If the recently notified National Counter Terrorism Centre [NCTC] is the pet project of the Home Minister P. Chidambaram and a part of his unfinished agenda, and if it is deriving power from the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act [UAPA], it needs to be looked at with some trepidation. Our Home Minister is not known to be a great champion of human rights. He has threatened human rights activists like Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy and others with ten years imprisonment under sedition laws. One of his few achievements is the draconian amendments to the already draconian UAPA, which, in the words of Soli Sorabjee, is constitutionally vulnerable and inconsistent with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR].
Now this newly set-up NCTC which will be acting under the clandestine Intelligence Bureau [IB] is given the powers to arrest, search, seizure under the law which is highly vulnerable to misuse. When the laws like POTA, AFPSA and NSA are so flagrantly misused by people who are actually answerable to media, civil society and public at large, we can imagine the misuse under an agency which works clandestinely and is outside the purview of even the Right to Information Act. A person arrested by this agency may not be heard of for a long long time.
It is not for nothing that the NCTC is being compared to the much dreaded KGB set up by Lenin and Stalin.
Dr Mookhi Amir Ali
Mumbai, M.S.