India's Intelligence Architecture and the Accountability Deficit at Its Core

The Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency created in 1968 after the intelligence failures preceding the 1962 war with China and the 1965 war with Pakistan, has no statutory charter defining its mandate, its powers or its limits. Neither does the Intelligence Bureau, the domestic agency that traces its lineage to the colonial-era Central Special Branch and remains, remarkably, one of the few institutions in independent India still operating under executive instructions issued in 1887 and periodically supplemented since, rather than under an act of Parliament. Both agencies report to the Prime Minister's Office and operate outside the purview of the Right to Information Act and outside any dedicated parliamentary committee empowered to review their budgets, operations or conduct in the manner that the House and Senate intelligence committees do in the United States or the Intelligence and Security Committee does in the United Kingdom. This is not a minor administrative gap; it is a structural feature of how India manages some of its most consequential and least visible instruments of state power.

An Arrangement Built for a Different Era

The historical logic behind this arrangement is not hard to reconstruct. In the years after Independence, and especially after the intelligence failures of 1962, Indian leaders prioritised speed, secrecy and direct prime ministerial control over agencies whose effectiveness depended on operating outside bureaucratic and legal encumbrance, an instinct reinforced by the Cold War environment in which most intelligence services, including Western ones, operated with far less legislative oversight than exists today. R&AW's early years under its founding chief R.N. Kao were built on exactly this model of tight executive control and minimal paper trail, and the agency's genuine successes, including its role in the 1971 war leading to Bangladesh's creation, are often cited as vindication of that design. But the world in which Western democracies operated their intelligence services with similarly loose oversight has largely disappeared. Watergate-era revelations in the United States and various scandals in Britain prompted statutory reforms decades ago that gave legislatures real, if still limited, visibility into intelligence agency conduct. India's institutional design has not moved with that broader current.

Where the Gap Shows

The consequences of this gap are visible less in scandal, since Indian intelligence agencies have generally avoided the kind of high-profile domestic surveillance controversies that have periodically embarrassed their American and British counterparts, and more in the quieter absence of institutional learning. When intelligence assessments fail, as they arguably did in the run-up to the 1999 Kargil intrusion, when Pakistani troops occupied Indian positions across the Line of Control without adequate advance warning, or in the years preceding the 2008 Mumbai attacks, when multiple pieces of information about the plot existed across different agencies without being fused into actionable warning, the resulting reviews, such as the Kargil Review Committee and the post-Mumbai Ram Pradhan Committee, have been conducted by executive appointees rather than through a standing parliamentary mechanism with the authority to compel testimony and mandate structural fixes with follow-through. Recommendations from these committees, including the long-pending creation of a unified national counter-terrorism structure with primacy over federal and state agencies, have been implemented only partially, in part because there is no institutional body outside the executive with the standing to insist on completion.

The Difficulty of the Counter-Argument

The strongest counter-argument against reform deserves to be stated plainly rather than dismissed. Intelligence work by its nature depends on sources whose lives can be endangered by disclosure, methods whose value depends on secrecy, and relationships with foreign services that operate on the understanding that shared information will not surface in a legislative hearing transcript. India's political system, moreover, is more fractious and less disciplined about classified information than the American or British systems, and there is a genuine risk that a parliamentary oversight committee could become a venue for partisan point-scoring that leaks operationally sensitive material, or that opposition parties could weaponise oversight hearings ahead of elections in ways that would damage agency morale and foreign liaison relationships built over years. These are not trivial concerns, and any reform proposal that ignores them will not survive contact with the security establishment's legitimate objections.

What a Workable Oversight Model Could Look Like

A workable answer, one that respects these concerns rather than dismissing them, would look less like the American congressional model, with its extensive staff and adversarial hearings, and more like a smaller committee modelled on Australia's Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, drawing a limited number of senior members from both houses and across party lines, meeting largely in closed session, empowered to review budgets and broad policy rather than operational details, and bound by strict secrecy obligations with real legal consequences for breach. The National Security Council, created in 1998, and the National Security Advisor's office have grown enormously in influence over the past two decades without a corresponding growth in any external body that reviews their performance, a concentration of unaccountable authority that would trouble observers of any other democratic institution exercising comparable power. Group of Ministers reports after Kargil and the 2000 National Security Council reorganisation both recommended stronger oversight structures; both recommendations were substantially diluted before implementation.

The Real Choice Ahead

What India lacks is not the institutional imagination to design an oversight model suited to its own political culture, since the Australian and even Israeli precedents offer workable templates that could be adapted, but the political will of successive governments, of whichever party, to relinquish even the mild inconvenience of legislative scrutiny over agencies that have historically answered to no one but the Prime Minister. Every government finds reasons at the time to prefer this arrangement while in office and every opposition demands reform while out of it; the pattern has repeated across multiple changes of government since the 1990s without resolution. A country of India's size, with the intelligence challenges it faces from multiple directions, cannot indefinitely treat institutionalised accountability as a luxury to be deferred until some more convenient political moment that never quite arrives.