Home Ministry witnessing the 'Chidambaram effect'

On March 11, Home Minister P Chidambaram will complete 100 days in office. He has asked for 150 days to roll out his blueprint for the revival of the home ministry. India is willing to give him 1,500 days--so long as it is clear that India has a home minister who is ready to act.

Some evidence of action--and previous inaction--is there for everyone to see in the figures revealed by the Interim Budget. Most of the outlays must have been finalised before Chidambaram took over as Home Minister. More than Rs 1,000 crore was returned by the home ministry unutilised in the current year. Of this, Special Police accounted for the lion's share. As this head includes charges to be reimbursed to state governments for expenditure incurred on the maintenance of border check-posts, etc.,  it is inexplicable why so much money was returned unspent. If the state governments are unable to even spend the funds, it's hardly surprising that militant groups believe that they can subvert state governments almost at will.

That the home ministry under Shivraj Patil was ready to give assorted law breakers a second chance is clear from two incidents. After a particularly spectacular encounter between the security forces and Naxalites which left some militants dead last year, a TV reporter from that area requested the home minister for a quote. He assumed that Patil would rant against the militants which would send a strong message to the state. Instead, Patil asked him to come to his residence. The home minister explained to the reporter on the camera that it was considered improper to speak ill of the dead in the Indian culture. There was no story.

And when a large part of India was hit by repeated Naxalite attacks, the home minister, in April 2005, said: "The government is not interested in using weapons.The Naxalites are our brothers and sisters and we know that this is a socio-economic problem rather than one of law and order. We can solve these problems through dialogue and discussions." When criticised during a discussion in the Rajya Sabha for sympathising with Naxal terror, he said there was "nothing wrong in calling those born in India as our brothers and sisters".

Sri Prakash Jaiswal, Patil's junior minister, has nothing but regard for his senior colleague. Especially as Patil taught him several yoga asanas including the shirshasana or standing on one's head.

Chidambaram is not quite as versatile or ambidextrous. All he's been doing is coming to office at 9 am and leaving at 9 pm, which means his colleagues, especially bureaucrats, have to follow. In his four-odd years in office, Patil condemned 19 sets of bomb blasts. They kept happening, he kept condemning them. He also held many National Integration Days and led his colleagues to take oaths against terrorism every year without fail.

Chidambaram, in contrast, has spent a lot of time in his initial days in office boning up on the intelligence agencies. He holds a meeting with intelligence heads once a day, either at 12 noon or 3 pm. The national security advisor is invited to attend so that the home ministry and the Prime Minister's Office are on the same page. This ensures that steps can be taken in anticipation of an event rather than retroactively. The post of Internal Security Advisor, which had remained vacant since MK Narayanan became the national security advisor in 2005, was filled by KC Verma, who has had a long innings as an intelligence administrator. Chidambaram's Officer on Special Duty Safi Ahsan Rizvi has also had an intelligence background.

Officers now know that they need to deliver conclusions. There are no 'ifs' and 'buts'. He has laid down clear timelines for targets. Patil would only meet officers above a certain rank. The message that has gone down in the home ministry now is: This minister will call an under-secretary if he has the answer to a question he has asked. This is keeping senior officers on their toes. Protocol no longer spells protection.

In pursuit of his goals, his attitude is: Kuchh bhi karega. He called on Bharatiya Janata Party leader LK Advani to get his ideas on the National Investigative Authority. When churches in Orissa feared they might be attacked over Christmas in retaliation to Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati's murder, Chidambaram offered a helicopter to the Orissa government and spoke to Naveen Patnaik twice a day to find out what kind of security measures were in place.

When he talked to officers in Naxal-hit Jharkhand, he offered them the mobile telephone number of his OSD and encouraged them to call him at any time of the day. Again the message was: Don't bother about protocol. Just get it done.

It isn't that bomb blasts have stopped. Indeed, bombs went off in Assam hours before Chidambaram was to land there on New Year's Day. But everyone--his officers, the government, even his colleagues (Pranab Mukherjee voiced a virtual panegyric on him in his reply to the Motion of Thanks on the President's address in the Lok Sabha)--says that the message is out that those who have been behind such incidents will be punished. This is the change: The Chidambaram effect.