To tackle terror, first improve governance

Last week���s terror attacks in Mumbai have led to the usual calls for retribution and tough action against Pakistan to prevent future attacks, but the search for an effective antidote to prevent similar incidents occurring again must start at home.

The way India is governed is seriously deficient when it comes to tackling modern terror���a point whose tragic import has been borne by the citizenry most recently in Mumbai, and before that in Guwahati, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Malegaon, Kanpur and other towns.

Governance is flawed in terms of its organisational structure, the way it is manned and run and, most importantly, in the underlying politics that determines its overall character. Laws and rules define the organisational structure of governance. Law and order, under the Constitution, is a state subject.

While there is a large Union home ministry tasked with internal security, running intelligence agencies and paramilitary forces, day-to-day law enforcement is the job of state police agencies. The Centre cannot unilaterally take action in a state���s law enforcement sphere, except in special circumstances.

Tackling terror calls for co-ordination among the law enforcement agencies of the states and with their central counterparts. This has been happening, of late, in bits and pieces, but is still fairly haphazard and a matter of chance. There is clear need to institutionalise such coordination across the federal divide.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been talking about the need for a federal agency to tackle terror. States have not been keen to cooperate. But if the Centre shows sufficient political will to create such an agency, it is difficult to see how any state can resist the move.

Political will is to blame, also, for the inability, so far, to institutionalise inter-agency cooperation on intelligence gathering and follow-up action. The recommendations of the K Subrahmanyam committee set up after the massive intelligence failure leading to the Kargil intrusions that grew into a war gathered dust under the previous NDA regime. The dust has thickened into grime under the present UPA government.

Another big debate is whether India needs special laws to tackle terror, with draconian measures such as those contained in the erstwhile Pota (Prevention of Terrorism Act). One view is that enforcement rather than the laws themselves are at fault.

With the same set of laws available, the Nitish Kumar government has created a significantly more law-abiding Bihar than had obtained under the previous Lalu Prasad Yadav regime. It is far from clear that existing laws, if enforced properly, are insufficient to tackle terror. What is indeed clear is that laws like Pota tend be more abused than used against terrorists.

Nor is governance just about the police machinery. Practically every interface between the government and the citizenry leaves the citizen feeling oppressed and exploited, with the state, its officials and their inevitable touts appearing more as predators than as agents of justice and order.

This is a function of politics. Politics in a country like India where society and the polity lag, by far, the ideal of liberal democracy outlined in the Constitution, should seek empowerment of the people to realise that ideal. Instead of such redemption, politics in practice seeks loot, besides supremacy of some sections of society over others.

In the process, such politics has corrupted the administrative machinery to the core. In a city like Mumbai, smuggling is part of the reality that the system not just lives with but also sustains. In such a situation, it is not difficult to smuggle in weapons, explosives or terrorists.

Redemptive politics to attain broadbased democracy is the true guarantor of functional governance, without which there is little hope of guarding against terror.