FISSURES IN ASSAM: SONS OF SOIL VS BANGLADESHI INTRUDERS

B.RAMAN

The persisting fissures in Assam, which periodically lead to outbreaks of communal violence,  are not between Indian Muslims and non-Muslims. They are between Indian sons of the soil, whatever be their ethnicity, religion or language, and Bangladeshi intruders.

2. The failure of successive Governments to deal effectively with continuing illegal immigration from Bangladesh by sealing the border, by strengthening border controls and by identifying and throwing back the illegal immigrants is giving rise to understandable concerns in the minds of the sons of the soil that they are being inexorably reduced to a minority in their own homeland.

3.There are even suspicions and fears of political and administrative connivance in facilitating the illegal migration and the integration of the illegal migrants with our own citizenry. The extent of these suspicions and concerns was evident from the observations of a Bodo student in an NDTV debate on the night of July 28,2012. He alleged that due to inaction by successive Governments the Muslims constitute 75 per cent of the population in certain areas.

4. While his figures seemed to be exaggerated, officials in our intelligence and security establishments agree that the failure of the State and Central Governments to counter head-on the problem of illegal immigration is eroding our internal security machinery  in the North-East.

5.There are similar  suspicions and concerns in the Rakhine State of Myanmar over the non-stopping illegal immigration of Muslims, known as Rohingyas, from Bangladesh. The anger among the sons of the soil over these intruders from Bangladesh periodically leads to outbreaks of violence between Muslims and non-Muslims.

6. There was one such outbreak recently in which there were about 80 fatalities and the internal displacement of a large number of persons who live in camps. A state of emergency was proclaimed by the Myanmar Government in the entire State and the Army was deployed to restore and maintain order and communal peace. Despite this, total normalcy has not yet been restored.

7.The Myanmar Government, security forces and political leaders including  Aung San Suu Kyi have been maintaining firmly that the problem in the Rakhine State is one of effective enforcement of law against foreign intruders. Suu Kyi, who is a strong defender of the ethnic rights of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, has steadfastly refused to recognise the Rohingyas as an ethnic group of Myanmar. They are looked upon as intruders from Bangladesh who have no right to enjoy the same rights as the citizens of Myanmar.

8. Despite pressure from the UN , the Organisation of Islamic Countries and Western non-governmental human rights organisations, the  Myanmar Government has been firmly adhering to the view that these illegal migrants should either go back to Bangladesh or migrate to other countries that might be prepared to accommodate them.

9.Compared to India, Myanmar is a weak country. In spite of that, it has stuck to its position that it cannot extend the same protection and legal benefits to illegal migrants as it extends to its sons of the soil.

10.We call ourselves a big power. We pride ourselves on our national strength. And yet, we do not have the national will to act firmly and decisively against the Pakistan-based terrorists and the  Bangladesh origin illegal migrants who are slowly corroding our internal security.

11. The failure to admit and address the problems posed by the presence of a large number of  Bangladeshi intruders in Assam and the continuing further intrusion is due to various factors such as political opportunism, political and administrative complicity with the intruders and an inability and unwillingness to understand the strategic threat posed by them to peace and harmony in Assam.

12. The problem is rendered even more explosive by the insensitive attitude of the indigenous Muslims of Assam. They are one of us. They are our co-citizens entitled to the same rights and protection as you and I. But their misplaced feelings of religious solidarity with the Muslim intruders from Bangladesh and their tendency to downplay the extent of illegal migration and the threats posed by the migrants are creating suspicions in the minds of the non-Muslim sons of the soil.

13. The indigenous Muslim  sons of the soil should identify themselves with the feelings, suspicions and concerns of the non-Muslim citizens. They should be in the forefront of national solidarity. Otherwise, the wedge between the Muslim and non-Muslim sons of the soil  could grow wider and create more tensions and violence.

14.It is time for the Governments at the Centre and in the State, the political parties, the administration and leaders of the indigenous Muslims to do a serious introspection over the gathering concerns  in Assam and act unitedly against the intruders from Bangladesh. Ideas being floated by some think-tanks orchestrated from outside India for regularising the stay of the migrants by issuing them work permits are harebrained and should not be touched.

