The failure of the Crisis Management Group (CMG) headed by Cabinet secretary Pradeep Kumar Sinha, to spring into action after terrorists attacked the Pathankot Air Base in the wee hours of January 2, and to make its presence known and felt in the succeeding four days that it took the Defence Ministry to declare that the action was finally over, points to a persistent failure of India’s institutional responses in times of crisis.
Was Sinha deliberately kept out of the loop? If so, this calls for an explanation to the nation at the highest level. The Cabinet Secretary is aware of his powers and responsibilities; on January 3, he chaired a meeting of the National Crisis Management Committee to assess the situation following the earthquake in Manipur. The fact that he was shunted off to deal with a minor earthquake is a telling reflection on our governance system.
The Indian proclivity for ad hoc and piecemeal responses to grim challenges persists despite receiving clear and actionable intelligence warnings of danger to the Pathankot base, and despite the terrible price paid during the IC-814 hijack by Harkat-u-Mujahideen in 1999, the attack on the Indian Parliament by Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed in 2001, and the chilling attack on Mumbai by Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2008.
Due to the failure to kick-start institutional mechanisms to deal with the Pathankot strike, India cut a sorry figure with premature declarations about the end of the attack, which took four nerve-wracking days to conclude.
The Crisis Management Group includes key officials from the intelligence, security, defence set-up and other ministries and agencies, who pool in the experience and capacities of their office to tackle a specific crisis until it is over. Different drills have been set up for different types of crises. In this way, each institution knows its responsibility and functions in a coordinated manner.
At Pathankot, observers commented that the deployment of the National Security Guard or Indian Army was ad hoc and uncoordinated and that time was lost by not deploying officers of the Punjab Police who were closer to the action.
A stringent scrutiny of the Border Security Force is in order. The BSF must explain the entry route taken by the terrorists and their intimate links with drug cartels operating on both sides of the border. It needs to be clearly established if the thermal imagers deployed on the border failed due to equipment malfunction or were sabotaged to facilitate the entry of drug pedlars who, in this case, turned out to be terrorists.
It is pertinent that in 1993, a well-greased smuggling network was used to smuggle lethal weapons into Mumbai; yet the scrutiny of the role played by crime syndicates in terrorism seems inadequate. It bears stating that so far, neither the National Counter Terrorism Centre nor the National Intelligence Grid have taken off, despite India being highly vulnerable to terrorism.
There is no doubt that the near simultaneous attacks at Pathankot and Mazar-e-Sharif (Afghanistan) were aimed at derailing the fragile dialogue process between India and Pakistan and thereby also impacting the Afghan peace process. But India needs to make a forensic analysis of the role, if any, played by elements inside the Pakistani state, Pakistan Army and Inter-Services Intelligence. The Pakistani establishment must be given a chance to act upon the information and evidence that India’s National Investigation Agency intends to furnish regarding the terrorists. In this context, it may be advisable for Ajit Doval to meet his counterpart Lt Gen Nasir Janjua to ascertain the outfit responsible for the strike and particularly if the incident carries ISI fingerprints.
The urgent imperative, however, is to address our own institutional deficits so as to combat and overcome the problems posed by cross-border terrorism.
ABPLive.in/blog, 6 January 2016
http://www.abplive.in/blog/institutional-lapses-led-to-delayed-response-to-pathankot-attack
