Mumbai assault shows gaping holes in India’s security: analysts

Mumbai assault shows gaping holes
in India’s security: analysts
Agence France-Presse . New Delhi


The attacks on Mumbai have again highlighted the lack of coherence in India’s counter terrorism strategy, its underfunded intelligence services and its poor rapid response networks, analysts say.
India is not ‘soft on terrorism,’ its prime minister stated firmly in September, two months before the country’s financial capital was ravaged by an attack of shocking scope and brutality.
Premier Manmohan Singh has his critics, but whatever the opinion on how soft or hard his government is, the fact that India appears unable to protect itself from major acts of extremist violence has now become a matter of grim record.
While the country is no stranger to attacks, the 60-hour assault on Mumbai by a dozen Islamist militants that claimed nearly 200 lives took an old problem to a horrifyingly new level.
‘If we do not wake up now then we should hang our heads in shame,’ commented security strategist Uday Bhaskar, a former head of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
Past attacks have triggered familiar rounds of recrimination — but little action.
Singh’s statement back in September came after a series of synchronised bomb blasts in New Delhi killed 22 people, and the prime minister at the time acknowledged ‘vast gaps’ in intelligence gathering and vowed that steps would be taken.
Barely a month later, serial blasts across the northeastern state of Assam killed 80 people.
And then came Mumbai, with its deliberate targeting of two luxury hotels and its foreign guests, as well as a Jewish cultural centre where Israeli nationals were held hostage and then killed.
‘The sheer scale and planning involved was markedly different from previous attacks — it’s a watershed attack,’ said Singapore-based security analyst Rohan Gunaratna, author of the book ‘Inside al-Qaeda.’
The challenge that faces the Indian authorities in preventing such assaults in the future is immense, not least because of the country’s size and social complexity.
As well as the long-running Muslim separatist struggle in Kashmir, there are Maoist insurgencies in 15 of India’s 31 states, and sectarian frictions that regularly boil over into violence.
The country does boast some highly trained and effective special forces, such as the elite ‘Black Cats’ of the National Security Guard who led operations to flush out the militants in Mumbai.
‘But they are just one specialist force,’ said Arun Bhagat, former chief of the Indian Intelligence Bureau.
The grassroots security scenario is often woeful, with a recent report by a national police research agency showing that the annual training budget for policemen in some states worked out at around 100 rupees (two dollars) per head.
‘The realisation that we are in a state of undeclared war has not trickled down to all security departments,’ Bhagat said.
‘The fact that a bunch of men carrying rucksacks bulging with weaponry could roam around a city like Mumbai unchallenged means some basic training is missing somewhere from our police forces,’ he added.
The September blasts in Delhi and the bombings a month later in Assam were attributed to emerging home-grown Muslim militant groups, while the scale of the Mumbai attack pointed to far more sophisticated outfit.
Accusations have focused on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba — which carried out an audacious assault by gunmen on the Indian parliament in 2001.