Sushilkumar Shinde is not a memorable man.
He might be the home minister of the country, holding one of the most important jobs in India, but the great Indian public is barely even aware of him. He has none of his predecessors’ unique traits: not LK Advani's stature, not Shivraj Patil’s sartorial flair and nothing close to the confident air that P Chidambaram always exudes. Yet over his year-and-a-half at the Ministry of Home Affairs, Shinde has racked up a record that those ministers wish they had, making it much harder for the Bharatiya Janata Party to attack the Congress on national security.
Shinde’s tenure has seen the execution of 2008 Mumbai attacker Ajmal Kasab and the hanging of Afzal Guru, who was controversially found guilty of being a part of the 2001 Parliament attack conspiracy. Fatalities in terrorist incidents in India came down from an average of 540 civilians under Chidambaram to just 278 during Shinde’s tenure, according to the South Asia Terror Portal. The average under Advani, during the National Democratic Alliance regime, was 1,508 civilian fatalities per year.
Over the last few months, Shinde has overseen an intelligence agency crackdown on the Indian Mujahideen, which Intelligence Bureau chief Asif Ibrahim last year called the country’s biggest threat. If we are to judge home ministers by what goes wrong during their tenure, as the media did most famously with Patil, then we ought also to measure them by what goes right — a yardstick that could single Shinde out as the most successful home minister in recent times.
But experts say it’s not as simple as that. Shinde might have once been a policeman himself, serving as a sub-inspector in the Maharashtra CID, but his tenure at the home ministry has mostly been laissez-faire (some would say almost dangerously so).
“He left it to the officers much more than Chidambaram would have done,” GK Pillai, former Home Secretary during Chidambaram’s tenure, told Scroll.in. “Chidambaram would review the finer details every month, there was much more closer monitoring, which has its pluses. But at the same time, some people say the home minister should be looking at the the bigger picture.”
In fact, there are those who believe Shinde’s successes were just good timing on his party, since they are the result of changes that were put in place during Chidambaram’s tenure. “Chidambaram made the key difference, he had a substantial impact coming in right after the Mumbai attacks and he was the one who made the hard decisions,” Manoj Joshi, a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, told Scroll.in.
“Shinde doesn’t really stand out in any significant way as a minister," he added. "For example, if he had managed to push through the NCTC [National Counter Terrorism Centre, a proposed federal anti-terror agency] despite the resistance, then we would have said that this guy has the political will and the clout. But otherwise there’s nothing too, there’s nothing too memorable."
The declining body count stands separately, but the other high points — the hangings and the recent crackdown on the Indian Mujahideen — have both come in for criticism and questioning.
“It’s a bit unfortunate that the way they’ve done the hangings gives the impression that they were doing these for electoral considerations, certainly in the Guru case,” Joshi said. The criticism here comes from multiple quarters. Some question the government claiming success in the execution of convicts who are already behind bars and have been sentenced to death. Others bring up the secretive manner in which the capital punishment was carried out. “It seems like just a way to send off the impression that they are tough, as a way of taking one issue away from the BJP,” Joshi said.
The IM crackdown also gets mixed responses. Many on the liberal side are still sceptical of the nature of this organisation, particularly considering the paucity of completed trials and convictions against alleged members of the outfit. On the other side of the divide, those closer on the right-wing of the spectrum suspect political motives in the speed with which the government has managed to get to the IM’s top leadership in the year before the elections — the implication being that they could have done so before but chose not to.
Experts, however, claim it is mostly good fortune to have had breaks in an ongoing investigation in which the political leadership is unlikely to have played much of a role. “I don’t see any particular acceleration or deceleration in the action against the Indian Mujahideen over the past year,” Ajay Sahni, the Executive Director of the Institute for Conflict Management, told Scroll.in. “Politicians can only affect the incentives and motivations of the police, or they can encourage the police to do what they’re supposed to do. The home minister is not going to do much more than that. In fact, some of the statements Shinde has made have had a negative effect on the police, but evidently there is no operational interference.”
Joshi added that there were many other variables, which couldn’t all be connected to the ministry. “There was help offered by the Americans because of considerations in the neighbourhood, and work done by RAW [Research and Analysis Wing] outside India, so it’s just a lot of things coming together — not something you can attribute to the home minister,” he said.
Meanwhile, the list of strikes against Shinde’s name is long. Former Home Secretary RK Singh, who worked under Chidambaram and Shinde and is now running for a Lok Sabha seat on a BJP ticket, has claimed that Shinde is "not fit" to be a home minister. Singh claims Shinde interfered in the investigation against the Indian Premier League match-fixing scandal, and regularly asked for officers to be transferred to specific postings.
Then there are the standard problems: a muddled procurement and acquisition process, obstacles in Centre-state relations, the failure to move forward on the National Counter-Terrorism Centre, underwhelming implementation of the Multi Agency Centre to collate and analyse all internal security-related intelligence, weaknesses in coastal security, lack of training for forces dealing with Naxalite terror and an unprepared police force. Most experts believe India remains as vulnerable from a security perspective as it was on November 26, 2008, when Pakistani terrorists stormed Mumbai, and Shinde has done little to change that.
“Ultimately, the buck stops at the home minister,” Pillai said. “I think he should get credit for what has happened, as well as the blame. Whether he was the kind who monitored it closely like Chidambaram, or whether he is like Shinde who delegates a lot, he is the one who takes responsibility. He can’t escape from that.”
