If the first images that streamed across the nation on the night of November 26 were chaotic and confused, that defined the first response of a 44,000-member police force too. This, in a city that’s no stranger to terror — in the six years before 26/11, Mumbai saw 14 terrorist attacks that killed over 250 people.

And yet, constables rushed out of police stations without weapons only to find the attackers had fled when they returned with their archaic guns. Despite a clear deployment plan in place for such an emergency, over a dozen top police officers — whose job was to lead, plan and coordinate — rushed to attack sites armed with little other than their sense of duty. Result: across the city that night, there sprang up as many control centres as there were officers.

Not only did this fuel panic in the force, it delayed a concerted response by more than 10 hours when each second was precious.

It wasn’t meant to be this way.

For, the Mumbai Police has a clearly established standard operating procedure (SOP) for such crises. Put in place way back in 1993 after the serial bomb blasts, it called for a Deputy Commissioner of Police (Operations) to take charge of his area to co-ordinate responses, introduced assault vehicles into the force and after the 7/11 train bombings, it included setting up a unified command-and-control centre.

Within an hour of the attack, however, that SOP was itself the first casualty.

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