Let there not be another 26/11

The terrorist attacks on Mumbai on November 26, 2008, must be reckoned as one of the most momentous, most tragic and most instructive event in the annals of the Indian Republic. Apart from causing huge loss of life and property, it exposed a number of wide chinks in the armoury of the Indian polity and machinery of governance. A country, aspiring to be a super-power, stood before the entire world as nothing more than a huge tree with a hollow trunk. The event also brought to surface the inner shallowness of India’s intellectual discourse which had shaped the outlook of its social and political elite and caused the emergence of a soft and superficial state.
In this case, 10 young terrorists sailed on a Pakistani steamer from Karachi, hijacked an Indian fishing trawler on the high sea, landed quietly at a point near the Gateway of India, divided themselves in four groups and moved towards their pre-determined targets.
One group seized the Taj Hotel, the second entered the Leopold Café/Oberoi hotel, the third proceeded to Chabad/Nariman House and the fourth went to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminus. Everywhere, they resorted to bloodbath with impunity, shooting innocent people with the savagery of a brute. They held the city in terror practically for three days. Before nine of them were killed and one captured, they had butchered 180 persons and left many more wounded. It was a tragedy too deep for tears.
What was no less tragic was the incompetence that was displayed on the occasion. When the terrorist attacks occurred, the clarity, cohesion and promptitude that was needed was nowhere to be seen. In sharp contrast to the military precision and speed with which all the four groups of terrorists went about their task, the security apparatus of both, the state and the Central government, looked disjointed. It took quite some time for this apparatus to adjust itself for effective action.
The other components of the social structure did not cover themselves with glory either. For example, almost all the news channels vied with one another in showing live the operation conducted by National Security Guards against the terrorists at the Taj Hotel. They did not care to consider that their coverage could be used by the Pakistani handlers of the terrorists to convey fresh instructions and cause heavier loss of innocent lives.
All this happened despite the fact that India had seen a number of terrorist attacks in its metropolitan cities. In 2008 alone, there were serial blasts in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi. Unfortunately, India remained incorrigible, tempting its adversaries to take advantage of its soft underbelly again and again.
In the aftermath of the attacks, there was a furious denunciation of the Central and the state government agencies by the social and intellectual elite whose mental attitude towards terrorism underwent a marked change. They experienced, first hand, the pain, agony and horror. In the early phase of terrorism, when Kashmiri Pandits and other innocent persons were killed in the valley, these very elite, by and large, had remained unsympathetic and did not come forward in any meaningful way to pressurise the authorities to end the misery of the victims. On the other hand, some of them rationalised terrorism, talked of alienation of Kashmiri youth, went to the extent of ignoring documented facts and other hard evidence and even blamed the governor. To be counted as progressive and to get publicity in the media, flaunting of such postures had become the order of the day. It caused incalculable harm to the nation. While the terrorists slaughtered innocent people, the so-called progressives and liberal-intellectuals, who had no idea of ground reality, slaughtered truth, reputations and will to fight the menace and nip it in the bud.
Since the mid-1980s, when the Indian diplomat, Ravinder Mahatre, was murdered by Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front at Birmingham and a huge subversive drama was staged at Srinagar during the West Indies-India cricket match, I had been underscoring the sinister nature of the Pakistani plan under which terrorism was being injected in Kashmir by arousing religious frenzy and by diverting and deploying sophisticated weapons which the CIA was supplying to the ISI, ostensibly for use in Afghanistan War. But no one listened. Now that the cells have proliferated and started attacking the vital organs of the bodypolitic of India, a very heavy cost and a long time would be required to bring back this body to health. Already about 50,000 lives and several thousands crore of public funds have been lost.
The interrogation of David Coleman Headley, an American citizen and a recruit of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, has revealed how diabolical plans for future terrorist attacks are being worked out, how even houses of Prime Minister and vice-president have been surveyed and how the so-called non-state actors and the ISI are working in close coordination for undertaking their bloody ventures against India.
From all accounts, it has now become abundantly clear that Pakistan, to borrow the expression of Bruce Reidel, has become “the most dangerous country in the world, where every nightmare of the 21st century converge — terrorism, government instability, corruption and nuclear weapons”. Even after the elections of February 2008, neither the Army nor the ISI had lost any of its powers. In fact, the Pakistan Army has become a state within the state, and the ISI an Army within the Army. In the ISI itself, ultra conservative elements have come up and carved out a semi-independent niche for themselves. The atmosphere is thick with collusions and conspiracies.
Even otherwise, the Pakistani authorities have earned world-wide notoriety for their deceptive behaviour. In his memoir, Mullah Zaeef, former ambassador of Taliban to Pakistan, has observed: “Pakistan’s authorities are so treacherous that they can get milk from a bull. They have two tongues in one mouth, and two faces on one head”.
With these dangerous and treacherous environment around us and with our preoccupations with scams and scandals, could we rule out the repetition of a grim and gory tragedy like the one that visited us in Mumbai two years ago? If we have to avoid such a repetition, we must ask ourselves today a few basic questions. Are we retrofitting our machinery of governance and attending to the numerous shortcomings of our polity? And are we giving a new direction to our intellectual discourse which would generate new attitudes and outlook amongst the people in general and the opinion-makers in particular? I am afraid, no one is asking these questions even when the traumatic experience of 26/11 has not faded from the national memory.

Jagmohan is a former governor of J&K and a former Union minister