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English

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The attack on Mumbai shocked the world. For three days terrorists wreaked havoc over multiple venues in India s commercial capital, leaving a trail of blood, death and destruction. Reporters from Hindustan Times tracked the events as they unfolded at Cama Hospital, the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus and followed the three-day siege at the Taj and Trident Hotels and at Nariman House. The collection brings together their dispatches as well as commentaries, profiles and columns published during the siege and its aftermath. This is a dramatic snapshot of the victims, heroes and perpetrators of the attacks and also of the outrage that still grips the nation.

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Humanities

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	20 mars 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184758153
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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26/11 The Attack on Mumbai
Contents
Introduction
The Attack
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
The Investigation
December 2008
January 2009
The Aftermath
Copyright Page
Introduction
Vir Sanghvi
SOMETIMES CRISES TELL us more about the victims than they do about the perpetrators. So it has been with the Bombay attacks of 26 November 2008. We know now that they were carried out by jihadi s who were trained in Pakistan, possibly by official agencies. That is politically significant-at least in terms of international relations-but it is hardly a surprise. The same was true of the attack on Parliament a few years ago and of many other terrorist incidents. But the real lessons of the Bombay attacks emerge out of the Indian response. The way we have reacted holds up a mirror to our society and tells us something about our country and how it responds to hostility, aggression and pressure.
The Bombay incidents have caused so many debates within Indian society that it is hard to think of a contemporary parallel that has so provoked the Indian intelligentsia. There has been an outpouring of anger against the political establishment, a radicalisation-no matter how temporary-of the upper middle class, a rethinking of the we-all-want-peace attitude that characterised the educated Indian s response to Pakistan, a debate on the role of the media in times of crisis and the apparent sensationalism of television news, and a recognition of how vulnerable India and its civilians are to terrorist attacks.
In a sense it is surprising that the incidents in Bombay should have had such far-reaching consequences. India is no stranger to terrorist attacks. Nearly every month, bombs go off in some Indian town or the other. The predictability of the attacks has brutalised most of us. We are shocked for the first fifteen minutes after we hear of the bombings and then it is back to business as usual.
Even the attack on Parliament did not have the same impact on debate and discourse. The government of India, recognising that the intention of the terrorists had been to take the Cabinet hostage, reacted with anger and aggression. Thousands of troops were moved to the Pakistan border, war seemed imminent and, for the several months that Operation Parakram lasted, India spent crores of rupees hoping that Pakistan would blink. But neither did Pakistan blink-the confrontation just sort of faded away over time-nor did the Indian intelligentsia respond with the sort of outrage and soul-searching that resulted from the Bombay attacks.

Most nations react to terrorist attacks in a sadly predictable manner. Israel invades the West Bank. The United States threatens to get the perpetrators of the attack dead or alive . The general wisdom is that the best way to take revenge on the terrorists and to reclaim national honour is to launch an attack using conventional forces and conventional weapons against the States that have either armed or harboured the terrorists. The US response to 9/11 was to launch an attack on Afghanistan in the hope of apprehending Osama bin Laden and effecting a regime change that unseated the barbaric Taliban government. The Indian response to the Parliament attack was to threaten Pakistan with war.
The interesting thing about the Bombay attacks is that in their immediate aftermath Indians seemed less interested in taking revenge on the terrorists or in going to war than in blaming ourselves, our government and our politicians. I can think of few societies where an attack-clearly planned and launched by a hostile neighbour-should not result in a desire for war. Instead, India spent its time working out what went wrong and in looking for those who failed in their duty to protect our cities and our civilians.
Some of this took the foreign press by surprise and perhaps it astonished foreign governments as well. If you go over the coverage of the attacks in British and American newspapers you will find that all the articles focussed on the imminent India-Pakistan war and, then, on the almost certain Hindu backlash that would lead to the targeting of local Muslims.
In fact, neither of these predictions came to pass. There was hardly any desire to punish Pakistan-except perhaps for a few bimbos who were invited to TV studios-and few people saw Indian Muslims as being associated with the terrorists or responsible in any way for the attacks.
What accounts for the uniqueness of the Indian response?
Everybody will have his or her own explanation. This is mine: Indians are used to terrorism. It no longer shocks us as it once did. Nor are we startled by the recognition that Pakistan might be involved. We have come to accept this as a part of our lives.
We are not like the United States before 9/11, secure in some cocoon, believing that nobody can touch us. We know that we are vulnerable. And we know that we have enemies who hate us with a mindless intensity. So we had none of the knee-jerk responses that Westerners have to terrorist incidents. We did not react with anger against the terrorists or seek to make scapegoats of Indian Muslims.
Instead, we asked a deeper question: if all of us already know that India is a prime terrorist target, then why, in God s name, did our government not make more of an effort to protect India s greatest city?
As it rapidly became clear that there was no good answer to this question, the anger grew and the debates raged.

