A day after walking out of the NDC meet, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa today said renewed moves were being made to set up the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) despite opposition to it by several states.
“The proposal for the setting up of a single point of control under the Home Ministry for all anti-terrorist measures was objected to by almost all the state Chief Ministers. Co-ordination and not control was considered to be the right way forward,” she said in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
The present system of a multi-agency centre at Delhi interacting with the subsidiary multi-agency centres at the level of states was considered to be working well, she said.
“ ...The establishment of an operations division under the NCTC with the powers of arrest and seizure and armed with the freedom to operate independent of the state police was a proposal completely unacceptable to even the Chief Ministers of Congress-ruled states,” she said.
“ ...Action in the form of counter-terrorist operations is better left to the state police to perform,” she said.
Jayalalithaa said a Rapid Action Counter-Terrorist Force should be created in every state to function under the nodal state agency with liberal central funds.
Reminding the Centre of the commitment made at a conference of Chief Ministers that further action on NCTC would be taken only in consultation with the states, she said, “It appears that these commitments are all being thrown to the winds when it comes to the point of considering the views of state Chief Ministers before finalising policy in the Ministries of the Union Government.”
“The situation has deteriorated to such a level that today the views of the Chief Ministers are not even heard, let alone be considered for policy making. The indifferent treatment meted out to Chief Ministers at the NDC meeting held yesterday is one such instance,” she said.
Creating a stir, she walked out of the National Development Council (NDC) meeting in Delhi upset over the 10-minute time limit set for her to complete her speech and accused the Centre of treating Chief Ministers as ‘school children’
She alleged that the Centre’s “arrogance and intolerance” had grown to “exceedingly extreme limits”.
Noting that she and other Chief Ministers went to Delhi to state the field situation and bring a sense of realism and fairness to the process of plan preparation, Jayalalithaa said, “Instead we acquired the impression that the intention was to cow us down with a display of might by the central government.”
She said she hoped such plenary conferences where state Chief Ministers were invited would be conducted in a more “polite and dignified manner, at least in future”.