Shillong, June 24: The two-day 23rd conference of DGPs and IGPs and Central Police Organisations (CPOs) heads of north eastern states held in the Meghalaya police headquarters can be termed as a ‘damp-squib’ as internal conflicts and interests apparently curbed the decision making process of the heads of the security agencies as they failed to take any decisive decision on internal security policing in the region triggering fear that this will subsequently weakened the ability for policing internal and external threats which is palpably high in the region.
Besides the police and the CPOs chiefs, the meeting was also attended by DoNER secretary Navin Verma and other officers from other related union ministries. The CPOs who was parts of the meeting includes BSF, Assam Rifles, Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau (SIB) and ITBP.
The conference held under the aegis of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) discussed security scenario in NE state and inter-departmental coordination International border management and other issues.
Central intelligence forces stationed in the NE region are visibly unhappy with the state polices of different north eastern states as the latter conveniently forgets to share intelligence inputs giving the much hyped coordination between the state and central security forces a toss.
In what could only be described as a tit-for-tat situation, central intelligence agencies too treat the state police with the same yardstick as it too fails to share inputs with its state counterparts.
It appeared there were very little or no efforts from those attending the meeting to rectify this lacunae and this is likely to have a rippling effect to the entire gamut of campaign against militancy in the north eastern region.
With very little or no coordination between the state and central security forces, the inter border and inter-states arms smuggling and the alleged involvement and abetment of security personnel seems to have been consigned to backburner as nothing credible were discussed.
Therefore, the conference in a sense could be termed as a non-starter because if this issue of arms smuggling and nexus between arms smugglers and security personnel are sidelines, it leaves a huge gap in the fight to content militancy in the areas.
The inter-state highway robbery is another ticklish issue that the conference decided to completely blackout from its agenda for discussion. Critics now concludes that the topic would have been a source of huge embarrassment for the state polices as some of its own personnel are allegedly hand in gloves with the highway robbers thus taking a cut of the stolen money.
Another issue that the conference conveniently skipped to discuss is the ‘day light robbery’ by the police who often extorts money from truck drivers across the national highways in all the north eastern states. Such discussion would have opened a Pandora box for the state security agencies and, therefore, not discussing the issue during the conference will only provide the handles to those involved in extortion rackets to carry on with the nefarious activities.
