It is perhaps in the nation’s interest that the dust doesn’t settle on the Mumbai attacks of November 26. For, what we are witnessing is an incredible systemic collapse that began long before the mayhem. In the beginning (though we always learn this post-facto), there was what seemed at first intelligence failure, but now could turn out to be more of a failure to act upon information. Then the armed forces got into credit-grabbing press conferences to out-publicise the National Security Guard, with the latter still in action. Now, every defence and intelligence organ appears to be unilaterally absolving itself of blame even as intelligence agencies fight amongst themselves. We have seen earlier, and we saw again last week, how the lack of adequate communication and the absence of coordination over intelligence and security result in hundreds of deaths. Admiral Sureesh Mehta, the navy chief, denied that the navy had received “actionable intelligence” before the attacks. But we are also told that the Research and Analysis Wing had received input on November 19 disclosing the precise coordinates of the terrorists’ vessel. We are told that the terrorists came from Azizabad in Karachi, that they set sail on the Pakistani vessel Al-Hussaini, that they hijacked the Indian trawler Kuber around November 22/23, that they stayed in India’s territorial waters for about 72 hours before reaching Mumbai, which they did since the navy, the coast guard and the customs all thought guarding the coast was everybody else’s lookout. Reportedly, US intelligence had warned India of a potential maritime attack on Mumbai twice. But there’s just so thin a line between collating known knowns and flooding the media space with leaks from every intelligence agency and the armed forces. There is no contesting the fact that 26/11 happened. But reconstructing how the terrorists were able to get away with what they did will be so much more difficult if each of the very functionaries charged with creating a clear picture of what happened instead focuses on how individually s/he was not part of the failure. The spectacle of each grabbing the microphone to put his/her side of the story out is unedifying. May we be spared press conferences now by the RAW and IB chiefs.
