Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State, edited by Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur, is a compilation of 15 essays on India’s internal security management by well-known writers, which were originally presented at a virtual workshop in September 2020.
The editors have given an elucidative mise enscène in Chapter 1 titled “The State and Internal Security in India.” Their thought line summarises what individual authors have stated in the next 14 chapters on the different facets of internal security. Eleven chapters are directly linked to the subject while three are on peripheral, yet actively linked issues
The directly linked topics are on the Constitution; the controversial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA); the role of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA); India’s public finances; the internal security doctrine; the role of the military; the functioning of different police agencies like state police, central armed police forces (CAPFs), including the special wing of the central reserve police’s (CRP) rapid action force (RAF); assessment of the performance of private security guards; and contribution by intelligence services.
The peripheral, though important issues are India’s security from a comparative perspective, which is a discussion on the various dilemmas faced while executing internal security duties, gender, and labour reforms within the Border Security Force (BSF) and the suppression of police officers’ democratic rights. The last subject is particularly sensitive as India, unlike other democracies, does not permit police “unions.”
Layout of the Book
The book follows a presumption that the police is the bedrock of India’s internal security. Chapter 1 hints that our expenditure to maintain internal security is inadequate. It begins with a statement that massive expenditures on internal security by the world’s two pre-eminent powers, the United States (US) and China, do not get noticed as much as the resources spent by them on military competition. China’s annual spending on internal security has tripled since 2007, reaching $200 billion in 2020. Even the US “spends more than nearly half as much on internal security as on conventional defence expenditure.”
Acting on this premise, the editors examine the position of India where a lopsided situation is seen. While the CAPFs and the military under the union government have expanded their capacity, the state police forces, who are the first responders at the micro level, remained “understaffed, underequipped, badly trained, and poorly led” due to funding and coordination problems.
This is true. The inability of the states to spend central funds on police equipment and modernisation was noticed by the two-person high-level committee appointed by the Government of Maharashtra to assess police performance during the 26/11 terror attack, of which this reviewer was a member (Anand 2022). There are several reasons, mainly to do with tangled bureaucratic procedures. To solve this, we recommended appointing empowered committees at the state level to speedily sanction the proposals and funds.
Defining Internal Security
The book then examines the long definition of internal security coined by the commission on centre–state relations (2010), led by Chief Justice Madan Mohan Punchhi (retd), which mentions external and internal threats, including those provoking “animosity between and amongst” citizens. I may mention here that no precise definition of “internal security” is found in the MHA’s (2023) annual reports, except a description of what their two internal security divisions do. As against this, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) defines “internal security” as “an American national security umbrella term for the national effort to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards where American interests, aspirations, and ways of life can thrive” (EPA nd).
However, the editors of the book recommend that the definition should also include “the security threats faced by the citizens of the country from the state itself,” as both the solution and the source of the problem. This is because “citizen consent” is a “necessity for the production of internal security” since democracies must rely on “persuasion,” and when consent is not readily given, “some turn to coercion (to varying degrees) to obtain it.” One wonders whether any government will be so self-inculpatory as to agree to this.
The editors also feel that in India, numerous national security laws, weak oversight mechanisms, and “extraordinary legal protection to them in the form of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act” have sullied its democratic reputation and have affected “the quality of the country’s democracy.” This, together with “judicial forbearance for human rights violations in the name of national security,” extrajudicial killings by security forces, the high numbers of custodial deaths, torture to extract confessions, and the use of national security laws to suppress political dissent “are some of the quotidian practices that have come to be accepted in the name of internal security.”
They also believe that part of the problem which results in overburdening the police investigation resulting in delays and avoidable harassment of individuals is because of the practice of applying the most stringent provisions of law like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) under political influence or due to the belief that such penal laws would have a deterrent effect. This is spot on. On 20 December 2023, the Bombay High Court granted bail to human rights activist Gautam Navlakha, after 44 months in custody, observing that “no covert or overt terrorist act has been attributed to him under Section 15 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act” (Gokhale 2023)
Chapter 1 then examines the role of the MHA in internal security and concludes its charter is so unwieldy and so broad that its “attention to internal security gets diluted” as it covers from disaster management to counterfeit currency, and from census to official language policy. This is correct. Post-26/11 attacks, the then union home minister P Chidambaram had told the Intelligence Bureau Centenary Endowment gathering on 24 December 2009 that the MHA should be split to enable the senior minister to devote full-time attention to in- ternal security (Times of India 2009) This has not been done even in 2023.
Also, the authors of Chapter 1 feel that the lack of coordination “visible in the botched response to the 26/11” and the difficulties of bringing left-wing extremism (LWE) under control as insurgents operated across the state borders was due to no legislation or institutional mechanisms empowering MHA’s coordinating role with the states. This is also correct. This reviewer had pointed out, immediately after the 26/11 attacks in an op-ed piece, that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had issued standing instructions in 1984–85 that a National Security Guard (NSG) team should be ready to fly 24 hours × 365 days at the New Delhi airport in a central agency aircraft to meet any contingencies like hijacking. This was not followed by subsequent governments (Balachandran 2014).
The authors’ remarks in Chapter 1, fortified by Saikat Datta in Chapter 13 about the Intelligence Bureau on the lack of regulatory frameworks or parliamentary oversight, equally apply to other intelligence agencies in India. For this situation, the previous United Progressive Alliance government is primarily responsible as it did not accept a private bill introduced by Congress member of Parliament Manish Tewari (called “The Intelligence Services, [Powers and Regulation] Bill, 2011”) and allowed it to lapse (Balachandran 2022).
