Wednesday 20Jan 2010

NEW DELHI: Is it time for India to bring its intelligence apparatus under legislative oversight? As national security advisor M K Narayanan makes

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way for a new incumbent and, perhaps a new structure, the issue of accountability of intelligence agencies has been put on the table.

On Tuesday, Vice-President Hamid Ansari gave a definite thumbs up to a system of oversight to govern the intelligence community in India. Addressing senior intelligence officers for the R N Kao memorial lecture at the R&AW headquarters, Ansari said while both accountability and oversight were anathema to intelligence communities, these needed to be introduced into the Indian structure.

Quoting an intelligence expert, he said, "How shall a democracy ensure its secret intelligence apparatus becomes neither a vehicle for conspiracy or a suppressor of the traditional liberties of democratic self-government?"

He said the current scheme where intelligence agencies are kept outside the ambit of parliamentary scrutiny is no longer tenable. "The traditional practice of oversight by the concerned minister and prime minister and general accountability to Parliament... is now considered amorphous and does not meet the requirements of good governance in an open society."

Intelligence agencies have historically chaffed at suggestions of being exposed to parliamentary scrutiny for a whole range of reasons -- from fear of political interference to loss of secrecy that they need.

In his address to the intelligence brass, Ansari reflected the concerns but did not buy into those. He said the arrangement where intelligence agencies are accountable only to the executive raises concerns about the nature and scope of such supervision as well as the potential for misuse.

He said that other democracies who also wrestled with the dilemma have opted for oversight. "United States reached the conclusion that oversight of the intelligence community is essential because of critical importance of ensuring the nation's security as well as checking the potential for misuse of power."

Citing the different forms of parliamentary intelligence oversight, he argued, "Given these models of calibrated openness to ensure oversight and accountability, there is no reason why a democratic system like ours should not have a standing committee of Parliament on intelligence."