Bang Galore
ELITE MEMBER
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2010
- Messages
- 10,685
- Reaction score
- 12
- Country
- Location
The departure of P Chidambaram from the home ministry is worrying. This is not simply because a competent minister has moved on, but because there is a danger that complacency in the absence of an immediate crisis - such as the 26/11 terrorist attacks, which brought Chidambaram to North Block in the first place - will see a pivotal ministry being viewed in an old, outmoded way.
To understand why, one has to look at the history and evolution of the home ministry. For all his faults, Chidambaram was India's first modern home minister, seeing it as a technocratic charge - as technocratic as, say, the finance ministry - with a specific mandate to upgrade internal security firewalls. In India, reasonable to good governance or success of public institutions tends to be driven by individuals. Our politics doesn't encourage institutional rigour and memory. As such, there is no guarantee Sushilkumar Shinde, Chidambaram's successor, will imagine his job description in the same manner, or be up to it anyway.
Till the 1990s, the home ministry was a largely 'political' office, in that it was the ministry the ruling party used to further its politics. Home ministers were usually the second-most important ministers in the cabinet. At least that is the tag the ministry carried. That is why L K Advani was home minister in the NDA years. That is why Arjun Singh desperately wanted (but didn't get) the home ministry in the P V Narasimha Rao government, to establish his number two credentials.
In the days of one-party dominance, the home minister had a broad-based and largely political duty. He often bullied state governments run by opposition parties. He threatened president's rule, or more or less ran a state under president's rule. He used the intelligence and police agencies under him to extract leverage and occasionally to spy on political opponents.
Within the home ministry, internal security was twice carved out as a separate jurisdiction looked after by a minister of state - under Arun Nehru in the 1980s and Rajesh Pilot in the early 1990s. The nature of internal security then was very different. Challenges were either limited to specific regions (Punjab, the Bodo demand for sub-autonomy in Assam) or were decidedly political (moving central paramilitary forces from place x to y because of religious/ethnic disturbances). Contemporary terrorism, as it emerged after 9/11 or 26/11, with a possibility to strike anywhere in the country, was unknown.
Chidambaram grasped the essence of this change. To be fair, the change was obvious enough after the Mumbai attacks of 2008 and the series of smaller terrorist bombings that had occurred earlier that year. He approached the home ministry as a technocrat and not a generalist, with internal security in its 21 {+s} {+t} century form as an obsessive focus.
It is not that an internal security minister or overseer must necessarily be from a policing or field-operations background. India after 26/11 needed to address juridical lacunae in meeting terrorism-related situations. It needed to construct a legal and threat-anticipation architecture that would integrate the state governments and New Delhi. It needed to ask itself about the right balance between anti-terror laws and civil liberties.
In many senses, a lawyer politician was appropriate for this job. Chidambaram may not have always got what he wanted and there may have been genuine grounds of disagreement with the details of some of his proposals - such as the plans for the National Counterterrorism Centre - but at least he bought a certain seriousness to his job.
A confident, and some would say imperious man, Chidambaram had no qualms in expanding the ambit of the home minister. Since his primary remit was protecting the lives of citizens and residents of India, he had no problem in making clear-headed statements about sources of violent extremism in, say, Pakistan, whether this fitted into the foreign ministry's time-table or didn't. Realising the criticality of access to real-time intelligence he began to take meetings of chiefs of intelligence agencies. Gradually the home minister, rather than an official in the prime minister's office, became India's both de facto and de jure intelligence czar.
No minister can carry on forever. Sooner or later, Chidambaram's stint in the home ministry would have ended. It would have helped, though, if he had been replaced by somebody who was either as purposeful or had a similar skill set. Indeed, several people, including the former home minister himself, have suggested the home ministry needs to be reorganised. The wing of the government that has responsibility for counterterrorism and internal security cannot also busy its minister with requests and lobbying for Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri awards, freedom fighters' pensions and promotion of Hindi as an official language.
