Individual states can control regional terrorism or insurgency with a limited spread. We have had success stories as in the case of Al Ummah in Tamil Nadu.
But terrorism or insurgency of a pan-Indian spread is a different kind of threat like that of the Indian Mujahideen or insurgency of the Maoists. The whole of India is their theatre. And target. No individual State police, however professional and competent, can deal with the threat on its own.
We are on the threshold of other and more deadly mutations of terrorism such as maritime terrorism. Global terrorist organisations have been on the look-out for weapons of mass destruction material that they can use. From global, such threats are likely to become national.
Only the government of India can deal with these mutations and prevent them from operating in our territory. No individual State Police has or will ever have the expertise and capability to prevent and neutralize them.
Our internal security problems are inextricably entwined with our external environment. The non-state actors of today—whether terrorists or insurgents—copy-cat States in their ability to use modern technologies and new means of causing death and destruction.
Protecting ourselves and our nation from these ever-changing threats is the business of all of us— whether the central agencies or the State Police. When our Constitution was framed more than 60 years ago, our internal security tasks were simple —dealing with dacoities, robberies and insurgencies of the Telangana kind. Our founding fathers had the confidence that the States can deal with any internal security threat alone. In their keenness to preserve and protect our federal State, they made the Police a State subject.
Threats have changed today. Beyond our worst imagination. No single government or agency or police force can cope with the threats of today by operating from an island of its own imagination. The island mentality and the island techniques in the management of internal security have to give way to a co-operative and co-ordinated way of managing internal security.
Federalism is no longer the ability to act alone. It is the willingness and the ability to act together. Terrorists and insurgents are increasingly acting together at the regional, national and global level. But we in India are not. We find it easier to co-operate with other nations, but not with each other.
The current controversy over the National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC) between the centre and the states illustrates the continuing prevalence of the island mentality in dealing with pan-Indian internal security threats.
The concept was borrowed by P. Chidambaram, the union home minister, from the US where its NCTC has played a useful role in preventing terrorism. Normally, there should have been no controversy but Chidambaram’s action in seeking to make the NCTC a part of the Intelligence Bureau with executive powers of arrest and search has rightly alarmed the opposition-ruled states.