#236 Don't Hold Your Breath

Election Maneuvers, Two American Icons, and a Way Forward for India's External Intelligence Agency

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India Policy Watch: Election Watching

Current policy issues in India

— RSJ

By the time you are reading this on Sunday, the trends for elections that were held in five states of India in November would have been clear. While there will be the usual overanalysis of what the results portend for the national elections due in May 2024, I think much of it will be futile. Even if the BJP loses all of them, it won’t have any impact on its prospects six months later. I don’t recollect the run-up to any of the Lok Sabha elections in the past that has been as dull as this. Sure, there is an occasional all-party opposition meet and some talk of an united alliance against the BJP, but they all fizzle out without anything concrete. A real united opposition that sensed an opportunity to dethrone BJP would have by now been holding electrifying rallies across states. For contrast, think back to the PM Modi campaign in the run up to 2014 elections. There is nothing of that kind of energy in the opposition ranks and unlike 2014, they have a more formidable incumbent with a higher share of seats who knows how to run the election machinery. There are odd press conferences and some disjointed yatras around the country that’s going for opposition campaign at the moment. This isn’t how takhta palat happens in India.

More importantly, there’s a lack of substantive issues to rally the masses for a change. The economy is going fine on the headline metric. The Q2 growth at 7.6 percent has delivered a big surprise on the upside. Farm growth is anemic but manufacturing and services continue to remain strong. Stock markets are at an all time high and there is no shortage of experts talking up the India story given how China and other emerging markets are faring at the moment. So the middle class and the chatterati will stay firmly with PM Modi. The BJP hasn’t ever forgotten the folly of ‘India Shining’ campaign of 2004 so expect sops and other handouts for the farm sectors in the next few months before the code of conduct comes into play. It is not as though there is widespread farmer anger anyway against this government. The central bank continues to keep the liquidity extremely tight which means the inflation which is already in a comfortable zone will continue to trend downward towards 4 percent by the time of elections. Other issues like corruption, crony capitalism and charges of selling off the country to capitalists (always worth a shout in India) haven’t got much traction despite the news flow on Adani. Anyway, given the track record of Congress, it is still difficult for it to take a moral high ground on such issues. So, barring nasty geoeconomic surprises, there’s limited play to pin this government down on the economy. 

Outside of economics, there are no emotive issues available for the united opposition to rile up the people. In fact, my bet is the ruling party will be ready with a series of such moves beginning January. The inauguration of Ram temple, some Pakistan-Khalistan angle, raking up good old polarisation in key battleground states - these and more are familiar tricks up their sleeves. The opposition not only is bereft of such a nation-wide narrative but, importantly, even if they were to accidentally latch onto one, who will breathe life into such a narrative? And that brings me to the other key issue. Even if the opposition were to get together opportunistically and brand themselves under some umbrella front, two key questions remain. First, how will they agree on a pan-India seat sharing model? Who will coordinate the work on this? There will have to be some arbiter who finally takes a call and whose sagacity or seniority is respected. Even if it is temporarily during the pre-election phase. There’s no JP or even a V.P. Singh among the current lot who can hold it together for a brief while. Second, the nature of 2024 elections will be even more presidential than before. PM Modi has high approval ratings regardless of the electoral fortunes of his party. In a presidential style contest, which BJP will make it, there will be no face of opposition to counter him. Now to expect that the undercurrent of anger against the government is so high that people will vote for a faceless alternative is to believe that the prevailing mood of the nation is ‘anyone but Modi’. I think we are far from such a scenario.

On the balance, the hope for opposition is that in some strange way pure electoral arithmetic works for them where all non-BJP votes consolidate to any of the opposition party that’s contesting against it. This kind of math only looks good on paper. It doesn’t translate in real life. And the other hope is that the BJP turns complacent, runs a poor campaign, doesn’t mobilise its core voters to turn up and ends up losing seats in a couple of big states. And that together with some electoral arithmetic leads to a net loss of about hundred seats, in which case all bets are off. This appears highly unlikely and that’s the reason I believe this will be one of the dullest election battles in living memory. Unless, of course, the opposition read the writing on  the wall, coalesce together and put up some, or any, credible faces or faces and rally behind them. It might not still be enough but at least we might get a fight on our hands. But I’m not holding my breath on that. 

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Global Policy Watch: Old Men At Sea

Global policy issues relevant to India

— RSJ

In a span of 24 hours, Henry Kissinger and Charles Munger died. Two men who lived for long and had outsized impact in their fields. Both outspoken and with a timely turn of phrase that gained them huge followership. All the adulation (mostly) that their demise has elicited aside, I think they both leave this world weakening the very things they most cherished. American exceptionalism and no-holds-barred realpolitik for Kissinger. And the moral force of capitalism and free markets for Munger. By themselves it could be argued that they had a point. America, as a force for good in the world, is a necessity when you see the many authoritarian regimes around the world today or even during Kissinger’s days in the 70s. Similarly, fair competition and free markets still solves more problems and has saved more lives than any other form of economy. Yet, they had a fundamentalist view of their worlds where the space for alternatives was non-existent. And that kind of extremism has meant, they leave a world where America is a reluctant leader of the free world, its dominance being lowest since the fall of Soviet Union and simultaneously, where fundamentalist wokeism so prevalent among the youth is much closer to the ideal of Marx than to that of Hayek. Where reason, enquiry and intellectual debate are sacrificed at the altar of the new gods of identity, forced equity and lived experience. It is a lesson that even if you have won the war comprehensively, as Kissinger and Munger did, it is important to learn lessons from your victory and be graceful with those who were vanquished.

