Blasts @ MindSay 
[ Blasts Slideshow | Browse Tags ]
Time for some tough action 
As Mumbai and the rest of India come to terms with the carnage in Colaba and count the long-term costs of the devastation, there are two small points of reassurance.
First, the prolonged 60-hour shot-by-shot, live TV coverage of the siege of two hotels and a Jewish community centre, has bluntly brought home to Indians — particularly the country's opinion-makers — the ugly face of terrorism. The threat to national security and the well-being of the country could not have been driven home more unequivocally. India is no stranger to terrorism and Mumbai in particular has suffered incessantly since March 1993. But the sheer audacity of this particular operation and the spectacular publicity surrounding it ensured that every Indian, with access to TV, lived through the horror. If there ever was a wake-up call to rouse a Kumbhakarna, this was it.
Second, this was one outrage which finally snapped the endurance and infinite generosity of India. In the past, every assault on Mumbai — where, at times, the death toll was higher — had produced a flicker of anger, followed by an astonishing display of fatalism. What was often flaunted by the angst-ridden section of the media as the ‘spirit of Mumbai' wasn't a display of the gritty, stiff upper lip resolve Londoners showed during the Blitz in 1940-41. It was actually a demonstration of lofty aloofness which very easily translated into indifference or, worse, denial.
The mood is different this week; it is palpably angry. It is one thing for the three Thackerays to spew indignation. That's habitual. But when pillars of Mumbai society such as Ajay Piramal and Shobhaa De say enough is enough and when Ratan Tata expresses his understated dissatisfaction with the administration's unpreparedness, it suggests that something has finally given way. Those Swami Vivekananda once caricatured as “the patient Hindu, the mild Hindu” may well have become angry Indians.
The transformation was waiting to happen. For more than a decade terrorists espousing unacceptable causes have blown up trains, bombed crowded markets, hijacked a plane and attacked places of worship. Indians have suffered stoically but left it to governments to take remedial action. Instead of building on that trust, the political class has approached terrorism as a game of political one-upmanship, stoked subliminal fears and then left India vulnerable. Every terrorist atrocity was followed by assurances of “tough” action, greater preparedness and continuing laxity. The fanatically motivated terrorists who held Mumbai to ransom for 48 hours have made a mockery of the state's ability to protect its citizens. They not only killed but made a whole country suffer.
The men in uniform did a wonderful and professional job under difficult and even adverse circumstances. They showed what the country is capable of achieving when driven by a common resolve. But India has been shamed by the incompetence of those it entrusted with running the country. Mumbai wasn't a victim of ordinary intelligence failure; the grim truth is that there was zero intelligence. India was caught napping.
It is important to vent our anger through the ballot box, to reject those who preened while our cities burned. Unfortunately, this isn't enough. The collective choice must be shaped by a candid realisation that India is no longer on a conventional flight path: it is at war. Another wrong turn and a Mumbai that is already suffering the burden of a government's mismanagement of public finance will end up as a Beirut, a Karachi.
India doesn't need to replace an uninspiring tweedledum with a dreary tweedledee. It needs someone inspirational, someone blessed with guts, imagination, energy, integrity and application. It yearns for a leader who has the self-assurance to prescribe a bitter dose of medicine. India doesn't need a leader to manage the peace; it needs a leader who can lead us in a war. We are through with a Chamberlain; it's time for a Churchill.
As Mumbai and the rest of India come to terms with the carnage in Colaba and count the long-term costs of the devastation, there are two small points of reassurance.
First, the prolonged 60-hour shot-by-shot, live TV coverage of the siege of two hotels and a Jewish community centre, has bluntly brought home to Indians — particularly the country's opinion-makers — the ugly face of terrorism. The threat to national security and the well-being of the country could not have been driven home more unequivocally. India is no stranger to terrorism and Mumbai in particular has suffered incessantly since March 1993. But the sheer audacity of this particular operation and the spectacular publicity surrounding it ensured that every Indian, with access to TV, lived through the horror. If there ever was a wake-up call to rouse a Kumbhakarna, this was it.
