The aftermath of Kargil saw a series of reforms being brought to the national security system to plug existing loopholes
This article is part of the essay series: Kargil@25: Legacy and Beyond
Throughout their history, intelligence agencies have been forced to undergo reform and reorientation because of failure. In India, too, reforms in intelligence agencies have occurred, primarily after wars. Following the 1962 debacle, the Directorate General of Security (DGS) was set up within the Intelligence Bureau (IB) with its operational unit Aviation Research Centre (ARC) tasked with obtaining intelligence on China. Following the failure of the IB in the 1965 War, the government pressed ahead with the decision to create a separate external intelligence agency, the R&AW and linked the DGS with it.
The next wave of reform came after the 1999 Kargil War, in which Indian agencies failed to detect Pakistani incursions across the Line of Control (LoC) and New Delhi failed to gauge the army-civil divide in Pakistan and went ahead with peace moves that led to the Lahore Declaration of February 1999.
The Kargil Review Commission (KRC) led to the Group of Ministers’ (GOM) recommendations which brought about significant reform to the national security system. It created two new agencies, the Defence Intelligence Agency(DIA) and the National Technical Research Office (NTRO).
Arguably, the Naresh Chandra Committee was appointed in 2011 as a somewhat delayed reaction to the 2008 Mumbai attack. However, the recommendations of the Committee have more or less been ignored.
The big change in India’s intelligence machinery came along with a wider reform of the national security system brought on by the Kargil surprise. Comprising of the Union Home, Finance, and Defence ministers, a GOM was constituted in 2000 to recommend reforms to the national security system. This group constituted a set of expert task forces to aid in its task. The Task Force on the Intelligence Apparatus was headed by former R&AW chief, Girish Saxena, and its members were former foreign secretary, K Raghunath; former IB chief, M.K. Narayanan; former Special Secretary Home, PP Shrivastava; former Additional Secretary R&AW, B Raman and R Narasimha, of the National Institute of Advanced Studies.
The big change in India’s intelligence machinery came along with a wider reform of the national security system brought on by the Kargil surprise.
All the recommendations on the area of intelligence in the GOM report were redacted in the report released to the public in February 2001. Some information on the recommendations came through the press release accompanying the report. Other information came through some scattered media reportage and an important article by Satish Chandra, the former Deputy NSA in a security annual edited by Satish Kumar. A summary of the main recommendations was:
The GOM recommended the need for more coordination and jointness among the various agencies; indeed, the report specifically spoke of the need to create a new intelligence community. The key problem, it noted, was the continued silo mentality of the intelligence agencies, preventing effective cooperation amongst them. The problem began at the very top and, given this, there was little chance that there could be cooperation at the lower echelons.
The GOM recommended the formation of the Intelligence Coordination Group comprising the National Security Adviser(NSA), the Cabinet Secretary, and the Secretary National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS). Its job was to look at: the allocation of resources; annual reviews of intelligence quality; annual tasking; overseeing the agencies; and examining national estimates and forecasts. Other top officers were invitees and the idea was to bring together producers and consumers of intelligence on one platform.
The GOM provided each agency with a specific charter, which remains classified, outlining its responsibilities and functions. The idea was to prevent overlaps and turf wars.
As part of this, the GOM recommended that the IB not be treated as an appendage of the Ministry of Home Affairs. Its location next to the Union Home Ministry in South Block was there for administrative convenience, and the ministry was not meant to supervise the agency. In line with this, it called for the DIB to be given the rank of a Secretary, on par with his R&AW counterpart.
In view of the increasing role of high technology in intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination, a new agency, the National Technical Facilities Organisation (NTFO), was created. Its task was to plan, design and set up, and operate major new expensive Techint facilities and it was later renamed the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO). It was also called on to establish secure digital networks to disseminate Techint to the agencies, as well as enable information flow between agencies. As part of this, it would also establish a common database of information so that it could be easily and quickly disseminated to other agencies. It assumed responsibility for tracking the missile launches of countries of interest. And finally, it was given the responsibility for defensive and offensive cyber operations.
