Intel wing for the CRPF: Not the Right Move

“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

DC Pathak on effective ways to counter Naxals

The massive attack by armed Naxalites on a road opening contingent of the CRPF in the Maoist belt of Sukma district in Chhattisgarh, resulting in the death of fifteen of the paramilitary personnel and looting of over a dozen automatic rifles, draws attention to the fact that for nearly two decades now, the handling of this prime challenge to national security had not yielded lasting results.

Serious Challenge

An intelligence alert about the organised movement of Maoist cadres from Odisha to this area also did not help. The event raises questions on the strategy and policy response that the Centre and state governments had adopted in dealing with the escalating threat of Naxalism in a vast area spread across Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha.

It is instructive to recall that it was in the mid- Nineties that the Indian intelligence had unearthed the plan of the then underground Naxalite leadership to operationally unite the Maoist Communist Centre(MCC)of Bihar and the People's War Group (PWG) of Andhra Pradesh by utilising the intervening Dandakaranya forest belt as the corridor. The ambitious plan even envisaged the spread of the movement to the North- East where it would seek linkage with left-of-the-centre insurgent groups active in the region. In spite of the initial success of the Andhra Pradesh police in combating the movement militarily, Naxalism steadily traversed the map of India and became a trans-national threat. Today, Naxals are posing a serious challenge to our paramilitary forces in the forest and hilly terrain of thousands of kilometres in the hinterland of India.

Originating in West Bengal in the late Sixties, Naxalism went through an uncertain period of advocacy of the Maoist doctrine of 'power coming through the barrel of the gun' before it gained ascendancy in the Nineties and rapidly spread to new areas on the strength of its underground organisational planning, rising number of trained cadres, and acquisition of arms and explosives.

Built on the combination of an ideological pull, the atmospherics of disgruntlement prevailing in the remote interiors of India particularly in the tribal belts and the unfortunate "withdrawal" of local administration in the affected areas on the first appearance of the gunmen, the Maoist movement has succeeded in establishing a "parallel government" in certain pockets of the country.

Joint Strategy

What has come in the way of a sustainable strategy being developed against "the biggest threat to national security" - as the Prime Minister described it more than once - is the unwillingness of the political leadership to accept that while police and law and order are in the domain of the state, dealing with issues of national security requires a joint strategy between the Centre and the states. In handling cross border terrorism, the Centre has to be the lead player but the fight against Naxalism - still a largely indigenous challenge - has to be led by the states. Unlike terrorism, the Maoist threat requires an "area" domination and the emphasis on "intelligence from below." The Centre's role is to make paramilitary forces in adequate strength available to the state in conducting area- specific operations, share such intelligence about the plans and movement of the armed Naxalites, as the national agencies are able to lay their hands on, and not let any politically motivated blame game overshadow the lessons that must be drawn from an incident of the kind that occurred in Sukma district.

For far too long has the threat of Naxalism been looked upon as a mere police problem. The present dimension of Maoist insurgency has called for an effective "combat" strategy in which any contingent in the lead will be backed by stronger formations covering the flanks and the entire operation would be directed by a designated senior officer in the field. Sending out a 'road opening patrol' of a dozen of men -who were left on a limb, was repeated in Sukma as no lessons were apparently drawn from what had happened earlier in this area.

External Threat

The Maoist cadres use a 'war' strategy under the guidance of the Central Military Commission of the organisation in planning their offensive based on their own information. The counterinsurgency response, on the other hand, hardly has a blueprint defining the area of operation, the command structure and the plan of securing area domination. Our counterinsurgency drive should have the benefit of aerial surveillance to locate the moving formations of Naxalites. The police leadership of the state must lead from the front as otherwise there will be a demoralising loss of personnel or a wild resort to force of the kind that will cause avoidable collateral damage. The strategy should be to create an effective island of peace so that development activity can be conducted there without hindrance.

In a welcome correction of policy, the Centre has accepted the view that Naxalism required handling of the security development interface and is not merely a police response. Funding for development is being enhanced in the affected areas through the Planning Commission. In the security- development paradigm, security comes first sequentially and it can be achieved through time- bound and area specific 'combat' operations. In the cleaned up territory, peace must be held long enough to complete the development objectives. The entire energy of the state government will have to be devoted to this large mission. This is a tall order considering the current state of Centre- state relationships in our country but there is no short cut to this. The challenge will multiply if our adversaries decide to provide an external input to what is still by and large an internal danger.

(The writer is a former Director Intelligence Bureau)

Source: indiatoday.intoday.in 22 March, 2014