15. The only solution is stopping further illegal immigration through border fencing and identifying and throwing out those who have already come in. There is no question of their illegalities being regularised. (29-7-12)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate, Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com . Twitter: @SORBONNE75 )

ASSAM VIOLENCE & OUR INTERNAL SECURITY MACHINERY

B.RAMAN

There are three important components of internal security---- communal violence, insurgency and terrorism. In the past, all the three used to receive equal attention from the internal security machinery of the Government of India as well as the State Governments. Equal priority used to be given to all the three threats to internal security from the point of view of collection, analysis and assessment of intelligence and follow-up action.

2.While threats from insurgency and terrorism continue to receive the same attention and priority as before, likely threats to internal security from communal tensions and violence do not seem to receive the same attention as before. The comparative communal peace since the Gujarat riots of 2002 appear to have induced  a sense of complacency among our internal security managers and led to the rusting of the reflexes for preventing and controlling outbreaks of communal violence.

3. This is evident from the serious outbreak  of violence between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities of the Bodo areas of Assam following the reported  murder of two leaders of Muslim youth organisations by unidentified Bodo elements earlier this month. These murders led to retaliatory attacks on Bodos by members of the local Muslim community which, in turn, led to counter attacks by the Bodos on the Muslim residents in their areas. As normally happens, the Muslims are reported to have suffered heavily in areas where the Bodos are in a majority or in large numbers and Bodos are reported to have suffered heavily in areas where Muslims are in a majority or in large numbers.

4.The violence has led to about 50 fatalities in both communities and to the internal displacement of nearly 300,000 members of the two communities who have been accommodated in refugee camps. Apart from attacks on human beings by enraged mobs of the two communities, there have also been widespread destruction of houses due to arson.

5.One cannot blame failure of intelligence of the State or Central Government for what has happened. Kokrajhar and the adjoining Bodo areas have always figured in the list of communally sensitive pockets maintained by our intelligence and security agencies. The moment there were reports of the murder of two Muslim youth leaders by some Bodo elements, an alarm should have been sounded by the State police and the central intelligence agencies and the preventive machinery of the two Governments should have been activated.

6. In such instances, preventive and pre-emptive action normally consists of increasing the visible presence of uniformed and armed security forces to deter possible acts of retaliation and activating important leaders of the two communities in order to enlist their help for controlling anger. Such action does not appear  to have been taken by the State as well as the central Governments. While the principal responsibility for the initial inaction is that of the State Government and its police, there has been contributory negligence by the internal security machinery of the Government of India too.

7. The moment the reports of the initial acts of violence came, there should have been an assessment of the likely consequences by the internal security machinery in New Delhi and appropriate instructions for follow-up action to prevent retaliatory attacks should have been issued to the State Government from New Delhi.

8. Even after the retaliatory attacks broke out, there does not appear to have been a prompt assessment of the serious situation that was developing. As a result, there was a delay on the part of the State Government in requesting for the help of the Army for stopping acts of violence and in the deployment of the Army once the request for help was received from the State Government.

9. The sins of commission and omission by both the State and Central Governments should be examined, the deficiencies in the reflexes and responses of our internal security machinery identified and action taken to remove them. We cannot afford to downgrade the priority and attention given to the prevention of threats to internal security from communal tension and violence. ( 28-7-12)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate, Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com . Twitter: @SORBONNE75 )

“ESCAPE TO NOWHERE”: A MIX OF FACTS & FICTION

B.RAMAN

“Escape To Nowhere”, a gripping spy thriller written by Amar Bhushan, who retired as  Special Secretary (No.3 ) in the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) in 2005, has been described by the publishers as a spy fiction “loosely inspired by a true incident that took place in 2004 when a senior intelligence officer suspected of being a spy for decades vanished.”

2. The true incident alluded to is the clandestine  escape of Major (retd) Rabinder Singh, a Joint Secretary of the R&AW, and his wife to the US via Kathmandu with the help of the station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the US Embassy in Kathmandu in May,2004. Rabinder Singh escaped while he was under surveillance by the Counter-Intelligence & Security Division (CI&S) of the R&AW because of suspicion that he was working for a foreign intelligence agency.

3.While the R&AW suspected that he must be working for the CIA, the first concrete evidence that he was a mole of the CIA came after he had escaped to the US evading the surveillance mounted on him. Enquiries made in Kathmandu after he gave a slip to the surveillance teams and vanished from Delhi brought out that the CIA station chief in Kathmandu had made arrangements for his clandestine flight to the US in a British Airways flight with US passports issued to him and his wife. They were escorted to the US from Kathmandu by a woman officer of the CIA named Angelien.

