The Mumbai attack is the worst terrorist attack anywhere in the world, next only to 9/11. It has happened in a country which, like Sri Lanka, is one of the world's worst victims of terrorism. Nearly 200 people are dead and double that number, injured.
The strike on Mumbai was an outrage against India. It was easily the most sophisticated, well-planned and executed operation capturing world attention for 60 hours.
The psychological effects of young people carrying AK 47 and AK 56 rifles to their certain death could be manifold. In some quarters, and some countries, it may be used by organizations to hold these boys as role models, spawning another generation of them. Sri Lanka is familiar with this phenomenon. India will have to come to grips with it.
In that sense, the other side has won a part of the battle it fought.
India has paid the price for being a democracy, for signing the Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement and being in a strategic partnership with Israel, the US and Britain. Teams of murderers - it is too civil to call them terrorists - attacked two hotels in Mumbai, a hospital and a residential/commercial building.
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| Indian fire brigade officials and bystanders look towards The Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai on November 29, 2008, as smoke and flames billow out from a section of the building. Indian commandos have killed the last Islamic militants holed up inside Mumbai's Taj Mahal hotel, ending the more than two-day assault on India's financial capital, the city's police chief told AFP. |
There were three hostage situations, unprecedented in itself in this country. We now know that the terrorists came for a reconnaissance or rehearsal, followed by a dry run and that they used the sea route. They could not have mounted this operation without local help.
The figures of those involved in the operation (including so-called 'sleeper cells or small groups of people who typically are entrusted with one link in a complicated chain of responsibility but have no idea what they are contributing to) are not yet known but intelligence suggests it would be in thousands rather than hundreds. There is no doubt that this in turn raises questions about effectiveness of intelligence, a point the Prime Minister flagged in his address to the nation on 27 November.
There are several other firsts about the Mumbai attack. The terrorist identified their targets and shot them - like the three top police officers of Maharashtra. These were not bombs planted in various locations and detonated without the terrorists being physically present themselves like in the past when bombs were planted on bicycles, dustbins and on trees.
In the subcontinent, this is the third hotel attack. Before this, the Marriott in Pakistan was bombed. The only other time terrorists got into a hotel and killed people inside was the attack by the Taliban on the Serena Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan earlier this year.
So which group could have done all this, motivated by a deep and abiding hatred for India and its people?
The identity of the group could be confusing but the circumstances and timing of the attack is something Sri Lanka will empathise with. An election is on in Kashmir with highest ever turnouts of 60 and 70 percent. There are Islamic militant groups that believe the Kashmiri people, to prove they are not part of India, should stay away from these elections. This time their efforts to disrupt the elections - at least so far - have proved fruitless because the people have defied their diktat and have surged out of their homes to cast their ballot.
This caps a sense of ineffectualness these groups are feeling. They have been under pressure to prove their relevance. The biggest among them is the Lashkar e Taiyyaba (the Army of the Pure) which has its headquarters in Muridke, Lahore, Pakistan and has been proscribed by most countries, including Pakistan by Gen Pervez Musharraf. Why? Presumably because of the nature of the LeT's ideological beliefs.
Founded by Hafiz Saeed, a scholar of Islam, the organization believes in 'jihad' (holy war) to carry out a sustained struggle for the dominance of Islam in the entire world and to eliminate the evil forces and the ignorant. He considers India, Israel and US to be his prime enemies and has threatened to launch Fidayeen (suicide squad) attacks on American interests too.
The Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba does not believe in democracy and nationalism. According to its ideology, it is the duty of every 'Momin' (believer) to protect and defend the interests of Muslims all over the world where Muslims are under the rule of non-Muslims in the democratic system. This puts them squarely in the sphere of interest of the al Qaeda.
This was palpable in both the nature of the Mumbai attack and the targets they chose. People with British and US passports and Israelis were singled out. Israel is second only to Russia as India's biggest defence supplier. The Taj Mahal Hotel and its environs are the symbol of India's past and current prosperity.
Hotels, by their very nature, have security that is breachable. There are strong memories of the blast near the Colombo Galadari as one evaluates the Mumbai incidents. This is yet to be established but the idea could have been to blast the hotel and bring down the whole edifice, a kind of symbolic, savage blow on India's democracy. Around 15 kg of RDX has been reportedly found in the basement. They were probably meant to be triggered off from a remote location after the terrorists fondly hoped they had got away.
That has proved wishful thinking. For all India's weaknesses — the challenges of policing this vast country, intelligence gaps etc — bravery is not one of them. What was undertaken in Mumbai was the biggest ever counter-insurgency operation by the National Security Guard, the specialized agency.
Though there was a time lag in their reaching the site of the operation, they managed to save many lives in two hotels which were packed with tourists and businessmen, for it is the beginning of the high tourist season.
What are the costs and consequences for the terrorists and for India? Obviously the gaps in policing and intelligence will have to be filled. Relations between India and Pakistan at their best since the 2001-02 attack on Indian Parliament will plummet. The Indian establishment has drawn its own conclusions about the origins of the attackers - for it has demanded that the chief of Pakistan's Inter services Intelligence (ISI), Ahmad Shuja Pasha be sent to New Delhi to help get to the bottom of the attack, if it is true, as Pakistan says, that the ISI was not involved in it, and that it was rogue elements from the Jihadi groups.
India has reason to believe otherwise. From the training and explosives these groups appear to have had, an institutional hand can be detected. What is more, the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul was so similar and so recent that it is not easy to absolve Pakistan.
But India has a dilemma. It has to act, it cannot keep interminably turning the other cheek. But it is a democracy with a largest minority Muslim population in the world. It can do nothing to expose one section of its citizens to counterattacks from another. There are enough people in this country who have vivid memories of the Partition of 1947. India will never, ever want its citizens to go through that kind of bestiality.
What it will do is to do everything to help put Pakistan's shaky democracy firmly on the rails and use that to rein in the ISI. In helping itself to overcome internal - and external - terrorism, India needs to help Pakistan.
Maj. Gen. Ashok Mehta was commissioned into the Gorkha Rifles regiment of the Indian Army in 1957 and served as a Divisional Commander of the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka (1988-90). Since retiring from the Army, he has become a well-known policy analyst and commentator of South Asian security affairs.
This article was written exclusively to The Sunday Times |
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