Such a structural overhaul of the home ministry is absolutely overdue. Far from making a move towards it, the UPA government has regressed, and brought in a home minister who seems unfortunately reminiscent of the 1980s. Perhaps Shinde will prove all of us wrong - though who would bet on it? For the moment, it appears the smugness of the past may just be back.
Why we'll miss Chidambaram - The Times of India
To understand why, one has to look at the history and evolution of the home ministry. For all his faults, Chidambaram was India's first modern home minister, seeing it as a technocratic charge - as technocratic as, say, the finance ministry - with a specific mandate to upgrade internal security firewalls. In India, reasonable to good governance or success of public institutions tends to be driven by individuals. Our politics doesn't encourage institutional rigour and memory. As such, there is no guarantee Sushilkumar Shinde, Chidambaram's successor, will imagine his job description in the same manner, or be up to it anyway.
Till the 1990s, the home ministry was a largely 'political' office, in that it was the ministry the ruling party used to further its politics. Home ministers were usually the second-most important ministers in the cabinet. At least that is the tag the ministry carried. That is why L K Advani was home minister in the NDA years. That is why Arjun Singh desperately wanted (but didn't get) the home ministry in the P V Narasimha Rao government, to establish his number two credentials.
In the days of one-party dominance, the home minister had a broad-based and largely political duty. He often bullied state governments run by opposition parties. He threatened president's rule, or more or less ran a state under president's rule. He used the intelligence and police agencies under him to extract leverage and occasionally to spy on political opponents.
Within the home ministry, internal security was twice carved out as a separate jurisdiction looked after by a minister of state - under Arun Nehru in the 1980s and Rajesh Pilot in the early 1990s. The nature of internal security then was very different. Challenges were either limited to specific regions (Punjab, the Bodo demand for sub-autonomy in Assam) or were decidedly political (moving central paramilitary forces from place x to y because of religious/ethnic disturbances). Contemporary terrorism, as it emerged after 9/11 or 26/11, with a possibility to strike anywhere in the country, was unknown.
Chidambaram grasped the essence of this change. To be fair, the change was obvious enough after the Mumbai attacks of 2008 and the series of smaller terrorist bombings that had occurred earlier that year. He approached the home ministry as a technocrat and not a generalist, with internal security in its 21 {+s} {+t} century form as an obsessive focus.
It is not that an internal security minister or overseer must necessarily be from a policing or field-operations background. India after 26/11 needed to address juridical lacunae in meeting terrorism-related situations. It needed to construct a legal and threat-anticipation architecture that would integrate the state governments and New Delhi. It needed to ask itself about the right balance between anti-terror laws and civil liberties.
In many senses, a lawyer politician was appropriate for this job. Chidambaram may not have always got what he wanted and there may have been genuine grounds of disagreement with the details of some of his proposals - such as the plans for the National Counterterrorism Centre - but at least he bought a certain seriousness to his job.
A confident, and some would say imperious man, Chidambaram had no qualms in expanding the ambit of the home minister. Since his primary remit was protecting the lives of citizens and residents of India, he had no problem in making clear-headed statements about sources of violent extremism in, say, Pakistan, whether this fitted into the foreign ministry's time-table or didn't. Realising the criticality of access to real-time intelligence he began to take meetings of chiefs of intelligence agencies. Gradually the home minister, rather than an official in the prime minister's office, became India's both de facto and de jure intelligence czar.
No minister can carry on forever. Sooner or later, Chidambaram's stint in the home ministry would have ended. It would have helped, though, if he had been replaced by somebody who was either as purposeful or had a similar skill set. Indeed, several people, including the former home minister himself, have suggested the home ministry needs to be reorganised. The wing of the government that has responsibility for counterterrorism and internal security cannot also busy its minister with requests and lobbying for Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri awards, freedom fighters' pensions and promotion of Hindi as an official language.
Such a structural overhaul of the home ministry is absolutely overdue. Far from making a move towards it, the UPA government has regressed, and brought in a home minister who seems unfortunately reminiscent of the 1980s. Perhaps Shinde will prove all of us wrong - though who would bet on it? For the moment, it appears the smugness of the past may just be back.
Why we'll miss Chidambaram - The Times of India