Associated with this was the creation of a Technical Coordination Group (TCG) to examine all proposals for expensive, high-tech equipment, oversee the techint capabilities of all agencies and decide on the allocation of funds for this purpose. It is headed by the NSA and the Chairman of NTRO as its member-secretary. The NTRO was also given the job of evaluating high-tech equipment requests of various agencies. Among its members are the Cabinet Secretary, Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, Secretaries of the Space and Atomic Energy departments, the R&AW and IB chiefs, the head of the DIA and the scientific advisers to the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister.
With a view of promoting best practices, the GOM suggested that intelligence collation be separated from intelligence collection. The NSCS was, therefore, given the task of intelligence assessment, evaluation, and coordination and the JIC was abolished. The NSCS saw its task as one of evaluating the inputs from various sources and weighing them against each other, and producing reports. A separate part of its work was the system of annual tasking and evaluation of agencies.
The IB was designated as the premier Counter Terrorism agency and authorised to create a Multi-Agency Centre (MAC) and Subsidiary Multi Agency Centres (SMACs) to collate and process intelligence inputs from various sources, to be located in state headquarters comprising representatives from various agencies. For operational purposes, it was to establish a permanent Joint Task Force on Intelligence which had members from the Ministry of Home Affairs, intelligence branches of various states and paramilitary outfits.
The GOM created a Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) to handle strategic military intelligence and its head is the principal military intelligence adviser to the Defence Minister, the Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee and the Defence Secretary. It was given the prized Signals Intelligence assets of the service intelligence directorates.
The GOM re-wrote the mandate of the economic intelligence outfits, by making the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau (CEIB) an intelligence organisation and think tank for the Department of Revenue.
Finally, the GOM recommendations made the National Security Adviser a powerful coordinator of intelligence as the head of the ICG, ranking member of the ICG/NIntB and supervisor of NTRO. In practice, the R&AW chief also reported to him. He gets intelligence inputs from all relevant agencies and is responsible for the evaluations and assessments made by the Joint Intelligence Committee and the National Security Council Secretariat.
The recommendations were implemented wholly or partially in the ensuing years. In addition, external and internal developments also helped in the process of testing the GOM recommendations. At one level, there was natural pushback, especially where existing agencies were asked to hand over functions to newer establishments, at another, government processes—such as orders and directives were used to undermine the GOM recommendations without due process. To an extent, personalities played a role. With M.K. Narayanan, former DIB as the NSA, some of the innovations relating to apex coordination were given up, such as the ICG and the annual tasking mechanism of the NSCS.
The recommendations were implemented wholly or partially in the ensuing years. In addition, external and internal developments also helped in the process of testing the GOM recommendations.
Further, despite the recommendation of the GOM, the MAC was not established, reflecting the IB desire to keep the CT turf exclusive, as well as the reluctance of the other agencies to share their information.
Nevertheless, efforts were made to fine-tune the recommendations through a two-man committee to look into personnel issues of the two premier agencies R&AW and IB. Subsequently, another Task Force on Intelligence Mechanisms was created in 2009, headed by former IB chief, P C Haldar, and S D Pradhan, who had been Deputy NSA and Chairman of JIC. This taskforce made several recommendations on ways to implement the GOM recommendations.
From the outset, there had been a great deal of resistance to the recommendations of the various committees and although important recommendations were accepted, they were often undermined by turf battles.
From the outset, there had been a great deal of resistance to the recommendations of the various committees and although important recommendations were accepted, they were often undermined by turf battles.
Some new agencies were also created, such as the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) which was hived out of the CEIB to act as an interface between the financial sector and law enforcement for collating, analysing and disseminating information relating to suspicious transactions, essentially money laundering. The NTFO was renamed as the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) which indicated that it was more than merely a repository of facilities. This, in turn, created problems with other agencies.
The one big watershed in this period was the Mumbai attack of November 2008 which turned out to be another major intelligence failure and multi-dimensional security disaster. The implications of the Mumbai attack in the context of failed reforms and prospective reforms were examined by a task force set up by the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in 2014 by former R&AW Special Secretary, Rana Banerji. But since then, there has been no public knowledge of any special reform effort, although there are reports of fine-tuning and incremental changes within the intelligence system.
Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the ORF. He has been a journalist specialising on national and international politics and is a commentator and ...
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