team of officers, who had joined from organisations such as the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, and the paramilitary forces, were asked to find out if money given by the central government was falling into the hands of the outfit. NIA started gathering intelligence from another faction of the Black Widow which had surrendered en masse a few months back. It tasted success with the arrest of Rajkumar Meghen, chairman of the United National Liberation Front, the Manipuri militant outfit.
Next, the agency managed to lay its hands on Anthony Shimray, member of the banned National Socialist Council of Nagaland-IM. “He revealed that he had done a deal with an Asian arms company to procure large amount of weapons. These were to be supplied to various extremist outfits in the northeast,” says an officer directly involved in the case.
In the initial stages, the investigators were led by gut-feel. In May 2010, NIA sent a special team to Hyderabad on the hunch that something was about to go wrong somewhere in the city. The investigators were groping in the dark before they stumbled on an LeT module. This led to the arrest of Zia-ul-Haq before he could launch a terrorist attack on the local office of a US multinational.
“This was the first case where NIA, which usually starts investigation after an incident has happened, prevented an imminent attack,” says the NIA officer quoted earlier. At times, luck too works. For instance, the arrest of Swami Aseemanand, aka Naba Kumar Sarkar, helped NIA crack the Malegaon (2006), Samjhauta Express (2007), Ajmer (2007) and Mecca Masjid (2007) blast cases. NIA took over all the cases related to Hindu fundamentalists from CBI and carried out further investigation.
“We work very hard on our cases. We have been successful mainly because our officers camp at the incident site for days and are focused. For instance, a team is stationed at the Bodh Gaya blast site since day one,” says NIA Director-General Sharad Kumar who joined on August 5. NIA claims to have solved the September 2011 Delhi High Court blasts within 48 hours — second quickest after the 2001 Parliament attack which is said to have been cracked within 36 hours.
Since its inception, NIA has registered 72 cases, of which 32 are in various stage of trial and 37 are under investigation. In three cases, the accused have been convicted. While Ajai Sahni, executive director of Institute for Conflict Management, feels NIA hasn’t caused any “dramatic change against terrorism” and a single investigator in states handles these many cases, others like UK Bansal, former director-general of the Border Security Force, say the success rate is decent — comparable to Scotland Yard’s 35%.
Ask NIA officers about their best case and most say it is the one in which they managed to establish, for the first time, that counterfeit currency notes were printed in Pakistan and brought to India through Nepal and Bangladesh. “It was a classic case of scientific and forensic analysis,” says an NIA officer. “We collected the fake notes seized from across the country. Around 20 samples from various sources were matched with a sample currency note seized in Mumbai.
The results were shocking. With the help of the Reserve Bank of India, we scientifically proved that they had been printed in Pakistan.” Gopal Pillai, who served as home secretary from June 2009 to June 2011, says: “NIA is one of the finest (investigative) agencies (in the country). But, I wish people could stay in the agency for a longer period. The sooner they raise their own cadre, the better.”
That’s an important point. Sinha, who took over from Raju in February 2010, opened a branch, NIA’s first office outside New Delhi, in Hyderabad in October 2010. He wanted people who were proficient in local languages and who understood the psyche of the people. To his chagrin, Sinha found people reluctant to join NIA in spite of the 25% jump in salary. Perhaps they didn’t want to leave their cities and cushy jobs. Sinha tried to win over local police investigators, but the inflow remained a trickle. Finally, he began to recruit people from the paramilitary forces and putting them through the basics of investigation at CBI’s training centre in Ghaziabad. Subsequently, branches were also opened at Guwahati, Kochi, Lucknow and Mumbai.
But turf wars in the intelligence community show no sign of abating. Relations with Mumbai Police haven’t improved. Other states too aren’t any accommodating. “We are not handed over the investigation of an incident at the beginning. After 22 days, we were handed over the investigations of the Hyderabad blasts,” says an NIA officer. Apart from the states, NIA has run into trouble with the Intelligence Bureau. Home ministry officers, to whom both the agencies report, have to often intervene to iron out egos and improve coordination. Still, the war against terror seems to be gathering steam; ask Shinde.