An Overburdened Police System
While the essays in this book have faithfully reflected the existing condition of internal security and suggested ways and means of improving the system, I did not find any analysis on why the police system is so overburdened in India. Also, an essay on “Non-Traditional Security Threats” (NTS) should have found its place in this compilation as it is another important factor which has increased the police burden since 2000.
This reviewer had flagged that issue in his keynote address on 12 October 2007 to the Maharashtra regional branch of the Indian Institute of Public Administration, Mumbai (Balachandran 2017). When Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police in 1829, the charter focused only on primary police functions of prevention and investigation of crime as well as maintenance of law and order. Public approval of police performance was also an important factor.
It was not so in India. This was understandable in colonial India since the rulers had no public accountability. That was the reason why 22 non-police or more particularly municipal responsibilities, were imposed on the police under the Police Act, 1861 like cattle impounding, killing of stray dogs, and detection of street dirtying.
The same trend continued even after we gained independence in 1947. For example, the Bombay Police Act, 1951 has in Chapter VII (amendments till 2009) similar responsibilities for the police personnel. Although this is seldom implemented by the state police, an impression arises that the police can be asked to do any job which others do not do. In 2015, the Bombay High Court asked the police to act suo motu on “dodgy” builders, although such interventions could be described as intervening in civil matters (Sequeira 2015).
The state police are asked to cater to several “unseen” duties which have no connection with Peel’s charter of police work. In 2009, during the 26/11 enquiry, we were told by the Mumbai police that out of nearly 40,000 police officers available in Mumbai, almost 16,000–17,000 were on “special duties” like traffic management, intelligence wings, court duties, prison escorts, static and mobile VIP security, senior citizen protection, “mohalla” committees, special events like big poojas, fairs, or festivals, leaving only 12,000 persons for crime and law-and-order duties. At any given time, nearly 2,000 police officers were on leave or were sick. That left only 100 police officers per police station who were asked to manage round the clock police registration of offences, investigations, and mobile patrols for answering SOS calls.
In many countries like Singapore, prison escorts are managed by the prison department. In the United Kingdom, a private contractor named Serco does that job. A few years ago, Maharashtra’s director general of police sent a proposal to the home department to hand over this responsibility to the Maharashtra prison department, thus saving thousands of police person-hours spent in such a mundane responsibility, which could be diverted to the suppression of crime. It was not accepted.
That is not the case in other countries. In the US, agencies like the postal service department, universities, municipalities, state hospitals, waterways, forests, parks, and correctional facilities are conferred with some police powers in discharging their responsibilities in addition to the sheriffs and county police. They register criminal cases and charge-sheet offenders. Similar responsibilities under the legislation related to copyrights, gambling, and essential commodities are handled in many countries by non-police organisations. In India, this is done by the local police.
Non-traditional Security Threats
NTS problems include climate change, migration, depletion of forests, rapid urbanisation, increase of slums, destruction of mangroves, exploitation of migrants which is called human trafficking, disasters, epidemics, diseases like the HIV and COVID-19, and environmental security problems, all leading to urban unrest, which are sometimes transnational.
Although the Government of India has constituted the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and a special force called the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) numbering about 13,000, which have been doingexcellent service since 2005, the state police continue to be the front-line responders to such situations, which are increasing due to climate change factors.
It is for this reason that the US, in the wake of 9/11, acknowledged that over 100 different sectors, including private bodies, had vital roles to play in national security. The Department of Homeland Security was set up to represent such diverse elements, including the corporate sector, instead of casting the responsibility only on traditional institutions like the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Defence, and other intelligence services.
This is due to an acknowledgement that the state police, CAPF, armed forces, and intelligence agencies cannot tackle internal security in a “stand-alone” fashion. In India, this realisation is yet to come.
References:
Anand, Abhishek (2022): “Police ModernisationFunds Remain Under-utilised in Many States, Reveals RTI,” India Today, https://www.india- today.in/india/story/police-modernisation- funds-under-utilised-in-many-states-home- ministry-rti-1925660-2022-03-15.
Balachandran, Vappala (2014): National Security and Intelligence Management: A New Paradigm, New Delhi: Indus Source Books.
Balachandran, Vappala(2017): Keeping India Safe: The Dilemma of Internal Security, New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers.
Balachandran, Vappala(2022): Intelligence Over Centuries, New Delhi: Indus Source Books.
EPA (nd): “National Security Defined,” https://www. epa.gov/national-security/national-security- defined#: ~:text=Homeland%20security%20 is%20a%20national, from%20attacks%20 that%20do%20occur.
Gokhale, Omkar (2023): “Elgaar Parishad Case: HCGrants Bail to Gautam Navlakha, Stays Orderfor 3 Weeks for NIA to Move SC,” Indian Express,https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mum- bai/elgaar-parishad-case-hc-bail-gautam-nav- lakha-stays-order-3-weeks-nia-sc-9074424/.
MHA (2023): “Annual Report, 2022–23,” Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, https:// www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/Annual- ReportEngLish_11102023.pdf.
Sequeira, Roy (2015): “Bombay HC to Cops: Do Not Wait toAct againstDodgy Builders,” Times of India, https://timesofindia.india- times.com/city/mumbai/bombay-hc-to-cops- dont-wait-to-act-against-dodgy-builders/ articleshow/49458663.cms.
Times of India (2009): “To Tackle Terror, Chidambaram Wants MHA Split,” https://timesofin- dia.indiatimes.com/india/to-tackle-terror-chidambaram-wants-mha-split/article- show/5371367.cms.
Courtesy: Economic & Political Weekly March 30, 2024
