Lieutenant General Avtar Singh, who was on Tuesday appointed chief of the Defence Intelligence Agency, has a lot of mess out there to clear, and several turf battles to fight.
 
The DIA, created to improve efficiency of military intelligence gathering in India, was headless for over a month.

However, the entire concept of DIA has already suffered severely with existing agencies refusing to give up their turf and the DIA itself committing several blunders in its formative days.

Several knowledgeable officers put much of the blame for this on the high profile first chief of DIA, Lieutenant General Kamal Davar, who retired last month.

The DIA was supposed to be the integrated intelligence agency of the military in the new joint headquarters being set up in Delhi. The entire joint headquarters was to be the secretariat of the chief of defence ataff, the all-powerful general who would have become the single-point military advisor to the government.

Though speculation has always been ripe about one of the existing service chiefs taking over as the next CDS, sources in the ministry said the appointment of CDS has now been shelved till the elections are over. "It is not happening in the immediate future," a senior official said.

CDS and its integrated headquarters were planned by the government as the future of the Indian military that would have to fight battles in a scenario where the army, the navy and the air force would have to have a high level of inter-operability.

The integrated headquarters already has the Strategic Force Command, tri-service institutions such as the National Defence Academy, and the tri-service command in Andaman and Nicobar island under its control, besides the Defence Intelligence Agency.

What has complicated the matters for the integrated staff headquarters is the reluctance of the army, the air force and the navy to allow the new institutions to take over some of their individual functions.

Of all the offices of the integrated staff, the worst affected is the DIA.

According to the original plan, the DIA is supposed to be the headquarters for all defence attaches of India, tri-service signal intelligence and the satellite monitoring agency, DIPAC (Defence Imaging Processing and Analysis Centre).

However, the defence attaches continue to report to the Director General of Military Intelligence of Army and the other two agencies also continue to practice mostly the old system of reporting and analysis for individual services. "The agencies cannot be blamed for sticking to old ways. DIA has failed to deliver," senior army officer said.

He pointed out that the DIA has failed to come up as a sharp, focused merit driven agency. Numerous foreign trips by DIA's first chief, General Davar, and other DIA officers have been talking points in the military circles.

What is worse is that the agencies such as the Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing are also not too impressed with the DIA. On one occasion, a media interview of General Davar was remarked against by the IB and a report was put up against it to the Union Home Ministry. On another occasion, the DIA issued intelligence alerts based on not-so-sound inputs to warn that the India Gate could be targeted by terrorists, and sent the Delhi police and other security agencies into a tizzy.