Tryst with terrorists

Mumbai’s tryst with terrorist

Mumbai is truck again. It’s a sense of déjà vu for all. We saw the same horror scenes repeatedly on TV, the same rhetoric by the Govt. the same debate on talk shows. Nothing has changed after 26/11. Our booming economy and our status as a rising power has made Mumbai & Delhi as the most vulnerable cities to terrorist attacks. Look at the past four months and we were given enough warnings about a bigger attack in future. The number of failed bomb attacks – in Delhi high court, Delhi's Gargi College, Sealdah-New Delhi Rajdhani Express and elsewhere. They were dismissed as pranks. Perhaps these were the result of the Karachi Project which David Hadley revealed in his interrogation to FBI. Mumbai blasts could be an indication that the Karachi Project is blooming in India. Home grown Jehad group have been active and our Intelligence have failed to trap them. Not one of the five urban terrorist attacks that preceded the latest Mumbai bombings has been solved. Perhaps the lull after 2008 has set in complacency in the intelligence agencies. This was evident in the goof-ups in the 'Most Wanted' list that was posted to Pakistan. It's clear that coordination among security agencies in India is still lacking. And why not as many of the internal security reforms proposed after the 26/11 attacks have bitten the dust. Despite decades of terror attack we haven’t been able to pluck the shortage in the Police personnel in our country. As per the home ministry, about 5,40,000 policemen were immediately required to make up the shortages in our police forces. But less than a third of that number has been recruited till date. Our projections for policing are well below the UN recommended ratio of 222 policemen per 1,00,000 citizens. Worse still, for a country repeatedly targeted by terrorists, India's internal security budget is less than 1% of its GDP, whereas India's defence budget is about 2.5% of its GDP. If the responsibility of the government is to protect its citizens, then it simply needs to spend more on equipping, training and arming our policemen to achieve greater efficiency. We urgently need to spend a huge amount on CCTV Camera installed on strategic positions. These footage are crucial in catching terrorists. The London bombers, the Time square bombers and Kasab were all caught on camera. We need to model our Police and surveillance on UK, which has about 1.85 million CCTV cameras and the average Briton is caught on camera 70 times a day as per the police figures. Living in a surveillance society is the need of the hour. We also need to adopt the idea of community policing from UK which has protected London which perhaps has the largest movement of terrorists through it but remains secure.
We need to accept that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and its cut in aids to Pakistan will make our neighborhood a secure field for the terrorist to play as they want. Mr. Chidambaram has rightly pointed out that India is located in one of the most dangerous regions in the world. Our neighborhood is the global terrorism's epicenter. It is their aim to target India's economic rise and its cities, which remain crowded, disorganized and vulnerable. We need some elementary steps that could make citizens secure. Upgrading our police force, investing in technology for internal security and the long awaited national intelligence grid initiative could help fill this void, but it is still some years from being completed. Until then, we are left at the mercy of the terrorist.