The debate about governmental inaction still continues at some level. We know now that the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India s external intelligence agency had intercepted communications from known terrorist leaders that hinted at an attack on Bombay. Some of the intercepts were even more specific. They talked about an attack on a hotel at a street where the Taj was the only major hotel. They talked about seaside targets. And, most damning of all, they even had an intercept from the terrorists on their boat as they sped towards Bombay.
This intelligence was buried somewhere within the bowels of the Indian intelligence system. It was not analysed in time and the warnings were not passed on. Had India s intelligence czars acted in time, the attacks could have been averted.
In any other country, heads would have rolled for such a lapse. In India, on the other hand, no accountability has been fixed. Not one intelligence officer was sacked. And there has been no public apology for this glaring failure. There are problems with the chain of command as well. One of the most infuriating aspects of the way in which the authorities coped with the attack was how, for nearly ten hours, they did not cope at all.
When the terrorists first attacked the Taj Mahal hotel, the Bombay Police were informed. They concluded that the hotel was the centre of a gang war and entered its precincts with their weapons drawn. Shortly afterwards, they realised that they had got it badly wrong and withdrew. After that they refused to enter the hotel claiming that they were ill-equipped to take on terrorists armed with assault rifles and grenades. So, four terrorists who had taken no hostages wandered cheerfully around the Taj while the entire police force of Bombay skulked outside.
Desperate, some officials suggested that the armed forces be brought in. The army arrived in strength but its troops did no more than ring the Taj and the Oberoi hotels. They too lacked the expertise to fight terrorists. Eventually, somebody thought of the Indian navy s commandos.
The commandos arrived at the Taj but declared, in the finest traditions of Indian bureaucracy, that they would not enter the hotel unless they received a written request from the Maharashtra government.
While all this was going on, the fire brigade stood by arguing that it had no mandate to rescue people. The management of the Taj begged the firemen to rescue guests on the sixth floor, including the family of the Taj s general manager. The fire brigade shrugged its shoulders. It had to be given permission, it said.
But who would give it permission? The police, who had abdicated responsibility? The army, which was not fully in charge? Or the navy, whose commandos were waiting for their invitation in triplicate?
By the time this was sorted out and the fire brigade moved in, the guests on the sixth floor-including the Taj s manager s wife and young children-were dead.
The story of ineptitude and confusion does not end there. It is still not clear whether the navy s commandos engaged the terrorists at all. They certainly did not manage to wound a single one of them at the Taj. At the Oberoi, it now seems, the terrorists commandeered a room and slept the night in a comfortable bed knowing they were in no danger.
It was only when the National Security Guards (NSG) arrived from Delhi the following morning that the operation began in earnest. By then the terrorists were fully in control.
And even then the confusion on the ground continued. Various army generals continued to address the press, sometimes providing information that was simply wrong ( there s only one terrorist and he s wounded -actually there were three firing at the NSG) or, at other times, acting as though they were in charge which they were not.
Most shameful of all was the role of the navy. Even while the operation was in progress and NSG officers were fighting for their lives, the navy s commandos-an allegedly secret force-held a bizarre televised press conference in which they bragged about non-existent achievements and provided lots of misinformation (the terrorists have ID cards from Mauritius, etc.).
In the circumstances, can it be a surprise that it took so long to clear the Taj and the Oberoi of a relatively small number of terrorists?
Of course there were individual acts of bravery. An inspector of the Gamdevi police station pounced on Ajmal Kasab, one of the terrorists, and would not let go even though six bullets were shot into his body. The inspector died, but