New Delhi, May 6: With States stoutly opposed to National Counter-Terrorism Centre in its current form, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram has assured that the matter of re-location of the anti-terror body outside the Intelligence Bureau (IB) would be re-examined.
In his concluding remarks at the Chief Ministers' conference, which were released in New Delhi officially on Sunday, the Home Minister sought to clarify on the decision of placing the NCTC within the IB.
“... I may recall, when I stood at this very podium in December 2009, I did not propose that the NCTC should be located in the IB. In fact, the new security architecture was certainly more ambitious but did not propose that it should be located in the IB”.
He said that finally a decision was taken to locate it in the IB, because the GoM which made its recommendations in 2001, named the IB as India's nodal counter-terrorism agency.
“A number of speakers who pointed out that we must have a NCTC, asked why should it be located in the IB? Certainly this matter deserves re-examination and we will certainly re-examine it,” the Home Minister said.
Mr. Chidambaram said that he had come to the meeting with an open mind for the discussion on NCTC which he termed as extremely important in order to face the threat of terrorism to the country.
“I came to this meeting with an open mind and I continue to keep an open mind and I assure you that all your suggestions will be carefully considered before a decision is taken by the government.
“Ultimately, however, the government would have to take a decision. Taking no decision on a matter of such urgency does not advance the objectives for which we have met,” he said in his remarks.
Mr. Chidambaram said, “We will give serious attention to both those who strongly supported the proposal and those who suggested that it should be rejected outright”.
Advocating an agency like the NCTC, he said the country had both intelligence agency like the IB and investigative agencies like the National Investigating Agency.
“Between intelligence agencies and investigative agencies under the traditional system of administration of law and order, we have the police but my experience in this job for the last three and a half years tells me that what we need is not simply a police organisation; what we need is a counter terrorism organisation,” he said.
“So we need to move beyond looking upon counter-terrorism as a police operation and enlarge our scope to make it a truly counter-terrorism organisation that will mobilise all elements of national power,” he said.
The Home Minister said that while every successful case of past three years has been documented, so has been every case of failure.
On the cases of failure, the Home Minister said the failures have been mainly because of lack of timely decisions and lack of capacity.
“Each case of failure contains within it the potential of another terrorist attack, therefore, we cannot afford to fail. The adversary can fail 99 out of 100 times but the State, the Governments, cannot afford to fail even once out of hundred times,” he said and added that is why it is important that we get over these weaknesses, the weaknesses arising out of lack of capacity, the weaknesses arising out of lack of timely decision.
