Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde’s move to revive the controversial National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) in January this year is being opposed by the non-Congress state governments. Not only this, the Intelligence Bureau is also learnt to have raised a red-flag to the proposed counter-terror agency.
In the revised proposal, Mr Shinde had decided to keep the NCTC out of the ambit of the Intelligence Bureau and curtail its powers of arrest. The revised proposal, however, has failed to break ice on the issue once again.
Top government officials said that after lying in cold storage for many months, Mr Shinde firmed up a fresh NCTC note and discussed it with state governments early this year. The MHA has sought to make NCTC an independent organisation to allay concerns of the states. The earlier proposal, drawn up during the tenure of former home minister P. Chidambaram, had kept the NCTC under the IB, drawing flak from state governments.
In the revised proposal, the MHA also sought to curtail the NCTC’s powers of arrest saying that all arrests and searches by the NCTC sleuths will need to be carried out in close coordination with the state police forces. The move, coming exactly a month before the serial blasts ripped Hyderabad, was aimed at strengthening the security apparatus through increased coordination between the central and state police forces. “Some responses have come but the issue has to be discussed again,” an MHA official said.
Senior government sources said that the Intelligence Bureau has also objected to the revised proposal arguing that the Multi Agency Centre (MAC) already functioning under its ambit, is performing well. IB officials feel that the primary task of collating and sharing intelligence cannot be taken away from the IB by creating a parallel agency. The MAC has already established its subsidiary units in states using the logistical support of the state IB units, the sources said.
Moreover, the second and final phase of the MAC has been rolled out this year where around 460 districts will be connected to the MAC-SMAC network for pumping ground level intelligence into it.