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“Satyameva Jayathe” meaning “Truth alone triumphs” should have considerable context when it comes to holding our public representatives – especially those in the Executive branch – accountable. Secondly, “Absolute power absolutely corrupts.. these maxims point to one cardinal truth- we must evolve with the world when it comes to holding the powerful people in our Executive branch accountable. Remember, in the current Schumpeter’s 5th wave (information age), the most powerful are the ones with the maximum access to information. It is worthy to note that we are now in an even more disruptive 6th wave…
It’s been more than 75 years since independence, and yet, we hardly know anything of our formidable intelligence agencies – the IB and RA&W. RA&W’s case is worse. Its very foundation is to be a covert agency, but it now appears to be a victim of its founding time (1968), rather than an efficient agency. India’s GDP had been growing by leaps and bounds since the 1990s, as must be the ‘budget’ of these agencies. Some part of it is usually the “black budget” (kept confidential by design due to the nature of the operation). Imagine a nearly ‘unaccountable’ agency with access to big budgets. Would we not want to keep the agency secure from hostile individuals or other Special Interest Groups? How else would we serve the greater good? What if the executives have been corrupted? After all, they are human beings.
In my 20+ years of work experience across sectors, I have learned this – every organisation makes mistakes. It is “normal” that our intelligence organizations too may have made their share of mistakes (“Pegasus”; “Canada standoff”, “PoWs in Pakistan”, etc). It is also expected that they would have learned some lessons from these failures– just like the Bay of pigs, the ‘Ricin poisoning’, and so on. Why don’t we publish them by informing the people – at the very least with a redacted version of the classified documents? Why get humiliated when our spy gets caught in a foreign country and end up claiming that he is not even employed by the Indian govt? Even USA and USSR – two sworn enemies during the peak of the cold war – were able to talk and exchange spies when a U2 spy plane pilot was caught. This was back in 1962! Jingoistic projection of invincibility can lead to complacency, not excellence. This is unlike a learning environment which the “Vishwaguru” India is keen to project to the world. How evolved a country’s people are, is often dependent on how its intelligence network operates. Whether it is in the course of securing economic, strategic, or special interests of the nation… I’m not asking to broadcast, but maybe we need to get the Directors of IB and RA&W in front of the Rajya Sabha standing committees of intelligence and even share non-confidential content in social media. After all, the CIA, which is the counterpart of RA&W, is present on Facebook; they have their website, just as the super-secret NSA. If these covert agencies of very advanced nations with even greater threats than India can work out a democratic process that legitimizes the work of the agencies, why can’t we?
This aligns with the ‘due process’ followed by several democratic countries – e.g., UK, Australia, Canada, and so on. What better way to make the executive answerable to the people? This will also serve to take feedback – both positive and negative. If the CIA director can periodically do it (incidentally the US Senate Intel committee has both closed and open door sessions), why not our executives? We are the world’s largest democracy…it is time we enfranchise our people by bringing some invisible elements of the Executive into the light. Maybe it will help the nation take that much needed leap of faith. It is key that people place a renewed faith in our democratic systems – that we do have a working mechanism of checks and balances. And no one, much less, a member of the Executive branch, is immune.
First and foremost, an audit of their functioning is required. The central government does have officers with deep subject knowledge of handling audit process of confidential departments. Without such audit, there’s a clear and tangible risk that the taxpayer’s money is mis-utilized.
75 years of independence, 50 plus years of RA&W’s formation, British era remnants in Intelligence Bureau’s way of work – will these change organically? Or do they need that occasional nudge from the taxpayer’s representatives? INC’s leaders, fellow citizens, journalists, and ex-senior officers in the agencies have been calling for reforms for a long time now. All these sections of society are well informed. Are they all wrong and the agencies right?
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint