NEW DELHI: For Home Minister P Chidambaram and the UPA, 13 could well be a lucky number. “All will be known on May 13,” he says when asked about the electoral cost of the corruption tag that UPA II seems to have acquired of late. Chidambaram believes the public perception of the Congress-led coalition is different from the one the media projects, and that vindication will come with the results of the current round of Assembly polls.
The home minister says he welcomes judicial activism, but with a caution: “You can only deal with issues that can be stated in legal terms. Every question that comes up before the court must be framed in purely legal terms. To that extent, I welcome judicial activism, I welcome a proactive judiciary. But when you overstep that line and frame questions or answer questions which are not in purely legal terms then I am afraid you are entering dangerous territory.”
Canny lawyer that he is, Chidambaram underlines his argument with a powerful example. “This is what happened in Babri Masjid. Kindly remember that the Central Government of that day said the court is looking into the matter, the court has taken an undertaking from the Uttar Pradesh government. The executive did nothing and the undertaking was violated. What could be done? Kalyan Singh could be sentenced to one day. Therefore, matters which can be handled only by the executive must be left to the executive.”
Chidambaram says the CVC issue, was “a purely legal issue” and not an error of judgement by the Government. “It was an appointment, which was challenged and the court exercised the power of judicial review,” says the minister.
Answering questions about his pet project, the proposed National Counter- Terrorism Centre (NCTC), Chidambaram says it is not dead and buried. “It has not been shelved. It has not been taken up in the Cabinet Committee on Security," he said.
Does that mean it is no longer a priority anymore? “It is my priority,” Chidambaram says emphatically. “I am absolutely convinced that there must be an NCTC. I know of no major country in the world which does not have a National Counter Terrorism Centre.”
To a question on the multiplicity of authorities dealing with terrorism, Chidambaram says: “Some degree of redundancy must be built into the system so that we are not dependent only on one source for intelligence and information.”
But what about the Multi Agency Centre (MAC)? “Once NCTC is formed, MAC will be subsumed in it. It will be the core of the NCTC. The analytical part will be done by MAC but there is an earlier part and a later part to counter intelligence and counter terrorism,” says the home minister.
Will R&AW be also subsumed by the NCTC? “No,” says Chidambaram, “RAW is our external intelligence agency. It will remain separate. NCTC is conceived as an agency to counter terrorism, nothing else.”
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