Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde on Tuesday said both the Centre and states need to work together for setting up the proposed counter-terrorism body and sought consensus from all stakeholders.
When asked about the government’s strategy on setting up National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC), Mr Shinde said, “I have said it many a times that both the Centre and states need to work together. We cannot do it alone. When such opposition is there, we will think over it and then decide.”
He said seeing such resistance to NCTC, the government had first decided to take the opinion of chief ministers and then to approach the Cabinet Committee on Security. As of now, there is no question of taking it to the CCS, he said. He said the government has already accepted the demands of some chief ministers opposed to the proposed body.
“As certain CMs were of the opinion that the proposed body should not be under Intelligence Bureau, we took it out. They also said its operationalisation should not be under IB, that also we did. I will only say that we tried to have a central intelligence agency but they said Multi-Agency Centre is there,” Mr Shinde said, suggesting that the opposing states should agree to NCTC.
CMs who opposed NCTC included Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar, Jayalalithaa and Narendra Modi.