The national security council and its working has been in the news of late. The United Services Institute of India recently held a national security seminar to examine the way security has been managed since the NSC was created. The NSC and its functioning came in for trenchant criticism at the seminar. The NSC had been created with some fanfare in 1998 by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government. Has it served the nation's security interests well? The first thing to remember is that the NSC was an attempt by the government to duck the issue of keeping the promises made in its election manifesto. It was also an exercise in fudging the issue of security grandiosely mentioned in the National Democratic Alliance's agenda. The government had promised to establish an NSC which was to prepare a strategic defence review. Based on the review, the government was to determine whether India should become a nuclear weapons state. In the event, the government did a Houdini and conducted the tests first. It then constituted a committee to make re- commendations on the manner in which the NSC should be organized. The committee, headed by K.C. Pant and with Jaswant Singh as one of its members, made some sound recommendations. But the government could not find the courage to accept the recommendations. It therefore resurrected the NSC which had been created by the V.P. Singh ministry and had clearly failed to deliver. How has the NSC performed? Performance and the quality of output from any organization depend on the organizational structure, decision processes and the people who run the organization. The NSC comprises three tiers at the cabinet, secretaries to the government and security experts levels. At the cabinet level it includes the cabinet committee for national security. Its members are the prime minister, and ministers of home, foreign affairs and finance. Other ministers are coopted, depending on the need for their expertise. At the secretaries level, the strategic planning group includes the secretaries of all important ministries and their number goes up to double digits. As for the experts level, there is the national security advisory board. This also has a double digit size and its members are drawn from many disciplines. The link between the three levels is provided by the national security advisor. This important assignment has so far been handled by the principal secretary to the prime minister. The processes used by the NSC are vague and amorphous. There is a vast security apparatus outside the NSC system consisting of the defence services, the intelligence agencies, the police and paramilitary. They function under their respective ministries and any coordination amongst them takes place more by accident than design and more for crisis management than on a regular basis. The cabinet or its subgroup, the CCNS, thus gets security inputs from different directions - from ministries, agencies and the NSC apparatus. The multi-agency and multiple level inputs create a plethora of intelligence estimates, threat evaluations, and policy formulations on national security. There is no single window advice or policy recommendation available to the CCNS, or even to the prime minister. Thus they are bombarded by divergent and uncoordinated inputs. There need be no surprise, therefore, that after every crisis there is confirmation that information was available on the event, which was either disregarded or overlooked. Kargil, Kandahar, the near debacle of the Sri Lanka army in Jaffna this year or the massacres in Jammu and Kashmir after the previous ceasefire are instances of the security apparatus being caught offguard. The creation of the NSC is not going to improve the state of affairs. The NSC is therefore an overrated organization. Its impressive title - taken from the United States model - does little to instil confidence in the public mind. It does even less to convince India's adversaries to fear its security system. Critics have pointed out that the much vaunted NSAB is no more than a peripheral group. Its advice is not taken by the government as was evidenced in the case of the nuclear doctrine. The NSAB wrote a nuclear doctrine at the behest of the CCNS. On its publication its limitations were highlighted in and outside the country. The government, instead of standing by its NSAB, has gone silent on the status of the report. It has left the country which has nuclear weapons without a nuclear doctrine. The NSAB is supposed to have written a strategic defence review. The government is either afraid to have it published or, worse, is unable to get its ministries to endorse the review. The convener of the NSAB has publicly criticized the functioning of the NSC and the role of the national security advisor. The government has neither issued a rejoinder nor asked questions on the propriety of the NSC being publicly critiqued by one of its key officials. There were doubts cast on the veracity of the data the nuclear scientists obtained from the thermonuclear test of 1998. These doubts were expressed in and outside India by highly regarded scientists. The NSC would have been the appropriate forum where such doubts could have been laid to rest. The government, by choosing to remain quiet, has added to nuclear uncertainties. It chose four task forces to examine the security issues raised by the Kargil inquiry. The NSAB would have been the better choice to undertake the tasks. These examples show that the NSAB is viewed by the government as a marginal set up. The special protection group has not fared any better than the NSAB. Its meetings are attended more by junior officials than the secretaries themselves. The secretaries themselves can at best look at current issues and have neither the time nor the inclination to go into long term security issues. Most secretaries are in any case generalists and their selection to the office has often been questioned on grounds of insufficient expertise. Their contribution as members of the SPG has been minimal by all accounts. The CCNS is primarily key ministers struggling to keep up with the burden of running their departments. None of them have a security perspective other than what is given to them. In the absence of a secretariat for the NSC they are in no position to obtain a CCNS required security assessment. They are also swamped by the mass of multi-agency and multi-departmental inputs. Currently the secretarial support is being obtained for the NSAB through the joint intelligence committee. This arrangement does not do justice either to the role of the JIC or the needs of the NSC. At the seminar organized by the United Services Institute in New Delhi the major criticism was about the lack of results obtained through the NSC. It was noted that the NSC does not meet regularly. It was felt that the CCNS has little time for the detailed examination of national security issues. The overload of the NSC apparatus, by the bottleneck at the prime minister's office where the national security advisor becomes the funnel through which all recommendations must pass, was also noted. The response of the NSAB, the members of which were present in strength at the seminar, was interesting. The additional secretary in the NSC gave out the number of times the NSAB met in its first and second years. He also indicated how often the subcommittees of the NSAB met. He did not deem it fit to mention what the numerous meetings produced. As everyone knew, there was little of lasting significant which the NSAB or the NSC had produced. No one out of politeness told the gentleman that national security is more than the sum of meaningless meetings. The most serious shortcoming of the NSC has been the lack of concern for security issues in the cabinet itself. There is general agreement amongst analysts that the cabinet and its CCNS do not have the discipline of regular structured national security briefings or meetings. These are held when convenient, depending on the availability of the CCNS members from their political preoccupations. It would not be an exaggeration to state that national security is considered as an intrusion in the more immediate and profitable activity of political management. Until the cabinet (read the top political leadership) accords the time and priority to national security that is necessary, the NSC in its current or improved form is unlikely to be able to do worthwhile work. In other words, unless the political leadership adopts the discipline of managing natio- nal security as a major activity to be continued on a regular and systematic ba- sis, national security will remain no mo- re than a crisis management exercise. The author is director, Delhi Policy Group and former director-general, military operations