Click to play videoTwo days after the Mumbai terror attacks - a siege that left 217 people dead - India's anger with politicians is at an all time high.
Politicians must be forced to be accountable, can a society achieve a real change by mobbing against them?
Maharashtra Chief Minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh has resigned, Maharashtra deputy chief minister R R Patil has resigned as has union home minister Shivraj Patil because of India's failure to prevent the Mumbai terror attacks. But are our political leaders wholly and solely to blame?
India's bureaucrats are also notoriously slow-moving and averse to taking decisions. Ministries operate in isolation and there is hardly any information sharing between Government departments.
The Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) have been accused of having lost the cutting edge-expertise.
CNN-IBN debate on Face The Nation if resignation of ministers was enough to win the war against terror.
On the panel of experts were Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi; former IPS officer Kiran Bedi; Executive Vice-Chairman of Mercury Travels Ashwini Kakkar (a concerned citizen of Mumbai who has been helping with rescue efforts); and former chief secretary of Delhi Shailaja Chandra.
At the beginning of the show only 12 per cent of those who voted in said yes, resignation of ministers enough to win the war on terror, while 88 per cent disagreed and said more was needed than simply political resignations.
TARGET BUREAUCRACY
Members of the media fraternity have been inundated with SMSes asking why only politicians were being attacked and why were bureaucrats being spared the rod. People are feeling that it is, at the end of the day, bureaucracy that gives ideation, implementation and administration to the politician. The politician is dependent on the bureaucrat and in our country, the bureaucracy is known to be slow and not to take decisions.
Shailaja Chandra said that India has a system whereby either we sack the person after holding an enquiry - which never gets finished and which is the bane of the whole problem - or we can take action under Article 311 if there is a situation where the security of a state is in question.
"We never seem to let heads roll. The Government has the authority to transfer them, replace them, get rid of them. The Government does have the authority to do it but then if everybody is in it together, then whose head is going to roll? Who is going to take action? asked Shailaja, making a very valid point.
"If we had intelligence about a terror strike about to happen, then we should not have just written a letter. There should have been some follow up to see if action had been taken to secure a state. There was no follow up so who was responsible for this? And why were the alarm bells not rung in time? These are the questions which need to come out. Civil servants are the only people who are privy to the way the actual system has to run, unlike politicians. But you do need somebody in authority to say point out the people who were responsible and who passed on intelligence in an apathetic way," she added.
Shailaja also stated that this is not just a one time problem. We need to find out who failed the last time - because terror has now become a recurring problem for India.
PROBLEM OF MULTIPLICITY
India has a crisis management group, a cabinet secretary, a defence secretary, a home secretary, the IB chief, RAW chief, principal secretary to the prime minister and the National Security Advisor. It seems ours is simply a case of a bureaucratic system in which no one knows who takes a call.
Kiran Bedi said India's system was very top heavy.
"There is ample scope in this complex, multi-variant system to pass on the responsibility. I think we need to address this. There is no one single authority in national security today. Nothing on internal security can go through without going to the Home Secretary. Transfers are no longer the solution. Heads must roll now because enough has happened. In such situations we need to start using Article 311 much more because these bureaucrats are a threat to the security of the state," she said in an angry outburst.
She said that age was both a pro and a con when asked whether the NSA - who is 75 - should give way to someone who is more dynamic and more tech-savvy.
"There is a disgruntled lot of younger, more dynamic police people who want to come to the forefront but never get the opportunity. They feel left out," Kiran Bedi said.
She said that she was shocked that a police officer was not the Union Home Secretary of India. "When the Union Home Ministry is dealing with all the law and order situation in the country, the where are the police officers? Why don't we have operationally knowledgeable, active police officers as the Union Home Secretary and give them a tenure to perform? Why should this post be the prerogative of IAS officers who are never part of any terror-attack operations?" she demanded.
It seems that the IAS lobby does not have the mentality to change with the times and become a fast-moving body.
Shailaja said that IAS officers were in these posts simply because they had a nexus with politicians. She added that quite often it was the case that the right men and the good people were not manning the show.
ARE BABUS THE REAL ENEMY?
Politicians get cut down by terrorism - some like former prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi have even lost their lives to it - but the invisible bureaucrat is always safe and never in the line of public fire.
Ashwini Kakkar said that bureaucrats as well as politicos were simply failing to gauge the mood of the people - and not just in Mumbai, but all over India where terror incidents were taking place.
Abhishek Manu Singhvi joined the debate at this point saying that at the micro-level, the politician was the number one enemy simply because the level of anger was great.
However, he added that logic could not be allowed to fail completely in a moment of intense anger. "I had said that if even in the remotest possible Vilasrao Deshmukh and R R Patil sought to trivialise the Mumbai issue, then I condemn them, the country condemns them and so does the Congress party. But I say let's give them the benefit of doubt and hope that their statements were not meant in the callous manner in which they were portrayed. However, we cannot condemn all politicians of India in the same breath. What do we propose to do? Banish all politicians and let the IPS officers rule? Can we call ourselves a democracy the?" he stated.
"The British system that we inherited has the concept of civil system anonymity - which means that the political class takes the flak in Parliament and the entire bureaucracy is supposed to be anonymous," he said.
RESISTING REFORMS
If the bureaucracy does not reform, we are all literally going to die. People want to know that why is bureaucracy resisting reforms and averse to a change of mentality?
Shailaja said that copious reports have been prepared on reforms but everyone of the bureaucrats who get these reports like to play it safe because they are all looking out for their promotions. She added that people were not interested in getting on with things.
"As I said before, we need to look at this very minutely. Who gave the intelligence that we were going to be attacked, in what form was this intelligence forwarded, who knew about this in other departments and finally why was this not acted upon," Shailaja stated.
"There should have been a separation of those maintaining law and order and those investigating cases as according to two Supreme Court judgements in September 2006 and January 2007. However, nothing was implemented and there was complete hypocrisy as far as police reforms were concerned. The people responsible for this were bureaucrats. I attended a meeting of Chief Secretaries and DGPs. The DGPs did not speak a word at the meet whereas the Chief Secretaries one after the other said let us rubbish these police reforms and how can SC get into executive directions like this? But the bureaucracy is blocking these reforms," an angry Kiran Bedi shot off.
She said that if the reforms had been implemented as they were meant to, then people like Anti-Terrorism Squad Chief Hemant Karkare - who died fighting terrorists in Mumbai's Cama hospital - would not have been heading a sensitive investigation like the Malegaon case as well as rushing off to fight terrorists.
Abhishek Manu Singhvi said that the time had come to look at the flexibility of the three-level "it should be a protection for the innocent bonafide bureaucrat from malicious prosecution, but it should not be a refuge for the scoundrel," he rounded off the debate by saying.
FINAL SMS POLL: Is resignation of ministers enough to win the war against terror?
Yes: 89 per cent
No: 11 per cent
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