Before the urge to classify the Mumbai massacre as a systemic failure or a collective government failure, as described by A.K. Antony and Hansraj Bharadwaj at the CWC, becomes dominant, the Manmohan Singh government must use this attack as an opportunity to undertake drastic reforms of the security apparatus. The majority of reforms suggested post-Kargil remained only on paper. Singh must go back to basics: starting with the surgical removal of political patronage from internal security, as even the senior police inspector at Colaba’s police station and the beat constable at the Gateway of India are equally accountable for the blunder. If there was synergy between the Colaba police and its residents, then the terrorists would have found hard to do reconnaissance of the Nariman House and the hotels prior to the attack. And as for the intelligence agencies: with turf wars a never-ending routine, the government should seriously think about a counter-terror unit that has specialists, not the generalists of the Indian Police Service, to deal with fundamentalist terror. Apart from the core specialists, both the IB and the RAW have become sinecures for All India or Allied service officers on deputation from state cadres hit by insurgency or political victimisation. This leads to inter-agency wars with intelligence cadre personnel fighting with those on deputation.

The need for specialists is illustrated by the fact that nearly four billion hours of footage is generated by 26 million CCTV cameras in the United States every week and the counter-terror set up under the Homeland Security department is trained to pick up the unusual. To put it bluntly, intelligence collection is drudgery and has little to do with gossip picked up at golf courses. Similar problems of coordination and jurisdiction lie between the navy and those lesser mortals, the coast guard. Rather than get into a jingoistic mood about weakly governed Pakistan, New Delhi first needs to have a standard operating procedure that comes into action in case of a terrorist threat or attack, one that requires no political clearances whatsoever. Pakistan is only a part of the problem.

... contd.