Indian Defence Review

A Government with authoritarian reflexes in future may be tempted to misuse the powers of arrest given to the IB through the NCTC for having political opponents arrested by having them branded as associated with terrorism.

A Government with authoritarian reflexes in future may be tempted to misuse the powers of arrest given to the IB through the NCTC for having political opponents arrested by having them branded as associated with terrorism.

The IB is a secret intelligence organisation. It has no accountability to Parliament in respect of its work. We do not have a system of parliamentary intelligence oversight committees. We depend on the executive without any checks and balances to ensure that the IB functions according to the law of the land.

The British, during their colonial rule, did not consider it necessary or wise to give the powers of arrest and searches to the IB for any purpose. They observed the sacred principle that a clandestine intelligence collection agency should not have the powers of arrest. None of the Governments that had held office in New Delhi since our independence had considered it necessary or wise to give such powers to the IB.

The practice of giving powers of arrest to the intelligence agencies was started by Lenin and Stalin when they set up the KGB, the all-powerful Soviet intelligence agency, in order to enable it to deal with so-called counter-revolutionaries. Many other authoritarian countries have since given these powers to their intelligence agencies.

The IB has till now not had these powers. In spite of that, during the Emergency there were serious allegations of the misuse of the IB and the CBI by the Indira Gandhi Government to harass the opponents of the emergency. Instances of such misuse were documented by the Shah Commission and the L.P.Singh Committee set up by the Morarji Desai Government to enquire into them.

If there could be such gross misdeeds when the IB did not have any powers of arrest, imagine how much more could there be when a clandestine organisation, not accountable to Parliament, is given such powers on the ground that those powers would be required to deal with terrorism.