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Mumbai, Pune, Yet Security Still Remains Vulnerable

The bomb blast in Pune, the first terror attack in India after 26/11,

 shares a number of things in common with Mumbai—a weekend attack in peak hours, an upmarket target, a locality teeming with foreigners and a Jewish Chabad House round the corner. Of course, while every terror attack must be condemned in the strongest terms, it's important to analyze the Pune incident differently from 26/11. The Union home minister was absolutely correct when he said the Pune attack wasn't about intelligence failure (unlike Mumbai, which was). If anything, the trail of David Headley had already revealed this area as a potential target, which makes it tempting to blame someone loudly for letting terrorists strike at this very location. But it isn't realistically possible for the police forces to guard every place at all times, and so some targets will always be softer than others—the nearby Chabad house and Osho ashram, for example, had better security.

What is possible though is for the local police forces to be completely focused on the huge task (of countering terror) at hand. Let's make no mistake, we live in a rough neighborhood and the threat of terror is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. However, in recent weeks, police in Maharashtra (and Mumbai in particular) has been deployed in numbers to tackle the menace of the Shiv Sena and allied groups. In the context of a state that has been vulnerable to terror attacks in the recent past, should the preeminent job of its police forces be to ensure the peaceful screening of a film? Or indeed to deploy in numbers to prevent motley groups from disrupting the peace on Valentine's Day? Incredibly, those are precisely the issues that would have been top of the mind for the Maharashtra police in the run-up to the Pune bomb blast. And this isn't a comment on the police forces, but rather on the state of politics in Maharashtra. It's time that politicians across the political spectrum in Maharashtra take up issues of genuine importance, and not frivolities. The government of Ashok Chavan in particular needs to pull up its socks. Law and order is a state subject and while the Centre has a role to play in countering terror, state governments cannot shy away from responsibility and accountability. The Union home minister has done a very good job of revamping the internal security apparatus in Delhi. It would help if his efforts were complemented by the states.

Towards the close of 2009 P. Chidambaram said in a speech to the intelligence community that "there is the danger of a terror- free year inducing complacency, signs of which can be seen everywhere." When the Pune attack happened Chidambaram's warning was underlined in stark relief. Ever since last summer, India's intelligence services had been warning of a renewed offensive by Pakistan- based jihadist groups like the Lashkare- Taiba. Police in several states, as well as neighboring Bangladesh, had foiled multiple jihadist attack plans. In August, Indian communication intelligence detected plans to stage a car-bomb attack in Pune, while the interrogation of Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley made clear that the Lashkar had ambitious plans to stage large-scale attacks across India. Earlier this month, top Lashkar ideologue Abdur Rehman Makki had even held out explicit threats to target New Delhi, Kanpur, and Pune.

Many in New Delhi's policy community believe renewed operations by jihadist groups are the outcome of the desire of powerful elements in Pakistan's military-dominated elite to maintain an adversarial relationship with India. This, the argument goes, is because tensions with India give Pakistan's military an excuse to go slow in its ongoing offensive against Islamist groups at home — a war many in Pakistan believe has been foisted on the country by the United States. Encouraging jihadists to target India allows Pakistan's army to rebuild its long-standing relationship with the religious right, and to maintain its political primacy at home. If this turns out to be the case, it will bring India's renewed efforts at dialogue with Pakistan under enormous pressure. Neither calling off the dialogue nor engaging in it will protect India from attack — dialogue, after all, is only a process, not an outcome in itself. Pakistan's half-measures against the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks, as well as its refusal to dismantle the military infrastructure of the groups, illustrate the need to acquire the means to deal with a Pakistani establishment that seems to think it has nothing to gain from acting against anti- India terrorists. It is a situation that calls for a mature response that is firm and result-oriented and not one stemming from passions of the moment. 

- [ By SatiSh ViSaVadia ]