There are almost daily revelations that India’s security apparatus has been penetrated at several different levels by US and Pakistani agents. Two ISI agents arrested in West Bengal in connection with the Mumbai blasts have disclosed that there are 82 other ISI agents in the armed forces. What’s going on?

What India is confronted with is endemic treason. That so many security force personnel are willing to sell their souls to foreign powers and so many foreign agents are able to make their way into high security zones is a matter of grave concern. That this should have happened in the wake of so-called revamping of the intelligence infrastructure after the Kargil debacle points to a malaise.

The security apparatus that is now presided over by a National Security Adviser should be alive to the threat to subvert the system. How can they be oblivious to the fact that Indira Gandhi assassination was carried out by persons who had penetrated her inner-most security cordon. Her son, the charismatic Rajiv Gandhi was killed by the Tamil Tigers, who used the novel “suicide bomber” technique to deadly effect. The Indian security mandarins should have learnt the lessons by now and put correctives in place.

Indira Gandhi’s killers Beant Singh and Satwant Singh managed to be on duty on the fateful day in October 1984. They did so by simply effecting a change in their duty roster. Who enabled that change in duties is an enduring mystery. Twenty two years later in 2006, we are face to face with another enduring mystery: how two former members of the Hizbul Mujahideen could get into the CRPF managed outer security cordon of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh? So far there is no plausible explanation.

No doubt, the two Kashmiri youth are no longer associated with the Hizbul Mujahideen but the fact that they had been trained by Pakistan Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) cannot be ignored even when we are made to believe that national security and political stability were not seriously compromised. Their presence at a place, where they should be the most unwelcome guests in the normal course, came to light because a weapon of a CRPF guard was stolen. It shows that standard operating procedures in so sensitive an assignment are either lax. Or did some one subvert the procedures with malafide intent.

Worth recalling in this context is what had happened at the Amritsar airport in the winter of 2002. The hijacked Indian Airlines flight, IC-814, from Kathmandu landed at the airport while heading for Kandahar. The set drill on such occasions prescribes that the take off aircraft should be stalled and even prevented. Had the drill been followed, the hijacking could have been aborted. Unfortunately, that was not the case. A mysterious telephone call from someone claiming to be from a Government department in Delhi ordered the local officials that the aircraft be allowed to take off from Amritsar. Till date, no one knows who the mystery caller was.

There were, thus, and could still exist, shadowy figures within the Government hierarchy who could be working to destablise India. The Naval War Room leak of secrets and the handing over of thousands of pages of cyber secrets to an American woman diplomat by a person working in the National Security Advisory Board are just two instances sufficient to highlight the problem.

Now, about the reported warning by Intelligence agencies that two ISI agents had managed to penetrate the IAF. There is need to make an independent reassessment of this information and not depend entirely on the IAF denial that nothing had turned up in its thorough search. It could well be that, as in above mentioned cases, there is a shadowy figure within who has helped the two ISI agents in getting entry into the organization and is now able to shield them. Or conversely, it needs to be investigated whether the Intelligence agencies made a genuine mistake since ‘the moles’ were actually ‘discovered’ elsewhere in Jammu and Kashmir.

In the J and K case it turned out later that the two men had mentioned to their senior officers that they were being used by local terrorists because their families were targets in remote locations. This is a circumstance that applies to many of those serving in the State police and other security organizations. It calls for a very special kind of manpower management as a standard operating procedure.

Double checking and cross-checking should be the norm rather than the exception in security-related issues. There is no room for any kind of misplaced eclectism in matters security of top leaders. Nonetheless, screening of personnel particularly from areas amenable to penetration by terrorists should not end up in witch-hunting and neo-McCarthyism

Clearly what is at work is a covert warfare and this is all the more reason why India learns to call a spade a spade. This is no longer proxy war which, intrinsically, has a limited ambiance in time, space and location. Nor is this cross border terrorism which too has a limited geography. This is war by other means and two nations that have a history of being inimical to India have already been identified among the culprits.


Courtesy : Syndicate Features

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