“In today's changed circumstances, CRPF needs to have its
own intelligence wing.”
“We are in the process of forming an intelligence wing. The
work is going on.”
Unless stated otherwise, the above two innocuous statements
would appear to be parts of the same speech. However, while the first is a
quote from a December 2005 media interview by Central Reserve Police Force
(CRPF)’s the then Director General (DG) J K Sinha, the second is an extract
from the organisation’s DG K Vijay Kumar’ statement in April 2011. CRPF DGs
apart from Mr. Sinha and Mr. Kumar, each of them, during their tenure, making
similar statements regarding the ‘necessity’ of and ‘progress’ towards
achieving the goal of setting up a ‘home-grown’ intelligence wing. However,
such protracted yearning notwithstanding, the formation of such a wing is
unlikely to augment the CRPF capacities in any significant manner, will merely
add to the multiple agencies that roughly do similar work and more importantly,
militate against the spirit of an efficient national security architecture.
Even prior to being designated as the country’s lead
counter-insurgency (COIN) force, following the 1998 Kargil war, the CRPF,
India’s largest Central Armed Police Force (CAPF), performed COIN duties in
Jammu & Kashmir and the Northeast. The intensification of left-wing
extremism, which took CRPF’s 60 battalions to unknown territories, positioned
them against barely identifiable enemies and called for a drastic modification
in its war fighting approach, made the task even harder. CRPF were soon to
discover that the flow and quality of ground level intelligence provided by the
existing agencies are clearly short of its operational requirements.
This assessment prodded the CRPF to make the first ever
proposal to the MHA for an internal intelligence wing in 2005. The then Home
Minister Shivraj Patil’s approval notwithstanding, the Finance Ministry shut
down the proposal citing financial crunch. It further questioned the rationale
of such an effort when each of the states of the country has its own
intelligence wing. The CRPF, however, went on to select about 10 personnel from
each of its battalions to gather intelligence locally. This wing, without
official designation, consisted of about 1250 personnel. Speaking in September
2006, the then DG J K Sinha even hinted that the wing will be made operational
the same month. Fresh opposition kicked in and the plan never took off.
However, the CRPF did not dismantle its unofficial
intelligence wing and continued to deploy these personnel in conflict theatres.
At least on one reported occasion, two such CRPF personnel gathering ground
level intelligence were killed by the militants in Kashmir in May 2008. The
existing wing appeared to have undergone a minor expansion in the following
years. According to an August 2010 media report the CRPF further trained 30-40
of its men for eight months in intensive intelligence gathering and deployed
them in the Naxal-hit areas and other theatres of operation.
The ongoing demand for an intelligence wing by the CRPF,
thus, amounts to institutionalising and expanding the existing wing within the
organisation. An official recognition would translate into dedicated money and
resources for the existing motley wing, in addition to and not a subtraction from
the CRPF’s annual budget (2010-11) of Rs. 7827.32 crore.
At one level, it is difficult to disagree with the CRPF’s
assessment of the ground level intelligence gathering institutions, especially
in the Naxal hit states. The expansion of the Naxal influence in India rides
heavily on a highly successful effort on part of the Communist Party of
India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) to disrupt the existing intelligence gathering set
up. Not just that an enveloping atmosphere of fear has drastically confined the
police personnel to the relative safety of the police stations and limited
their intelligence gathering capacities, the Maoist systematic campaign against
the ‘police informers’ has further discouraged the voluntary submission of
information by previously willing civilian population. Of the 190 civilians
killed by the Naxals this year (till 14 June), 72 were branded as police
informers. Such killings, mostly following a process in conviction in Kangaroo
courts, is a mere continuation of the trend, which saw the death of 211 and 323
such ‘police informers’ in 2009 and 2010 respectively. In addition, the
CPI-Maoist continues to destroy telephone exchanges and towers disrupting
security force communication. As a result, intelligence flow from the ground to
the security forces has either become non-existent, or at best, sketchy and
unreliable.
Of late, fatalities among the CRPF personnel have risen
steadily. The organisation lost 67 personnel in 2008 and 70 personnel in 2009
during its country-wide deployments. The figure almost skyrocketed in 2010,
when over 150 of its personnel got killed in the Naxal theatres alone. The ill-informed
media narratives notwithstanding, not all killed personnel could have been
saved with good intelligence.
The pressure to limit the body bags has mounted on the CRPF
authorities and in turn, it is ending up in accentuating its yearning for an
exclusive intelligence wing. The spats certain CRPF officials have had with
state police officials in Chhattisgarh over availability (or the lack of it) of
precise intelligence inputs, has further pushed the organisation to be
self-reliant in matters of collecting ground level intelligence.
However, setting up this new wing may not be a solution at
all to the organisation’s woes.
Firstly, it is difficult to understand how exactly the new
wing will create a new set or subset of data and information, which is
qualitatively better than those generated by the existing agencies. Although
the senior CRPF officials locate their failure thus far to set up the
intelligence wing in the objections raised by the Intelligence Bureau (IB),
which is described to be antagonistic to its creation, one is not sure if the
CRPF’s Intel wing, with its limited manpower and resources, will be able to
compete with the IB at all.
Secondly, the new wing, like any other intelligence
gathering agencies, cannot be for the exclusive use of the CRPF and the
organisation will have to share the data and information it generates with
others. As a result, it will merely end up in being a parallel entity- the
third agency in most states where the IB and the Police collect intelligence,
fourth agency in some where the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) too is present
and the fifth agency in few of the rest where the Military Intelligence (MI)
too operates. The ongoing task of establishing synergy among the different
agencies and facilitating seamless integration of intelligence, under the
evolving counter-terrorism architecture, will certainly not get any easier by
adding one more entity to the already crowded scene.
Thirdly, going by the logic of making the security agencies self-reliant,
the IB and the RAW should have their armed wings, the National Security Guard
(NSG) commandos should have their intelligence wing and perhaps the Ministry of
Home Affairs (MHA) also should seek an armed wing for itself. The problem of
augmenting the quality of intelligence generated and ensuring their flow to the
forces who need them can be achieved by investing more on infrastructure
generating technical intelligence (TECHINT) and also the Human Intelligence
(HUMINT). Towards that direction, the IB’s budget needs to be raised and the
huge vacancies in its field level personnel needs to be filled up rather than
allocating fresh resources for the CRPF’s proposed intelligence wing.
Fourthly, answer to operational woes in the conflict
theatres including the states affected by Naxal activities is police
modernisation, of which improving intelligence gathering is a critical
component. The COIN mechanism centred on grand war designs promotes a culture
of centralisation at the cost of weakening the police stations and making them
irrelevant. This trend needs to be reversed. Policies to revive policing and
intelligence gathering need to factor in the critical need of improving the
quality of police personnel at the lowest level of the system.
In short, remedy to the problem of inadequately performing
institutions cannot be creation of new institutions, but enabling the existing
organisations to perform.
By Bibhu Prasad Routray in www.claws.in
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