NEW DELHI: The United States may have emerged as a key partner in counter-terror efforts post-26/11, but it has a very dim view of the capabilities of Indian security forces. It also felt till just a couple of years ago that India was reluctant to have an effective anti-terror partnership because of suspicions about American policies towards Pakistan, its independent foreign policy stance and sensitivities over Muslim sentiments.
"India’s police and security forces are overworked and hampered by bad police practices, including the widespread use of torture in interrogations, rampant corruption, poor training, and a general inability to conduct solid forensic investigations," the US embassy observed in a cable it sent on February 23, 2007, after a not-so-satisfactory meeting of an Indo-US counter-terrorism joint working group.
The memo further said, "India’s security forces also regularly cut corners to avoid working through India’s lagging justice system, which has approximately 13 judges per million people. Thus Indian police officials often do not respond to our requests for information about attacks or our offers of support because they are covering up poor practices, rather than rejecting our help outright." The communication disclosed in the cable refers to the US unease over the arrest of a computer expert, Mukesh Saini, who was working with India’s National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC), and was arrested on charges of spying for Americans. US’s acting coordinator for counter-terrorism, Frank Urbancic, took up the matter with his Indian interlocutor, K C Singh, then an additional secretary in the MEA. Urbancic called Saini a key working-level interlocutor at the NCTC, dismissed the charge of espionage and said his arrest had cast a "negative shadow" on the functioning of the counter-terror working group.
The criticism of the Indian police only echo the widely-held perception that it is ill-equipped to meet the growing terror threat and other internal security challenges.
The limitations were exposed fully by the Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen involved in during 26/11 strike, but the brutally candid opinion, coming from a foreign power, that too one seen with a chip on its shoulder, will lead to considerable heartburn. In a communication leaked earlier by the whistle-blower website, the US had raised serious doubts India’s ability to implement its "cold war" doctrine — a rapid, short and limited push within Pakistan’s territory as a reprisal against terror attacks and other hostilities. The cable sent by the serving US ambassador on February 16, 2010, Timothy Roemer, called the doctrine, a "mixture of myth and reality". "The value of the doctrine to the government of India may lie more in the plan’s existence than in any real world application." Saying that India was diffident in teaming up with the US in the war on terror, the 2007 cable said, "India’s lingering zero-sum suspicion of US policies towards Pakistan, its fiercely independent foreign policy stance, its traditional go-it-alone strategy towards its security and its domestic political sensitivities over the sentiments of its large Muslim population, have all contributed to India’s caution in working with us on a joint counter-terrorism strategy".
