India is unprepared for urban guerilla warfare-qua-terrorism. This much was proved by the walk-by/drive-by shooting sprees followed by the south Mumbai hotel sieges. Many of the disembarked terrorists are still on the loose and, courtesy the support of the Dawood Ibrahim crime syndicate, more murder and mayhem may be on the way.
A former director general of the National Security Guard (NSG), A.K. Mitra, reflecting the passive, defensive and reactive thinking rife in official circles, said on television that terrorists have “the option of being proactive” which luxury, he implied, is unavailable to the state and thus revealed the reasons why India has been rendered an easy terrorist target.
Mumbai was waiting to happen. National security reforms are needed to prevent future attacks. Prashanth Vishwanathan / Bloomberg
The fact is a comprehensive proactive policy with a centralized authority to coordinate intelligence acquisition, processing and distribution, to assign counterterrorism tasks and to oversee the implementation of strategies and actions to thwart terrorist designs with minimum collateral damage and disruption, can choke this menace. Terrorists could still precipitate stray incidents, but will be unable to replicate the kind of meticulously planned and executed operations witnessed in Mumbai.
The Indian system is inefficient and ineffective because it is overly bureaucratized and works in a compartmentalized fashion. In the national security sphere, as in other fields, there is a profusion of agencies and institutions at local, state and Central levels, each separately fighting its own war and hence, geared to step on each other’s toes. Coordinated action and effective prophylactic measures become impossible.
With everyone responsible for tackling terrorism, nobody is responsible for anything and the job of actually taking on the terrorists is left for someone else to do. However, the existing arrangement, because it allows escape from accountability, is prized by bureaucrats and political leaders alike; the reason why systemic reform is unlikely. With the scene bereft of a single nodal authority tasked with all aspects of internal security—such as the Homeland Security Administration in the US, for instance—what obtains is the Mumbai fiasco. Barring the scale of extreme mismanagement, this was a routine occurrence of everything that could go wrong going wrong.
Consider this:
1) Elint (electronic intelligence) intercepts indicated a definite time frame in which an attack was coming. But lacking authoritative inter se prioritization and rating of this bit of “actionable intelligence” compared with previous such warnings, the boy crying “wolf” once too often syndrome took over and agencies downstream disregarded it. This explains why the triple-layered, overlapping, maritime defence ostensibly in place comprising the navy, the Coast Guard, and the marine police was mostly on paper.