4.The Manmohan Singh Government, which assumed office on May 22,2004, had Rabinder dismissed from service under Article 311 (2) ( c ) of the Constitution of India on June 5,2004.This Article enables the dismissal of a public servant on grounds of national security without holding a formal departmental enquiry. The dismissal order was issued after he had taken sanctuary in the US and did not serve much purpose.

5.At the time this embarrassing incident took place, Shri C.D.Sahay was Secretary ( R ), as the head of the R&AW is known. In his capacity as Special Secretary and No 3 to Shri Sahay, Amar wore many hats. One of them was as the head of Counter-Intelligence and Security (CI&S). In that capacity, he was  the Chief Spy Catcher of the R&AW and the Czar of its counter-intelligence.

6.The initial suspicion regarding Rabinder Singh was aroused by the observations of a young directly-recruited officer of the Research & Analysis Service (R&AS), who had noticed that Rabinder exhibited undue curiosity about classified matters of various divisions of the R&AW with which he was not connected and was in the habit of cultivating other officers through expensive entertainment in order to collect details of the happenings in the divisions under their charge.

7. This young officer, as he was expected to do, immediately reported his observations to Amar, who ordered the CI&S Division to mount a surveillance on Rabinder. The surveillance lasted 91 days. It covered his office, car, his residence and a gym visited by him.

8.The surveillance teams collected considerable details confirming the observations of the young R&AS officer. They also found out that Rabinder was in the habit of extensively Xeroxing classified documents passing through his hands and carrying the Xerox copies to his house. While there was thus strong evidence that he was probably working as an agent of a foreign intelligence agency, suspected to be the CIA, there was no provable evidence connecting him to the CIA.

9. Normally such evidence regarding the agency for which Rabinder was working could have come only from clandestinely recorded meetings of Rabinder with his handling officer. During the entire period of surveillance, the surveillance teams did not come across any instance of Rabinder clandestinely meeting his controlling officer in the agency for which he was suspected to be working.

10.In the absence of such concrete evidence regarding the agency for which Rabinder might be working, differences arose between Sahay and Amar as to what should be done. Sahay urged Amar not to allow any more leakage of classified information and documents through Rabinder to the agency controlling him. He advised Amar to  act against Rabinder on the basis of whatever incomplete evidence that he had been able to collect, have him arrested and interrogated and dismissed under Article 311 ( 2 ) ( C ).

11. Amar took a legalistic approach. He advised Sahay against any premature action. He wanted to move against Rabinder only after irrefutable evidence that would facilitate his successful prosecution had been collected and the agency for which he was working had been clearly identified.

12. Such evidence and such identification were not forthcoming from the R&AW surveillance teams. Sahay thereupon urged Amar to officially inform the IB and hand over the responsibility for further surveillance to the IB, which is the principal CI agency of India and has the responsibility for counter-intelligence in all departments of the Government of India, including the R&AW. Amar, who seems to have had a strong distrust of and ingrained prejudice against the IB, was not in favour of this.

13. At this stage, Sahay started getting worried that even Brajesh Mishra, the then Principal Secretary to the PM and the National Security Adviser (NSA), had not been kept informed of the suspicions regarding Rabinder and the surveillance mounted on him. On the 74^th day of surveillance, Sahay insisted that the case should be brought to the notice of Brajesh Mishra. Amar opposed this. Sahay put his foot down and asked for a note so that he could brief Brajesh Mishra.

14.After Rabinder Singh escaped from Delhi, the CI&S staff found in his house two laptops. Amar gave them to the young R&AS officer, who was a computer expert, for examination. After examination, the R&AS officer reported that Rabinder had been transmitting the information and documents to his controlling officer through his laptops which had imprints of 23,100 files, some of which were probably Rabinder Singh's correspondence with his children in the US.

15. Enquiries made after Rabinder’s escape to the US brought out that he was being controlled by the CIA from the US Embassy in Kathmandu and not that in Delhi, that he used to transmit his reports and documents through the Internet and that he was making clandestine visits to Kathmandu to meet his controlling officer for instructions.

16. What I have stated above is my reconstruction of the Rabinder Singh case on the basis of my study of the so-called spy fiction and the details given in it. The book is an intelligent and intricate mixture of facts and fiction based on the Rabinder Singh case. It is not a case study or a critical analysis of the Rabinder Singh incident by Amar. Instead, it is his version, in the form of fiction, of why he handled the surveillance in the way he did.

