These powers cannot be arrogated by the centre, nor can they be ceded by the states through any ‘consultative process’. If there is, in fact, any pressing necessity for the centre to be given greater powers to deal with the imperatives of counter-terrorism (CT), these cannot be conferred through any informal process of consultation, through executive orders, or through amendments to any existing laws. The most marginal augmentation of the centre’s jurisdiction beyond the existing union and Concurrent lists can be secured only through a constitutional amendment, no less.
It is abundantly clear, by the very evasiveness of the centre’s approach, that the union government lacks the confidence that it can, in fact, demonstrate the necessity of its proposals on the grounds of CT imperatives and in an open and calm debate on the distribution of powers between the union and the states.
Indeed, and this has been repeatedly argued elsewhere, the “bold, thorough and radical restructuring of the security architecture at the national level” that UHM Chidambaram proposes is anything but necessary, and is, more likely, a wasteful symbolic process, intended to feed the illusion of power, and the pretence of an ‘effective response’, rather than to augment the substance of CT capacities and capabilities.
The idea of the NCTC as panacea, moreover, needs to be vigorously contested. Despite trillions of dollars that have been poured into its CT architecture, and a multiplicity of wars launched abroad to protect the ‘homeland’, the reality is that US CT success is anything but complete. There are often loose assertions that the US has successfully protected the ‘homeland’ from terrorist attacks since 9/11, but this is contra-factual. In at least three cases, disaster has been averted, not by any preventive initiatives on the part of US intelligence and enforcement agencies, but by the sheer and spectacular incompetence of terrorists: the December 2001 case of the “shoe bomber”, Richard Reid; the December 2009 “underwear bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; and the May 2010 “Times Square bombing”, by Faisal Shahzad. Nor, indeed, has the US homeland been entirely free of terrorist successes since 2001. On July 28, 2006, for instance, Naveed Afzal Haq opened indiscriminate fire at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, killing one and wounding five. On February 12, 2007, Sulejman Talovic killed five and wounded another five, at the Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City, Utah. And on November 5, 2009, Nidal Malik Hasan, a US Army major serving as a psychiatrist, killed 14 and injured 29, at the military establishment at Fort Hood, Texas. The US homeland is, further, infinitely better protected by geography, history and demography. America has, moreover, compromised almost every Constitutional principal to secure itself over the past decade.
More significantly, the US has been quite unsuccessful in other theatres of CT intervention – the AfPak region is a dramatic case in point. This theatre – plagued by continuous Pakistani mischief – offers a better point of assessment of US CT capabilities. US technical capabilities have certainly created some dramatic ‘successes’ – the neutralization of Osama bin Laden at his Abbottabad safe haven the most prominent among these. The reality, however, is that, where only a handful of Afghan Districts along the AfPak border were afflicted by the Pakistan-backed Taliban insurgency in the aftermath of Operation Enduring Freedom, today, Taliban factions have established their disruptive dominance in 31 of the country’s 34 Districts. American aid and interventions in Pakistan have also failed to establish any measure of stability and, indeed, the country’s “descent into chaos” has only accelerated over the years.
The intention, here, is not to suggest that everything the US has done is wrong. Rather, that the image of uncontaminated success that is projected, as a contrast to India’s unmitigated failure, is far from accurate.
Crucially, India’s past CT failures arise out of an acute deficit of capacities for intelligence gathering, analysis and response, and not out of any extraordinary defects of institutional ‘architecture’. Home minister Chidambaram explicitly noted, in his Intelligence Bureau Centenary Endowment Lecture on December 23, 2009,