Why the NSG Should Not Protect Politicians

Sure, there is the desire to make inept politicians pay for what happened in Mumbai. But there are some more fundamental reasons why.

First, the NSG should be a dedicated anti-terror unit. The Secret Service does not conduct anti-terror operations; nor do SWAT, Seal, and other special forces not provide protection services. The former is dedicated to protecting people, the latter to anti-terror response. Likewise, the NSG should do what it does best.

One benefit of such a move would be to free up resources within the NSG, sorely needed to improve the state of the NSG. As the BBC mentions, the NSG lack dedicated aircraft - which accounts for their delay in getting to Mumbai. They also are not trained in the kind of operations Mumbai required:

The commandos have been trained to rescue small groups of people. "They have not been trained on multiple location operations of such scale."

India is one of the most frequently attacked countries - and needs to have a matching capability to respond. Freeing the NSG from protective service duty will allow it to grow to be one of the best anti-terror response units in the world.

But there is an even more pressing reason for India's politicians to be protected by the local police. It is simply a matter of giving them incentives to care for the dismal state of policing and invest more in it.

That investment is sorely needed. While India pressures Pakistan to act, what is clear is that Mumbai was a domestic failure of local law enforcement. The only way to ensure this does not happen again is for India to invest heavily in its criminal and security systems.

And a first step is to reform the local police. The local policeman is Indians first defense against terrorists of the kind that hit Mumbai. It is these people - long reviled and under paid - who face the first bullets, secure crime scenes, and call in the big guns. We cannot expect to be safe if these people are not motivated and equipped to protect us. That means paying policemen more, investing in better training, better equipment and a safer work environment, and improving communications across state police and military intelligence. The creation of a "federal" agency or a stronger law is useless, if we cannot catch the people to begin with.

India's politicians have grown fat and lazy on pork, and <a href="http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers30%5Cpaper2951.html">disconnected from the insecurity</a> that grips the country. It is a natural principle of democracy that those that represent a country's citizens have the same protections as the common man. No more, no less. It is time that happened, because nothing else will encourage our politicians to care for the security of Indian citizens.