17. After reading his narrative carefully, I have come to the conclusion that it will be uncharitable to describe the book as an attempt  by Amar to deny allegations made by the media and analysts that he was personally responsible for this fiasco. He has not tried to conceal what in retrospect might appear to be his sins of commission and omission in the handling of the enquiry and surveillance. It is more an attempt by him to justify the way he handled it which, in his own admission, was different from the way Sahay wanted it handled . He does not come out as an intellectually dishonest person or a bungler. Instead, he comes out as a sincere operative who believed in certain ways of doing a CI investigation which enabled Rabinder to escape.

18.Sahay comes out very creditably out of this narrative. His was a pragmatic, feet-on-the-ground approach. He had no compulsive distrust of the IB or of Brajesh Mishra. Sahay rightly believed that it was the job of the IB to conduct the surveillance and that Brajesh Mishra had a right to be kept informed. The only reproach I will make against Sahay is that he did not put his feet down and direct Amar to carry out his orders. The fact that Sahay and Amar belonged to the same 1967 batch of the IPS and were close personal friends seemed to have come in the way of his taking a strong line.

19. In contrast to Sahay’s pragmatic approach, Amar’s legalistic approach dictated his view that even in counter-espionage investigations, the law should be scrupulously observed and that nothing should be done on the basis of suspicions alone, however strong.

20. It is an interesting study of the dilemma faced in counter-espionage investigations. Apparently to avoid motivated allegations of violations of the Official Secrets Act (OSA) by his detractors, Amar has chosen a fictional format to present the salient points of the case to the public. He has carefully concealed the identities of all those involved by giving them fictitious names and even fictitious particulars. He has avoided giving any dates and in some places given wrong years of events.

21. Those carefully studying the so-called fiction would notice that he has sought to give the impression that the fiction relates to the period after he retired in 2005.In one of the discussions between Wasan as Sahay is called and Jeevnathan, as Amar calls himself, there is even a reference to the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai that took place long after the escape of Rabinder and the retirement of Sahay and Amar. There is similarly a reference to the Times Now TV channel which came into existence long after the Rabinder episode. There is even a well-disguised reference (without naming him) to Arnab Goswami, the anchor of Times Now. Jeev refers to Arnab as “a man who matched the hypocrisy and banality of his panellists with his supercilious eloquence and insufferable interruptions.”

22. The book, which is extremely well written in excellent English, is bound to become a best-seller and could attract our movie producers who are dying for an exciting spook story in Indian colours. It has high literary merits and one shouldn’t be surprised if it also picks up a reward or two for fiction.

23. The fictional format restricts its educative value for analysing and bringing out the state of our counter-intelligence. The Government and the R&AW should resist the petty urge to harass Amar  for writing this. He has not done any harm to national security by writing this book.

24. Applaud Amar for writing an enjoyable book of facts and fiction. Don’t needle him. ( 27-7-12)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate, Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com . Twitter: @SORBONNE75 )

INDIA'S KIM PHILBY

B.RAMAN

( Based on my remarks at the launching of Amar Bhushan’s spy fiction “Escape To Nowhere” at the Press Club, New Delhi, on July 23,2012.  )

The book has already received rave notices. I have no doubt it will be one of the best-sellers of this year. I am sure an exciting movie will follow provided a woman could be introduced into the film script. One misses the presence of a spooky woman in Amar’s narrative. There are woman-spooks in the R&AW---some doing very well. Any spy-fiction has to highlight their role in  Smiley’s World.

2.Amar’s book will have a very high excitement value. I hope it will also have an equally high educative value.  There is an acute shortage of scholarly works on the craft and profession of intelligence in India. There is an even greater shortage of works on the craft and profession of counter-intelligence.

3.Some of us, who had served in the intelligence profession, have come out of the spooky purdah and started sharing with the public our thoughts and insights on the state of our intelligence in the hope of better educating the public , but we still hesitate to write freely and frankly on the state of our counter-intelligence lest we unwittingly play into the hands of foreign intelligence agencies looking for clues as to how our counter-intelligence operates. What are their weak and strong points? What are the techniques employed by our counter-intelligence? It is much more difficult to write carefully on counter-intelligence than on intelligence without weakening our armour.  Amar has sought to do this, but some professionals will doubt the advisability of his discussing the techniques of surveillance employed by the R&AW. A description of the techniques is exciting for a fiction and a movie, but hazardous and weakening for a counter-intelligence set-up.

