Cities of fear?

I have never lived in Mumbai. My visits too have been few and far between. Therefore, it is difficult for me to visualise how people live, fearing one blast or the other in offing. What impresses me, however, is the manner in which the 20 million people from different parts of the country have fused into one community despite the terrorists and the threats of Shiv Sena to the non-Marathi speaking population.

The city has had 16 attacks in the last 18 years. People have come to live with the insecurity they face. They criticise the governments at the centre and in the state for not protecting them against recurring incidents of bomb blasts. Still they live undeterred and this is what the outsiders describe as “the spirit of Mumbai.”

I was in Karachi a few weeks ago and found how people have come to terms with the conditions obtaining there, one blast practically every day, apart from ethnic riots. I asked them how and their reply was: Tell us the alternative. There was a feeling of helplessness, something like Mumbai’s.

I also had the traumatic experience of facing riots and death at the time of partition. When I travelled from my hometown Sialkot City to the Attari-Wagah border in India, I feared I might be killed when people before my eyes were slaughtering one another. It looked impossible how we would restart our life without any help from the government. But we did it. Was it our sense of resistance or the spirit of determination?

I find the people living in Mumbai cast in the same mould. They get up, fall but are on their feet again. They have done it many a time before and would do it again, if challenged. I have not forgotten a poignant remark made by a woman living in Colaba: “Whenever my husband goes to office in the morning, I pray he should come back safe in the evening.” Things have not reached the same stage in Delhi where I live. But it can happen any time. As a senior citizen, I have come to be a fatalist.

The most unpalatable thing happening in India is the politicising of riots. Both the Congress and the BJP, the two main political parties, begin blaming each other. Within 24 hours of the blasts at Mumbai, BJP leader L K Advani reached Mumbai and advised New Delhi not to have talks with Pakistan. No one in the media or elsewhere had even remotely hinted at the involvement of Pakistan. But should he politicise the issue for electoral purpose? Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh soon jumped into fray and raised the possible involvement of the RSS. In contrast, Home Minister P Chidambaram said that his government was not yet sure who was responsible for the blasts. He told the public that no group was out of their radar.

The result of politicising the riots is that the government does not have to explain why it kept the police ill-equipped and ill-trained even after the Mumbai attacks three years ago. I regret why the government makes the same mistakes and gives the same assurances on zero tolerance against terrorists. I thought the attack on Mumbai in 2008 was a big warning. PM Singh himself said that they would not allow it to happen again. Yet, this intelligence failure has taken place. For Chidambaram to admit that there was no input either from internal or external intelligence agencies is a slur on the government. Both the Centre and Mumbai have elaborate intelligence networks. It is their job to be nosing and probing all the time.

We must look to America as it has not allowed a single incident to take place after 9/11. That country also has a large ethnic population and it is bigger in size than India. President Bush introduced some laws like the Patriotic Act which treated every American as a criminal before he or she could prove it otherwise.

We should not make such a mistake. There is no dearth of law in our government’s armoury. What is needed is to shake up the law and order machinery so that it operates properly and quickly. Why is the country ruled by the police act as old as 1861, formulated by the British which wanted to keep the public and police apart. America and European countries have devised ways for public participation in the measures taken by the police to maintain law and order.

The National Investigation Agency was set up with a fanfare in 2009 to assuage public anger over a similar series of failure leading up to 26/11. They were entrusted with cases but the result so far is dismal. The latest annual report of the Union Home Ministry says that large investments were made “in new measures to meet the grave challenges posed by global terrorism.”

Poor dividends from these measures do not come as a surprise. “Even though both state and central government have been scrambling to set up all kinds of special counter-terrorism forces,” says Dr. Ajai Sahni., Director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, “there has been no real effort to improve intelligence-gathering and investigations capabilities from the bottom-up.” No computer, he points out, is going to help you solve a case if you have got no worthwhile data to feed into it.

Investigators believe that all the five attacks are linked to members of the Indian Mujahideen (IM) a group inspired by the terrorist group in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. The IM is responsible for a string of attacks in several Indian cities between 2006 and 2008. There was however, little evidence to support the charge, though the available intelligence suggests that the Lashkar has been attempting to regroup.

Mumbai is not a problem. It is the fallout of administrative inadequacies. The financial capital requires better attention. And it should not go out of the centre’s radar.

The writer is a senior Indian journalist.