National SECURITY COUNCIL: How Effective?
Saumitra Mohan

After being on the anvil for more than a decade, the National Security Council (NSC) was finally constituted through an executive order on October, 19, 1998. The three-tier NSC, to be headed by the Prime Minister, is supposed to undertake an array of complex tasks pertaining to national security management linking it to the country's overall development process.

It was Rajiv Gandhi who first experimented in 1985, with a variant of NSC, by setting up a committee named "Policy Planning Committee on National Security". Ministers including two Chief Ministers, officials and non-officials were designated as members. The Chairman, Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), was made the Secretary. Mooted by Arun Singh, Minister of State for Defence in Rajiv Gandhi government, this predecessor of NSC which could have successfully performed the role of a think-tank, decision-maker, policy-arbitrator and performance monitor died an early death since conventional channel of decision-making like Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) and the Committee on Secretaries (COS) were already available.

The V.P. Singh Government's NSC, which included a multi-member advisory group, did not take off since no one was clear about its functioning. As a compromise, the Narasimha Rao government set up a "Security Strategy Group" to include the service chiefs also, who was not part of the decision-making process earlier, but nothing like NSC came up more because of clamour from retired civil and military officers.

The NSC also featured in the present coalition government's National Agenda for Governance, following which a task force was formed in April, 1998 under the Chairmanship of K.C. Pant, former Finance Commission Chairman, to go into the various aspects of an NSC. The task force submitted a detailed report on 26 June, 1998. The present NSC is based on its recommendations.

Headed by the Prime Minister, Principal Secretary to the PM will be the National Security Advisor and channel for servicing the Council. The Home Minister, the Defence Minister, the External Affairs Minister, the Finance Minister and the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission will be members of the high-powered panel that will have a three-tier structure. Its secretariat will be the JIC which is to be revamped to suit the demands of its new role. Satish Chandra has been appointed as its Chairman.

The strategic policy group will be strengthened and will provide inter-ministerial coordination and back-up for the Council. The group will comprise the Cabinet Secretary and Union Secretaries from the departments concerned including external affairs, home, defence, revenue and defence production besides three service chiefs, the Reverse Bank of India Governor and the Director, Intelligence Bureau.

The present structure combines the two posts of Secretary to the Prime Minister and the National Security Adviser. Both are full time jobs and are quite taxing. Combining the two posts will result in either or both tasks not being managed effectively. Since the secretaryship to the PM involves day-to-day running of the government, it is likely that the long-term planning in national security management would suffer in the proposed dispensation.

The strategic policy group is an expanded secretaries' committee. It can only give generalist comments on papers produced by others and can't by itself do any original work. If it is to carry out a strategic defence review, then there must be a group of experts who should produce a draft on which the secretaries can make non-specialist observations. It is not quite clear which structure will do that basic work. This is not very different from the present procedure.

The government has fallen back on the eight-year-old proposal by the V.P. Singh government. Like all its predecessors, it can't appreciate that national planning must start with a long-range intelligence assessment which is bound to be neglected and the strategic defence review will not have any solid foundation on long-term assessments, but will be a collection of ad hoc views of individuals. The government's attitude towards intelligence assessment is evident from the post of Chairman, JIC, being left vacant for nearly an year.

There is mention of a national security advisory board comprising persons of eminence from the government covering expertise in various fields. They are to meet once a month or more frequently as required. They are to provide long-term prognoses and analyses for NSC and recommend solutions and policy options. It is not clear whether they will be full-time or part-time functionaries.
Unless they are constituted into a single coherent body and made full-time staff, they will not be able to discharge their functions effectively. If that is done, the person who heads the board, will be the key person in national security planning. Such a person will have to be of the rank of a secretary to the government and have adequate background in national security affairs. One wonders whether in the setup proposed, one could expect him to be independent and not tailor his views to suit those of his seniors who will advance his career.

As envisaged, the pioneering national security advisership in not the best way to initiate a modern and efficient national security management structure, howsoever meritorious, competent, knowledgeable and dedicated the incumbent may be. A major blind spot of the official Indian mindset concerns the axiomatic truth that centralization of authority degrades effective exercise of power. Successive Indian leaderships have failed to nurture modern management concepts such as power-sharing and responsibility, delegation and team work for common goals and objectives. The purpose of setting up the NSC was to purge the present system of ad hocism in decision making and replace it with a collegiate, deliberative and information-based approach. This aim would be defeated by centralization, generalist supremacy, rigid hierarchy and bureaucratic circumambulation which are the basic defects of the proposed structure. It is not known whether this decision was arrived at after an informed deliberation in the Cabinet Committee, or was taken by the Prime Minister alone.

The JIC was shifted from the jurisdiction of the chiefs of staff committee and make an autonomous assessment body in the Cabinet Secretariat in 1965, after it became clear that the 1962 debacle was the result not of an absence of intelligence, but of a failure to assess the regular inflow of data. However, the tendency of intelligence agencies to withhold information from the committee, and the inability of the ministers and senior civil servants to appreciate that long-range intelligence assessments are essential inputs for policy making, combined to undermine the efficacy of the arrangement.

A cardinal principle in national security decision-making is not to mix up responsibilities for intelligence assessment and policy making; one process influencing the other to the detriment of optimal decision-making. The assessors must have access to all available intelligence and should be free to reach their own conclusions without any external pressures. Most countries have highly equipped professional analysts continually on the job. Despite the dawn of the information age, our politicians and bureaucrats have yet to realize the need for assessed intelligence. This refusal to learn is rooted in the endemic authoritarian style of official functioning, marked by an unwillingness to submit to the discipline of information, expertise and reasoned decision-making. All this is reflected in converting the JIC into a secretariat.

As the NSC and its supporting structure are being set up under an executive order, one can only hope that further improvements will be possible after taking constructive suggestions into account.
(1999)