POLICE AND commando units, showcasing new armoured vehicles and hardware, paraded through the streets of India’s financial capital, Mumbai, yesterday, to mark the first anniversary of the terror strike on the port city that claimed 166 lives.
Candlelight vigils and blood donation drives brought residents on to the streets as they recalled the three-day siege of their city by 10 Pakistan-based gunmen who arrived by sea in inflatable dinghies.
Splitting up into five two-man teams, the gunmen struck the city’s crowded train terminal, two popular five-star hotels, a Jewish centre and a café frequented by western tourists, spraying their targets indiscriminately with rifle fire and grenades.
The only surviving attacker Muhammed Ajmal Qasab (22), from Pakistan’s southern Punjab province, is facing trial in Mumbai.
On Wednesday a court in Pakistan, largely under pressure from the US, charged seven people in connection with the attacks, including alleged mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, head of the banned Islamist militant group Lashkar-i-Taiba (LiT or Army of the Pure), blamed by India for organising the strikes.
India claims the LiT, based near the southern Pakistani city of Lahore and with alleged links to the country’s army and powerful Inter Services Intelligence Directorate, trained the 10 gunmen, all in their 20s, in urban guerilla warfare and launched them from the Pakistani port city of Karachi.
Meanwhile, Mumbai’s police, criticised for being poorly trained and under-equipped before last year’s attacks, used yesterday’s anniversary to exhibit new hardware acquired under the Rs 1.3 billion (€18 million) plan to beef up the city’s security.
A fleet of newly acquired camouflaged armoured vehicles manned by commandos with guns drawn, made its way down Marine Drive, the city’s main promenade.
Quick reaction commandos in black uniforms abseiled down a building while police personnel marched on the adjacent sandy beach in an impressive display of strength that was absent in last year’s terror strikes.
Mumbai’s new police commissioner D Sivanandan conceded that the response to the attacks had not been “ideal”, but said improvements had been made since he took charge in June. Even if larger sums were spent on security, he said, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to render a city such as Mumbai with a population of more than 15 million wholly safe from terrorism.
“The tragedy took place precisely because the police miserably failed in its duties,” said Shukla Sen, a member of the Citizens’ Initiative for Peace, formed last December. Their functioning must improve, he added.
From the time the strikes began last year, it took almost 10 hours for the federal national security guards, created to counter such contingencies, to arrive from their base outside New Delhi. Then it took the inadequately equipped guards almost 60 hours to end the siege for which no one has so far been held accountable despite the public and media furore.
The politicians who resigned after the attacks have since returned to office, many to higher positions, while no police, security or administrative officials have been dismissed or admonished.
Neither the official inquiry into the attack, nor the glaring intelligence failures, have been made public and the matter has deteriorated into an unpleasant interdepartmental turf war.
Larger measures of establishing a maritime command to prevent another sea-borne attack remain mired in complex bureaucratic procedures, as do much-needed measures to reform the country’s intelligence, command-and-control and response mechanisms.