Security absurdity

To the ordinary, long-suffering Indian, horrendously expensive VIP security may look like another political outrage to which he must resign himself. Yet it becomes increasingly apparent that some at least of the politicians so favoured also see themselves as victims of the solicitude bestowed on them. Vishwanath Pratap Singh, for one, deserves congratulations for having extricated himself from the cloying embrace of the Special Protection Group. Not that this was easily done. With characteristic perverseness the Indian Government refused for a long time to remove his SPG cover — until the Supreme Court took pity on Singh. The mandarins in North Block are even now stitching together an alternative security proposal for Singh. The latter, betraying foresight, has declared that he will reject it if it entails huge expense and the fuss that he now endures. Good for him.

It is a measure of quixotic government thinking that it is unable to distinguish between a serving prime minister and former ones, to the point of outlandishness. Former prime ministers should not be legally entitled to hugely expensive SPG cover except in the most exceptional cases, but they are. Nor do matters end there. Their requests for the removal of such security — themselves a novel phenomenon, with Deve Gowda and Atal Behari Vajpayee following Singh’s example — are treated as wanton disregard for their own security and, by implication, the nation’s well-being. Now, if these men were serving prime ministers the Home Ministry would be quite right to pay no attention and make its own assessment of their security requirements. But they are now private individuals or lesser public figures. Most are no longer at such grave risk as the ministry appears to imagine. Even if they were, being no longer the Prime Minister restores the primacy of their status as grown-up individuals with minds of their own who have the right to take safety risks: in return for greater personal freedom, perhaps, or privacy, or political mileage or a conscience that shrinks from costing a poor nation so much.

The absurdity is compounded by the fact that where security should be firm, it has a record of slipping up. Indira and Rajiv Gandhi were both allowed to take liberties with their security when both were targeted by terrorists to a degree that no later Indian politician has been. Their conduct was natural: politicians in a democracy must be seen to strive for proximity to their electorates and must observe many forms of political correctness. But they surely trusted in the ability of those in charge of their safety to do their job. This was a misplaced trust, for these men did not have the spunk to stand up to them. For such failures the establishment now seeks to compensate with a cheap tokenism that offers blanket and prohibitively costly protection to all and sundry. So much so that it even insists on imposing them where they are unsolicited or even shunned. Given such a political culture, and weak coalitions which are fearful of offending anyone, the initiative for stopping this silliness probably had to come from the VIPs themselves. It has finally come. In spurning it, the establishment would be surpassing its own revolting standards of mutual back-scratching.