When the Union Budget was presented earlier in the year, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) outlay was raised 33 per cent over the previous Budget, up from Rs 25,500 crore to Rs 38,000 crore.
Today, Home Minister P Chidambaram spelt out how he would spend at least part of that money on changing the functioning of the ministry and setting up a new National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC). This is to transfer the counter-terrorism responsibilities of the nine intelligence agencies to the new organisation, and creating a set-up modelled on the Department of Homeland Security in the US, although both countries have different political and administrative structures.
Chidambaram said there were things that a home minister had to do currently which were important but had no bearing on security — for instance, inter-state relations, appointment of governors and national integration. These jobs could easily be done by a minister of state with independent charge, so that the home minister could address himself to running India’s internal and border security apparatus. “We are just lucky we have not had a terrorist attack for the past one year,” he said.
Exactly what NCTC will be and what it will do was not immediately clear, but in his speech — attended by intelligence officers (past and present) from all branches of the government — Chidambaram said: “Once NCTC is set up, it must have the broad mandate to deal with all kinds of terrorist violence directed against the country and the people. I am told the US was able to do it within 36 months of 9/11. India cannot afford to wait for 36 months.” He was delivering the 22nd Intelligence Bureau Centenary Endowment lecture at the Vigyan Bhavan here.
Chidambaram even set a deadline: “India must decide to go forward and succeed in setting it up by the end of 2010.”
The home minister said agencies such as the newly set up National Investigation Agency, the National Technical Research Organisation, the Joint Intelligence Committee, National Crime Record Bureau and National Security Guard would be brought under NCTC.
“The positioning of the Research and Analysis Wing, Aviation Research Centre and the Central Bureau of Investigation would have to re-examined and a way would have to be found to place them under the oversight of NCTC to the extent they deal with terrorism,” he said.
Intelligence officers who attended the function said the home minister was touching a raw nerve. NTRO was created as a top signals intelligence outfit in the aftermath of the 1999 Kargil war following the recommendations of the Kargil Review Committee.
