India is exceptional among democracies in having no legal framework for its intelligence services, nor a system of oversight and accountability for covert operations.
For the first time in the history of independent India, a high official
of its intelligence services stands indicted for cold-blooded killing in
the service of the Republic. Thursday’s Central Bureau of Investigation
charge sheet against former Intelligence Bureau Special Director
Rajinder Kumar and his subordinates for the alleged extra-judicial
execution of Maharashtra residents Ishrat Jahan Raza
and Javed Sheikh,
as well as two alleged Pakistani Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives, marks an
unprecedented challenge for India’s national security system. The CBI’s
charge sheet has blown the lid off the comforting fiction that
extra-judicial killings are aberrations, crimes carried out by brutish
policemen and villainous provincial politicians. In this case, the
Gujarat Police might have played executioner, but the charges against
Mr. Kumar give reason to believe that the death warrants were signed, so
to speak, in North Block. Loud and acrimonious political debate has
broken out on whether the four victims were linked to terrorism or not,
which really is an irrelevant issue. Instead, political leaders must
introspect on the role of governments in encouraging murder as a tool of
national security, and demonstrate the legislative will needed to set
wrongs right.
India is exceptional among democracies in having no legal framework for
its intelligence services, nor a system of oversight and accountability
for covert operations. Every time they run trans-border operations or
plant moles in terrorist groups, they break the law. Ajit Doval, a
former IB Director and the only Indian police officer ever to be awarded
the Kirti Chakra, has candidly said the operation that led the
President to give him the coveted military honour involved the killing
of a Pakistani spy, the illegal detention of terrorism suspects and
smuggling across international borders. For individual officers, the
absence of a regulatory law for covert operations creates perverse
incentives for wrongdoing: who, after all, would want victims of their
criminal acts to tell the story in court? In its absence, kidnapping has
been substituted for legal detention, torture for criminal
investigation, and the bullet delivered to the back of the skull, for
trial. Leaders of all parties, though, have been loath to change the
system. For years now, figures like Union Minister Manish Tewari, and
former intelligence chiefs, have campaigned for the legal regulation of
the intelligence services, arguing that the status quo will end
up undermining national security. To continue to ignore these voices
will ensure the destruction of the intelligence services, and threaten
the security of the republic they are charged with defending.
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