Because no idea ever dies. Especially, a bad idea.  

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India Policy Watch: Reimagining India's External Intelligence Agency

Current policy issues in India

— Pranay Kotasthane

If you haven’t read the indictment accusing an Indian official of ordering an assassination on US soil, you should. The Indian government has constituted a high-level inquiry committee to look into the inputs shared by the US government.

Whatever the reality, the indictment is already having a real impact. Praveen Swami reports that R&AW stations in San Francisco and Washington have been shut down. India’s external intelligence agency now has no disclosed stations in the US or Canada now, an unprecedented low.

Over the next few days, the news will be inundated with details of the investigation, and this episode’s impact on India-US ties. There will be the usual partisan sniping as well. But there’s one underrated angle to this discussion: this fiasco opens the Overton Window for India to reform its external intelligence agency.

Despite the popular portrayals, it is clear to those who care to ask that low state capacity is a serious problem afflicting India’s intelligence agencies. For R&AW, there are major problems in two areas - institutional control and human capital.

At the institutional level, Congress MP Manish Tewari has been advocating parliamentary oversight mechanisms for intelligence agencies for over a decade. He introduced a private member’s bill in 2011 and again in 2021, but it met the fate that most private members’ bills do.

Like it was the case with anti-terrorism efforts after 9/11, Western countries are creating mechanisms to tackle transnational repression. These efforts are mainly aimed at authoritarian regimes such as China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Each of them has a long history of overextending the reach of their State power. But India is also likely to come under this scanner because of the recent allegations. After the firefighting (and 2024 election) ends, it might be worthwhile for the government to pick Tewari’s bill up to signal the India's commitment against overreach of all intelligence agencies.

Regarding human capital, R&AW faces a peculiar problem. The Research and Analysis Service (RAS), which was supposed to be the primary intake mechanism for officers has given way to intake through the UPSC route. The service is now mostly run by IPS officers who are on permanent secondment from their state police service. This structure creates a plethora of principal-agent problems that undermine the effectiveness of the agency.

It’s not that the police officers are not up to the task of external intelligence, but that such a transition requires reorientation and training, which currently doesn't exist.

In January 2019, Anand Arni, Shibani Mehta, and I had written a Takshashila Discussion Document to precisely address this human resource challenge. We recommended reforms across the entire ‘supply chain’ of talent management - from pre-recruitment, orientation, mid-career, to the post-retirement stages.

Specifically, we recommended cancelling crash courses and instituting longer training mechanisms instead, and better cadre management to align incentives. We wrote:

Managing the supply-side of the workforce equation is not limited to recruitment and training but also includes retention and career progression of officers. The R&AW remains deeply divided by resentment within the RAS recruits who complain that the IPS officers on deputation are given better opportunities despite some of them having little or no past intelligence skills. There is also a complaint that limiting permanent secondment to All India Services has resulted in an IPS take-over of the department since IAS officers are unwilling to come on deputation to the R&AW. This, in addition to the fact that officers on deputation often earn promotions on the basis of work done by them in the past as part of their parent departments in an entirely different environment. This needs to be reviewed to ensure uniformity of practice and a balance between merit, objectivity, and performance over a period of time. The sole measure offered by Annual Confidential Reports are often at variance with the actual work done by the officer thus undermining the actual assessment process.

In its place a Seven-Year Review process can be introduced. In this system, an officer is personally interviewed by seniors once every seven years and given an incentive subject to performance. If an officer underperforms, they are given a two-year window to improve their work before being reviewed once again. If it is found that an officer has underperformed on two consecutive accounts, they should be released from the agency.

Another complaint is that officers are brought in from the IB (often at senior levels) ostensibly to fill in gaps. This is to the detriment of the career prospects of cadre officers. The IB officers come with no experience or tools to operate overseas as there are many dissimilarities in operations - the focus of the internal service is more on security intelligence and internal political activity, that of the external service is political and military; the IB operates on home soil, with the full protection of the state whereas the R&AW operates overseas with no formal protection; the IB operates as the IB whereas the R&AW operates under cover; analysis skills are different; operational methods are vastly different particularly in communicating with assets.

Cadre Management is therefore, not only essential to quantitative needs of the agency but also the quality of the manner in which its functions are conducted.

I guess it is time that the government reconsiders the current cadre management processes.

Reforms at both these levels - institutional and human capital - have become necessary and now, urgent. The current crisis offers an opportunity to reimagine India's external intelligence service for the Information Age.

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