Five years after 26/11, India remains indifferent, and Pakistan unrepentant. Can the country afford thisIJ
Wednesday, November 26, 2008, 8 pm. Ten assailants with 10 AK-47s, 10 pistols, and a sizeable stock of ammunition came via sea to take on the world’s fourth-largest city. “Surprise will get you in and fear will scatter the police,” their Pakistan-based masters had assured them. Soon after reaching Mumbai, they targeted a railway station, two elegant hotels, including the Taj, a café popular with foreigners and a reputed Jewish centre. To the credit of the Pakistani jihadi masters, their calculations were not off-the-mark: In the wake of the fidayeen assault, most policemen simply ran away, and there was a complete politico-administrative paralysis in the corridors of power. For the first 28 hours, the gunmen went almost unchallenged; and by the time the Government could awake to the tragedy, at least 166 people had already lost their lives. “The sobering reality was that one man less than a cricket team,” Adrian levy and Cathy Scott-Clark write in their recent book, The Siege, “had got an entire nation on the run.”
The Mumbai attack could — and should — have been avoided. There were no less than 11 tip-offs suggesting the strike would involve multiple, simultaneous attacks, with six warnings pointing towards a seaborne infiltration. Also, at least three warnings mentioned that lashkar-e-Tayyeba could use fidayeen for creating mayhem in the city. Yet, no one acted in time to prevent the impeding tragedy. Despite specific directions to the Taj from the police that it needed to upgrade its security, the hotel management decided to look the other way. It thought, as levy and Cathy Scott-Clark write, that guests “wanted to be greeted by brightly uniformed chobedars (doormen), not a SWAT team that would undermine the hotel’s luxury image.”
likewise, when Vishwas Patil, Deputy Commissioner of Police of Zone I, which lay at the narrowest part of the city peninsula and was accessible from Back Bay to the west and the harbour and docks to the east, asked the port authorities how the harbour’s security could be enhanced, he was told in a curt manner that there was not a single high-speed boat to chase waterborne suspects. Patil then wrote a letter to the Commandant Coast Guards, identifying obvious vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, a few months later, 10 terrorists sailed the Arabian Sea from Karachi and stormed Mumbai with AK-47s and explosives. And, once the attack began, the then Mumbai Police chief did nothing but tell his men to wait for “specialists” from Delhi who, unfortunately, took 12 hours to reach the city. Even the officers in charge of the MARCOS — an elite special operations unit of the Indian Navy — hesitated to send their men, fearing they were “the wrong dog for the fight”. A day later, when they realised the gravity of the situation, they sent 20 men out of a team of 1,000!
Five years down the line, have we learnt any lesson from our own 9/11IJ levy and Scott-Clark don’t think so, citing the lackadaisical approach of the Pradhan Commission, set up to probe the Mumbai attack. The incident, say the authors, “received only a cursory grilling from the commission, a two-man panel formed in Mumbai on December 30, 2008, to explore the ‘war-like’ attacks on the city”. They find the effort half-hearted when compared with the exhaustive probe conducted by the US and the UK after 9/11 and 7/7 attacks respectively. Unlike the two countries, no fundamental changes could be seen in the way India should deal with terrorism, jihadi or otherwise. Also, the Indian leadership has shown a reactive, and not proactive, attitude while dealing with the menace. We generally look back to analyse what a terrorist can do. America did the same mistake to find
Al Qaeda terrorists crashing planes into the World Trade Center. Mumbai in 2008 thought terrorists couldn’t go beyond planting bombs in scooters and buses! And when they came fidayeen-like, the city was up for grabs. The incident also displayed, for the first time in the country, how technology and terror can go hand-in-hand, how boys from the medieval world “who knew only about chickens and goats” could use GPS and Google Earth to plan and execute terrorism on an unprecedented scale.
The Mumbai attack is also a constant reminder of Pakistan’s doublespeak vis-à-vis terrorism. Islamabad has done precious little to punish the real culprits behind 26/11. The 10 gunmen were mere puppets, whose strings were pulled by Pakistan’s ISI, in close collaboration with lashkar. One of the alleged masterminds of the attack, Zaki-ur-Rehman lakhvi, may be in a Rawalpindi jail today, but that doesn’t stop the then chief of the ISI, under whose auspices lashkar is believed to operate, to visit him way too often. Then, there is lashkar chief Hafiz Saeed, who remains a free man and continues to call for jihad against India, although the US has placed a $10 million bounty on his head. When levy and Scott-Clark visited him at lashkar’s high-security training complex in Muridke, near lahore, he denied being in hiding. “I am here only, sitting with you,” he told the authors.
Saeed doesn’t have to go into hiding, and can breathe easy till he comes up with a bigger, more audacious attack. He knows the Indian Government has by now forgotten 26/11. And going by the UPA Government’s desperate attempts to initiate the peace process with Pakistan, even when there is a spurt in cross-border terrorism, it’s all but apparent that the political leadership based in Delhi is in a state of denial. But can the nation afford to give Saeed and his associates such a long ropeIJ Five years after 26/11, Mumbai still awaits justice.