If Pakistan has to give serious answers about the Mumbai attacks, so has India.
The revelations that not only did US intelligence inform its Indian counterparts of a possible maritime terrorist attack on Mumbai a month before it happened, including the information that the Taj Mahal hotel could be targeted, but that Indian intelligence was also aware of a potential attack as a result of intercepted phone calls is profoundly shocking. The devastating attacks could have been avoided. Lives could have been saved. But nothing was done. No one acted on the information.
That is beyond belief. Primary blame obviously lies with those evil maniacs who carried out and planned these vile attacks but there is something devastatingly wrong with Indian intelligence. No one can miss the similarities with the intelligence failings in the US prior to 9/11 — which the media and politicians in India were quick to join the bandwagon and criticize. This is far worse. It is not a case of an intelligence service failing to understand the warning signals coming its way. Here there were clear-cut warnings, given by reliable sources — and ignored.
Indian intelligence says it passed the information on to the authorities in Maharashtra, that they were the ones who did nothing about it. Such an excuse would be unimaginable elsewhere. The first duty of any government is to defend its people. India is no exception. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that there has been such deadly incompetence in India. At the time of the tsunami, the Indian Navy informed the authorities in Chennai of the impending catastrophe; ships were moved out to sea for safety but no one thought to warn ordinary people living along the coast of what was about to happen.
Defense is not a devolved matter in India. Even if it is true that the information about the attack was passed to the government of Maharashtra (the resignations of the chief minister and deputy chief minister there suggest it was, despite the denials), the central government in New Delhi and its agencies should have been actively in charge of the matter. Something is seriously wrong in the way the country operates if information crucial to its well-being is simply handed over to someone down the line rather than monitored and dealt with at the highest level. The central authorities should have ensured that the country’s commercial capital was safe. They failed — and in doing so failed in their first and fundamental responsibility to their own people. Imagine if CIA had discovered the full 9/11 plot in advance or British intelligence the 7/7 plot, informed the local authorities and then sat back and did nothing. Public outrage would have been deafening. Heads would have rolled. In the UK, the entire government would probably have been forced to resign. In India, the heads of the Maharashtra government have resigned, as has the country’s home minister, but it will be remarkable if this scandal does not yet bring down others at the center. It could be the final undoing of Manmohan Singh — which in many ways will be a great pity; he has been a good prime minister. India’s parliamentary democracy, however, is on occasions a rough and brutal business — and this is likely to prove one such occasion. But whatever the fate of the present government, something is fundamentally amiss with Indian intelligence. It needs to put right, not just for India’s good, but for the whole region. Relations between India and Pakistan are now on a knife-edge. That could have been avoided. At the very least, Delhi is going to have to swallow its pride and accept advice from others on security. The Indian public will not forgive any politician who is discovered to have refused such offers and put the country at risk merely out of a misplaced sense of national self-esteem. Nor are they going to forgive any attempt to divert attention away from the country’s security failings by focusing on Pakistan.
