The Unborn NCTC
The integrated saviour has to take birth on 1st March and the labour pains for the Home Ministry are getting acute.
Oscar Wilde might have called it last resort of the ‘unimaginative’ Home Ministry. Why? Because it is so consistent with what the Home Minister has been saying. You have to be unimaginative to be so consistent. The Home Secretary says – “it is in national interest”. ‘National interest’ has to be the sweet nothing of the season. Even Vijay Mallya said that closing down Kingfisher Airlines is not in ‘national interest’. State governments of some (11 and counting. Mostly anti- Congress. Didi is anti everything) states think it is anti-federalism. Nothing new, federalism has been the monopoly of parties opposed to the ruling one at the centre. So what is such a terror for the quasi-federal republic? Terror? It is meant to crush terror. Have a look at its officially imposing name – National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC).
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ContributeYes, the integrated saviour has to take birth on 1st of March and the labour pains for the Home Ministry are getting acute. The Central government thinks that the child has constitutional sanctity. The decision to establish NCTC has been taken by drawing executive power from Article 72 of the Constitution and empowering it under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), 1967. But there are people with bigger noses for constitutional nitpicking. The government has ammunition ready for them too. Home Ministry has placed NCTC within Intelligence Bureau (IB), which “finds mention at S.No.8 in the Union List under the 7th Schedule of the Constitution of India” (Central government’s reply to a question in Parliament, July 2009).
So have no doubt about it – it is a planned child. PETA activists have a powerful supporter to boast of – NCTC has been widely reported as Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s pet project. And the intentions were security specific – to strengthen and streamline various counter terror measures and agencies for pre-empting and preventing terror attacks.
It sounds like a response to the ‘national interest’ narrative that caught the scared urban imagination after that televised terror spectacle, better known by a numerical fraction – 9/11. So what does the Home Ministry want NCTC to do? Anything that syncs with that imposing name, sample some of its to-be-performed functions:
(a) gather intelligence, analyse intelligence and carrying out operations.
(b) requisition services of the elite National Security Guard (NSG), integrate intelligence pertaining to terrorism; analyse the same; pursue or mandate other agencies to pursue the different leads and coordinate with the existing agencies for an effective response.
(c) to maintain a comprehensive database of terrorists and their associates, friends, families, and supporters of terrorist modules and gangs; and of all information pertaining to terrorists.
What part of this is causing federal heartburn in states? Is something that acidic? Chidambaram has decided to give his pet project some teeth. NCTC has been empowered under Section 43 (a) of UAPA to search and arrest without informing, seeking consent and help of state police within the territory of the concerned state. Some federally conscious states have viewed it as raising the terror bogey for further weakening the feeble body of the state list. Law and order seems one of the rare fleshy parts in its anorexia inflicted body.
So here we are dealing with another institution. Sounds like that clichéd yawn from the cocooned class at the mention of government committees, commissions and red tape – “ek aur committee, ek aur commission”. The irony is, that this same class was mesmerized by institutional wizardry when street legislation was doling out a promise of creating an anti-corruption institutional leviathan called Lokpal. Institutional fetishes coming full circle.
Terror and anti-terror measures rule out the human factor, both play on bugbears. Each bogey is a fetish, so is the institution countering it. NCTC is waiting to be the new babe in the woods of our institutional fetishes. Federal concerns expressed along party lines, are causing some birth pangs. The day is drawing closer. Delivery date is March 1st. Birth, abortion or miscarriage?
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