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He might be the home minister of the country, holding one of the most important jobs in India, but the great Indian public is barely even aware of him. He has none of his predecessors’ unique traits: not LK Advani's stature, not Shivraj Patil’s sartorial flair and nothing close to the confident air that P Chidambaram always exudes. Yet over his year-and-a-half at the Ministry of Home Affairs, Shinde has racked up a record that those ministers wish they had, making it much harder for the Bharatiya Janata Party to attack the Congress on national security.
Shinde’s tenure has seen the execution of 2008 Mumbai attacker Ajmal Kasab and the hanging of Afzal Guru, who was controversially found guilty of being a part of the 2001 Parliament attack conspiracy. Fatalities in terrorist incidents in India came down from an average of 540 civilians under Chidambaram to just 278 during Shinde’s tenure, according to the South Asia Terror Portal. The average under Advani, during the National Democratic Alliance regime, was 1,508 civilian fatalities per year.
Over the last few months, Shinde has overseen an intelligence agency crackdown on the Indian Mujahideen, which Intelligence Bureau chief Asif Ibrahim last year called the country’s biggest threat. If we are to judge home ministers by what goes wrong during their tenure, as the media did most famously with Patil, then we ought also to measure them by what goes right — a yardstick that could single Shinde out as the most successful home minister in recent times.
But experts say it’s not as simple as that. Shinde might have once been a policeman himself, serving as a sub-inspector in the Maharashtra CID, but his tenure at the home ministry has mostly been laissez-faire (some would say almost dangerously so).
“He left it to the officers much more than Chidambaram would have done,” GK Pillai, former Home Secretary during Chidambaram’s tenure, told Scroll.in. “Chidambaram would review the finer details every month, there was much more closer monitoring, which has its pluses. But at the same time, some people say the home minister should be looking at the the bigger picture.”
In fact, there are those who believe Shinde’s successes were just good timing on his party, since they are the result of changes that were put in place during Chidambaram’s tenure. “Chidambaram made the key difference, he had a substantial impact coming in right after the Mumbai attacks and he was the one who made the hard decisions,” Manoj Joshi, a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, told Scroll.in.
“Shinde doesn’t really stand out in any significant way as a minister," he added. "For example, if he had managed to push through the NCTC [National Counter Terrorism Centre, a proposed federal anti-terror agency] despite the resistance, then we would have said that this guy has the political will and the clout. But otherwise there’s nothing too, there’s nothing too memorable."
The declining body count stands separately, but the other high points — the hangings and the recent crackdown on the Indian Mujahideen — have both come in for criticism and questioning.
“It’s a bit unfortunate that the way they’ve done the hangings gives the impression that they were doing these for electoral considerations, certainly in the Guru case,” Joshi said. The criticism here comes from multiple quarters. Some question the government claiming success in the execution of convicts who are already behind bars and have been sentenced to death. Others bring up the secretive manner in which the capital punishment was carried out. “It seems like just a way to send off the impression that they are tough, as a way of taking one issue away from the BJP,” Joshi said.
The IM crackdown also gets mixed responses. Many on the liberal side are still sceptical of the nature of this organisation, particularly considering the paucity of completed trials and convictions against alleged members of the outfit. On the other side of the divide, those closer on the right-wing of the spectrum suspect political motives in the speed with which the government has managed to get to the IM’s top leadership in the year before the elections — the implication being that they could have done so before but chose not to.
Experts, however, claim it is mostly good fortune to have had breaks in an ongoing investigation in which the political leadership is unlikely to have played much of a role. “I don’t see any particular acceleration or deceleration in the action against the Indian Mujahideen over the past year,” Ajay Sahni, the Executive Director of the Institute for Conflict Management, told Scroll.in. “Politicians can only affect the incentives and motivations of the police, or they can encourage the police to do what they’re supposed to do. The home minister is not going to do much more than that. In fact, some of the statements Shinde has made have had a negative effect on the police, but evidently there is no operational interference.”
Joshi added that there were many other variables, which couldn’t all be connected to the ministry. “There was help offered by the Americans because of considerations in the neighbourhood, and work done by RAW [Research and Analysis Wing] outside India, so it’s just a lot of things coming together — not something you can attribute to the home minister,” he said.
Meanwhile, the list of strikes against Shinde’s name is long. Former Home Secretary RK Singh, who worked under Chidambaram and Shinde and is now running for a Lok Sabha seat on a BJP ticket, has claimed that Shinde is "not fit" to be a home minister. Singh claims Shinde interfered in the investigation against the Indian Premier League match-fixing scandal, and regularly asked for officers to be transferred to specific postings.
Then there are the standard problems: a muddled procurement and acquisition process, obstacles in Centre-state relations, the failure to move forward on the National Counter-Terrorism Centre, underwhelming implementation of the Multi Agency Centre to collate and analyse all internal security-related intelligence, weaknesses in coastal security, lack of training for forces dealing with Naxalite terror and an unprepared police force. Most experts believe India remains as vulnerable from a security perspective as it was on November 26, 2008, when Pakistani terrorists stormed Mumbai, and Shinde has done little to change that.
“Ultimately, the buck stops at the home minister,” Pillai said. “I think he should get credit for what has happened, as well as the blame. Whether he was the kind who monitored it closely like Chidambaram, or whether he is like Shinde who delegates a lot, he is the one who takes responsibility. He can’t escape from that.”