4.Your intelligence capability helps you to collect information about others that you need for strengthening your national security. Your counter-intelligence capability enables you to prevent others from collecting information about you which they could use against you. You may be able to collect valuable intelligence about others, but if you are not able to prevent others from collecting intelligence about you, your national security will remain weak.

5.The best intelligence comes from human and technical penetration of other governments, intelligence and security agencies, terrorist and other organizations. In  Smiley’s World, there is a demonic competitive bid to penetrate each other. The more capable you are in penetrating others, the better the quality of your intelligence.

6.The highest value is attached to the penetration of foreign intelligence agencies. When you manage to place a mole in a foreign agency, you are not only able to collect high-grade intelligence, but also influence the thinking of the political leadership and policy-makers of the penetrated countries through  intelligence officers who are generally very close to the senior levels of decision-makers. That is why when there is a mole in an intelligence agency, it is difficult to make a damage assessment when the mole is discovered. It is comparatively easy to establish what information was lost through the mole, but it is difficult to establish what wrong decisions were taken by the political leaders and policy-makers as a result of the use of  a mole by a foreign agency to influence thinking at the decision-making levels.

7. The likelihood of the penetration of an intelligence agency by a foreign agency is a constant nightmare for all counter-intelligence set-ups. The ability of an agency to prevent penetration by a mole depends on various factors---the personal and professional integrity of its officers, their security consciousness, their loyalty to the country, their ethical standards, their ability to withstand temptations, their courage to report to their seniors any indications of suspicious conduct of their colleagues and even close friends. When these factors are weak, penetration is facilitated.

8. That is why we as a nation and the R&AW as an intelligence organization ought to have been worried by the ease with which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) penetrated the R&AW twice and managed to evade detection for a long time .The penetration and the ease with which the CIA and its moles managed to evade detection spoke poorly of the state of counter-intelligence in the R&AW.

9. Maj.Rabinder Singh was not only a mole of the CIA carefully planted deep inside the R&AW, but was also the only mole in our intelligence set-up who managed to give the slip to our counter-intelligence and flee to the sanctuary provided by his controlling agency. Rabinder was India’s Kim Philby, the KGB’s mole in the MI 6, the British external intelligence.

10.In the years after the Second World War, the KGB managed to plant in the MI 6 a network of moles believed to have been operated through Kim Philby. When the network came under suspicion, Philby and two others managed to escape to Moscow giving the slip to the MI-5, the security service, which is responsible for counter-intelligence in the UK.

11.After the escape of Kim Philby, there were many years of agonising debate in the British intelligence establishment on how the KGB managed to penetrate the MI-6 and what damage was caused to national security and to the intelligence establishment. The  enquiries brought out shocking instances of ethical permissiveness, lack of integrity and old boys’ network ( I cover you up, you cover me up) that prevailed in the MI 6 that made the penetration possible. Did the KGB’s network consist of only Philby and his two associates who fled to Moscow or were there others who remained undetected? There were some who believed strongly that there was at least one more----the fourth man---who remained undetected and continued to cause damage.

12.The Philby enquiries led to a revamp of the Western counter-intelligence set-ups. Despite this, the KGB managed to penetrate the CIA through Aldrich Ames, who exposed to the KGB the identities of some valuable sources of the CIA in the former USSR and Russia, who were arrested and executed. Weak professional integrity and an old boys’ network in the CIA were among the factors identified for this fiasco. The counter-intelligence set-up in the US has since been further strengthened under the joint leadership of the FBI and the CIA.

13. The Gary Saxena Task Force  on Intelligence Revamp set up by the A.B.Vajpayee Governmet in 2000, of which I was a member, had recommended the strengthening of the Counter-Intelligence set-up under the leadership of the IB.The Rabinder Singh episode indicates shortcomings in the implementation of the recommendations.

14.Amar Bhushan was the chief spy catcher of the R&AW, the Czar of its counter-intelligence. He has first-hand knowledge of the sins of commission and omission that prevented the early exposure of Rabinder and enabled the CIA to whisk him out of India. His book, which is in the fictional format, throws some light on what went wrong, how and why. It provides some answers but not all the answers to questions regarding the state of our counter-intelligence. A fictional format cannot be a scholarly in-depth format. It is hoped his initiative in writing this book will act as a trigger for undertaking a more in-depth analysis of the state of our counter-intelligence. ( 23-7-12)

( The writer is Addiotional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt of India, New Delhi