IB chief heads to US for anti-terror skills

With Pakistan-based pro-Khalistan separatists now threatening to open a second front in India after pan-Islamic jihadist groups, India is looking towards US for upgradation of its counter-terror capabilities with an aim to pre-empt future strikes through shared terrorist data-banks and advanced technologies.

Updated on: Oct 18, 2011, 23:27:57 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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With Pakistan-based pro-Khalistan separatists now threatening to open a second front in India after pan-Islamic jihadist groups, India is looking towards US for upgradation of its counter-terror capabilities with an aim to pre-empt future strikes through shared terrorist data-banks and advanced technologies. Indian aims to pre-empt strikes through shared terrorist data banks and advanced technologies.

Intelligence Bureau (IB) director Nehchal Sandhu is leaving for a week-long trip to the US on Friday to attend the annual conference of International Association of Chiefs of Police at Chicago.

Sandhu will meet FBI director Robert Mueller and director of National Intelligence James R Clapper with specific focus on counter-terrorism.

Sandhu will also visit Washington and Baltimore as New Delhi is interested in three areas of anti-terror operations.

Firstly, under Clapper, the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) analyses intelligence with experts from FBI and CIA to pre-empt strikes within and outside the US. Home minister P Chidambaram visited NCTC in Virginia in 2009 and proposed an Indian version on similar lines. The Indian NCTC proposal is hanging fire since April 2010 in the CCS.

Secondly, the Terrorist Screening Centre set up in 2003 under the FBI houses an updated data bank of terrorists or a single consolidated watchlist of terrorists. Thirdly, Fusion Centres in the US — Sandhu will visit one such facility in Baltimore — is where intelligence agencies interact with state and local units.

Although Sandhu and his US counterparts will discuss activities of pan-Islamic jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba and Al Qaeda, the revival of Sikh terrorism is also an area of focus with FBI collaborating with IB.

However, Sandhu will not meet FBI lawyers and officials concerned with the David Headley and Tahawwur Rana case, as the two are being focused by the NIA as part of 26/11 probe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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