‘Floating armouries’ one of many security holes
The ‘floating armouries' on India's west coast, recently red-flagged by the Navy chief, are only the latest addition to the many gaping holes in the country's coastal security mechanism. And almost all of them remain unplugged even five years after terrorists exploited our porous sea-lanes to lay a three-day long siege on India's financial capital. Indeed, it is astonishing that despite the embarrassing experience of 26/11, when it became painfully obvious that the country's security infrastructure was woefully underprepared, New Delhi has not done more to guard its coasts better. As the Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral DK Joshi, pointed out on Tuesday, these ‘floating armouries' can easily be used by terrorists to launch a major offensive.
Privately-owned, they carry large amounts of arms and weapons, are manned by privately contracted armed security personnel and most worryingly, function almost unregulated. Their primary purpose is to provide much-needed security cover to commercial vessels navigating through pirate-infested waters. But given that there is no telling who and what is in such vessels, the latter are a threat to littoral states. For India, the situation became especially problematic in 2011 when the International Maritime Organisation extended the ‘high-risk area' for commercial shipping from the ‘pirate alley' along the Somali coast in the Gulf of Aden to almost all of the Arabian Sea. The high-risk area now ‘hugs’ the western Indian coastline — and the dangerous consequences of this were highlighted when the Sierra leone-flagged, US-owned MV Seaman Guard Ohio, which delivered weapons to merchant navy ships before they went into high-risk waters, was detained off the Tuticorin coast in October for illegally carrying arms into Indian waters. India wants the IMO to roll back the extension, especially since no piracy-related incidents have been reported off India's coast in the last two years; New Delhi must take up the crucial matter seriously with the international community
While the issue of unregulated floating armouries must be addressed, our internal inadequacies and unpreparedness pose an equally grave threat. For instance, plans to establish a comprehensive coastal security mechanism, drawn up after 26/11, are yet to materialise. Only 34 of the 46 proposed static coastal radars have been set up, and the construction of coastal police stations is far behind schedule. Efforts to empower the Coast Guard have been shelved and coordination between the Coast Guard and the Indian Navy remains below par. In a telling example, even the close circuit television camera installed at the spot where the terrorists landed on November 26, 2008, was not functioning this November 26. This is in spite of the fact that the Union Ministry of Home Affairs claims to have “carried out vulnerability/gap analysis”. But paying lip service to national security concerns has been a hallmark of the Congress-led UPA regime. Almost all its anti-terror efforts have floundered: The National Counter Terrorism Centre has been put on hold, the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems Project is still a pilot project with software issues, and the National Intelligence Grid (it became functional only this year) is ineffective. There is still no national counter-terrorism policy.