MUMBAI TERROR ATTACK : IS 26/11 OUR DEFINING MOMENT :

Mumbai terror attack on 26 Nov 2008 should be seen as a watershed event for India. Even for a desensitized India, indifferent to regular cycles of bombings by subversive groups, the attack is unprecedented in many ways. The attack was at carefully selected targets of commercial importance, was executed by foreign terrorists, and they could come by sea-route without being intercepted by any of the defense systems.

Is it a defining moment for us? Will there be a paradigm shift in our thinking about our security? Or will it pass as another terrorist event that we will discuss on talk-shows and promptly put it out of our memory, like many times earlier.

Will we let the sobriquet of “soft state” become our indelible definition?

Or we shall wake up and do something about it.

India lives in a dangerous neighborhood. We have common borders with Pakistan and China , who always seek to push their geographical boundaries into India, be it on politico-religious basis, or purely on the basis of some historical inconsistencies. Pakistan , in addition, has chosen to be a permanent adversary because their “two nation theory” has been proved wrong by the multi-religious, multi-lingual and multi-party democratic India scaling heights in economic and cultural progress. China looks at India as the only power that can challenge her superiority in Asia.

It is no secret that our neighbor has taken upon themselves to directly confront India. Having fought and lost three wars, they have given up the hope of winning a direct confrontation and have adopted a indirect war doctrine to bleed India by funding terrorist groups. They have consistently taken shelter in a ‘denial regime’ to avoid consequences of a direct military response.

The democratic India on the other hand, has risen from a ‘growing economy’ to a major world economic power. Certain niche areas of excellence (e.g. IT, medicine and knowledge services) have allowed India to become one of the fastest growing economies of the world. The permanent adversarial role adopted by our neighbor sees India’s economic growth as a big threat to their ambitions. Hence the strategy of “bleeding India by a thousand cuts”.

India has been slow to come around to the real import of this threat. The response has been largely episodal and incremental. The political class has used the issue to score brownie points rather than build processes and systems for tackling it. As a result, there has been no letup in inimical neighbors causing terrorist events directly/indirectly. The sequence of bombings at various cities including Delhi (Parliament of India), Mumbai, Bangalore, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Guwahati is a clear indicator of the lackluster response.

With Mumbai terror attack, our security preparedness (or absence of it) has been laid bare.

Our large security apparatus has been left looking largely ineffective and slow to respond. The agencies that carry the responsibility of monitoring, pro-actively preventing or responding to an actual occurrence have failed to build processes and systems that can prevent or handle terrorist attacks.

The intelligence agencies are multifold and serve a particular force in their specialist function. There is no effective information collection, collation and disbursal system, despite the fact that India builds IT infrastructures for rest of the world.

The security apparatus has been incrementally built bottom upwards. Interoperability and synthesis of effort were neither thought of, nor built in.

In summary, India has a security umbrella, which is a collection of disparate intelligence systems, multiple security agencies, different allocated functions and almost non-existent co-ordination. The fact that various agencies are answerable to different power centers makes the overall co-ordination even more miserable at the times of action.

For example, during Mumbai attacks, the Federal bureau had the intelligence about impending attacks, which it sent to Home Ministry, which was not shared with Maharashtra, and the local police had no clue when the Mumbai outrage took place, NSG did not have transport arrangements to fly them from Delhi, and no road transport after landing at Mumbai Airport, all active forces did not know which equipment is available with other forces.

It looks like a study in chaos. The only winning grace is the bravery and some extra-ordinary leadership by our fighting-forces that carries the day.

Will it work against a more organized guerilla forces, which is certain consequence of Talibanization of Pakistan?

Why we need to change it?

Because the geo-political situation in our neighborhood will remain hostile in the foreseeable future.

As long as these targets are exposed because of lack of security umbrella around them, it is with minimal effort that the terrorist groups will slip through the cracks in security environment and continue their nefarious designs of damaging India’s economy and brand equity.

Secondly and more importantly, the payoff. It is estimated that the logistics of the attack have cost the perpetrators peanuts. The damage they caused to the business houses is estimated to be ten billion dollars. And we are still not factoring in the negative sentiment and the ignominy of being considered a slipshod country. So terrorists will get encouraged in their misplaced zeal to wreak heavier damage at nominal cost.

We need to build systems that will exact a heavy price from the attackers and also make our assets secure from attrition.

The need of the hour is change in the mindset about security (away from the indifferent attitudes), effective surveillance systems, real-time information systems and “state of the art” response systems (weapons, skills, technologies). Hope we can harness new awareness and technologies to thwart any future attacks.