On December 23, 2009, the then Union Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram added another acronym to the vast architecture of India’s counter-terrorism apparatus as he stood up to deliver the Intelligence Bureau’s centenary endowment lecture.

By adding NCTC to the lexicon, Chidambaram brought in another jumble of alphabets that is already littered with several others in different permutations and combinations. Sample this: IB, R&AW, NTRO, DIA, MAC, S-MAC, NSCS, JTFI, SPG, ICG, TCG, NIB, NIA, FIU and ARC. All these acronyms deal directly with counter terrorism in India on a daily basis at some level or the other at the central level. Add the state police forces, their Special Branches and acronyms and India seems to be the most secure country when it comes to alphabets grouping together to pose as secret agencies.

Lost in this maze is the efficacy of India’s security architecture that stumbles along every day in the desperate hope that another terrorist doesn’t slip through. But the tragedy is that despite so many structures and so many acronyms very little actually gets done. This happens because India’s security apparatus is in a mess. And unless the mess is fixed any additions to this secret bureaucracy will be a failure.

Failures happen when there is a systemic and structural problem. But repeated failures happen when there is a lack of accountability. In India, the vast bureaucracy of India’s secret intelligence apparatus work without any shred of accountability or performance matrix. They use secrecy as a shield to ensure there is no oversight mechanism and no one can take them to task for the repeated intelligence failures that continue to occur with regularity.

A simple way to prove this as fact is by studying the number of IB and R&AW chiefs who were fired for sheer incompetency or failures. The result, if such a study were to be undertaken, would show that none of them have ever paid for a failure. Take the Kargil war for instance. If this was a case of intelligence failure, then the two intelligence chiefs certainly didn’t pay for them. Instead, both were sent off as governors as soon as they retired for “services rendered.”

After failure of 26/11, none of intelligence chiefs ever paid a price for it. Even their subordinates were never questioned or hauled up at any stage for the lives that had been lost. This leads to a situation where failure has no penalty for the individual or the institution.

Ever since the IB was created 126 years ago, it was meant to quell nationalists and suppress the ‘thugee’ movement. As India gained independence and a Constitution, little was done to correct this anomaly. Had the failure of the IB in 1962 been studied seriously, then the political leadership could have easily taken a page out of the Constitution to ensure that accountability was brought into the system to address systemic failures in the intelligence community in India. The Constitution in schedule VII (item number 8) states that a “Central Intelligence Bureau” can be created by an “Act of Parliament.”

Had such an Act been passed it would have institutionalised the functioning, accountability and oversight of our intelligence community. Instead the foreign intelligence division of the IB was hived off to create another super-structure as a “Wing” of the Cabinet Secretariat using an executive decision. The Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) would go on to create its own bureaucracy without any act of parliament. In 2000, still smarting from the Kargil war, the bureaucracy created a third structure, the NTRO for technical intelligence without any scope of accountability or oversight.

Despite failure after failure, the faith that citizens repose in the government to improve the efficiency of the intelligence community is touching. Ironically, the political leadership and the bureaucracy keep looking at the West for answers.

This explains why Chidambaram quickly cottoned on to the idea of the NCTC when he visited the United States after taking over as the Union Home Minister. What he probably failed to see were the basics that allowed the NCTC and other acronyms in the American intelligence community to function with accountability to the people it served. This is possible because starting in 1949, the United States had already passed acts that would create and govern the intelligence community.

The CIA Act of 1949 creates a structure that was made accountable to the people. When allegations of misuse surfaced in the 1970s the Church Committee and the Pike Committees were formed to investigate and address these issues. The US Senate’s Joint Committee on Intelligence also ensures that a robust oversight mechanism where lawmakers can pull up and even replace intelligence chiefs if they are not happy with the quality of intelligence they produce every year.

In the United Kingdom which governed over colonial India and bequeathed several systems to it, the need to codify accountability and oversight was recognised and corrected with great care. The Security Service Act of 1989, the Intelligence services Act 1994 and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 kept the intelligence community accountable, efficient and answerable to a special parliamentary committee on intelligence and security.

In India, instead of trying to bring in some accountability or performance audits, the intelligence community continues to shroud itself in greater layers of secrecy. This creates such an inefficient system that no addition — be it the NCTC or any other acronym can ever redress. What lawmakers fail to understand is that bad intelligence and investigations only emboldens the terrorist.

Shoving an innocent man into jail with fictitious intelligence inputs and false evidence only helps ensure that the real perpetrators of a terrorist attack are never caught. Until the basic premise of our intelligence community is not corrected, India’s security establishment can only stumble along. The only acronym that fits it then this is SNAFU. Try and google that.

The author is resident editor, dna, Delhi