Second, this was one outrage which finally snapped the endurance and infinite generosity of India. In the past, every assault on Mumbai — where, at times, the death toll was higher — had produced a flicker of anger, followed by an astonishing display of fatalism. What was often flaunted by the angst-ridden section of the media as the ‘spirit of Mumbai' wasn't a display of the gritty, stiff upper lip resolve Londoners showed during the Blitz in 1940-41. It was actually a demonstration of lofty aloofness which very easily translated into indifference or, worse, denial.
The mood is different this week; it is palpably angry. It is one thing for the three Thackerays to spew indignation. That's habitual. But when pillars of Mumbai society such as Ajay Piramal and Shobhaa De say enough is enough and when Ratan Tata expresses his understated dissatisfaction with the administration's unpreparedness, it suggests that something has finally given way. Those Swami Vivekananda once caricatured as “the patient Hindu, the mild Hindu” may well have become angry Indians.
The transformation was waiting to happen. For more than a decade terrorists espousing unacceptable causes have blown up trains, bombed crowded markets, hijacked a plane and attacked places of worship. Indians have suffered stoically but left it to governments to take remedial action. Instead of building on that trust, the political class has approached terrorism as a game of political one-upmanship, stoked subliminal fears and then left India vulnerable. Every terrorist atrocity was followed by assurances of “tough” action, greater preparedness and continuing laxity. The fanatically motivated terrorists who held Mumbai to ransom for 48 hours have made a mockery of the state's ability to protect its citizens. They not only killed but made a whole country suffer.
The men in uniform did a wonderful and professional job under difficult and even adverse circumstances. They showed what the country is capable of achieving when driven by a common resolve. But India has been shamed by the incompetence of those it entrusted with running the country. Mumbai wasn't a victim of ordinary intelligence failure; the grim truth is that there was zero intelligence. India was caught napping.
It is important to vent our anger through the ballot box, to reject those who preened while our cities burned. Unfortunately, this isn't enough. The collective choice must be shaped by a candid realisation that India is no longer on a conventional flight path: it is at war. Another wrong turn and a Mumbai that is already suffering the burden of a government's mismanagement of public finance will end up as a Beirut, a Karachi.
India doesn't need to replace an uninspiring tweedledum with a dreary tweedledee. It needs someone inspirational, someone blessed with guts, imagination, energy, integrity and application. It yearns for a leader who has the self-assurance to prescribe a bitter dose of medicine. India doesn't need a leader to manage the peace; it needs a leader who can lead us in a war. We are through with a Chamberlain; it's time for a Churchill.
Mumbai attack: Pakistan role under scrutiny
While initial reports suggested that Mumbai carnage was a localised attack by militant malcontents in India because of the "Deccan Mujaheddin" decoy that was used to claim responsibility, evidence cited by Indian army & security experts based on phone intercepts, nature of weaponry, mode of entry by sea etc., has quickly focused the attention on Pakistan.
The statement by India's normally cautious & restrained prime minister, Manmohan Singh, that groups based across the border, a thinly-disguised reference to Pakistan, has also galvanized the strategic and security community into examining Islamabad's role in the region that has already been subjected to scrutiny in the past.
Intelligence experts have zeroed in on Pakistan's role in the terrorist activities in Indian Sub-Continent. "There have been reports from credible sources for years that Pakistani intelligence has used terrorist groups to conduct war-by-proxy against traditional rival India. With the latest horrific attacks throughout Mumbai, evidence continues to accumulate that may add new substance to such reports," the website Washington Examiner noted.
What has added potency to the latest charges against Islamabad is the Bush administration's own assessment - leaked to the US media - that Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI was linked to the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul some weeks back that killed nearly 60 people including a much-admired Indian diplomat and a respected senior defense official.
This time, the US scrutiny is more intense because American, Israeli & other western nationals appear to have been singled out during the carnage. 100's of Indians have died in dozens of terrorist attacks in India in the past two decades without Washington losing too much sleep over it. In fact, Indian officials have often complained in private that successive US administrations have been incredibly indulgent about Pakistan's brazen involvement in fomenting terror in India, believing it would not touch the US.
Part of the coddling goes back to US patronage of the ISI during the Afghan war. As a result, Washington has done little to bring to book Dawood Ibrahim, a terrorist charged with masterminding the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993 that took 258 lives, although Indian intelligence agencies have identified him as living in Karachi under ISI protection.
While all major terror attacks in India are typically accompanied by knee-jerk charges from India & shrill denials by Pakistan, analysts point to mounting evidence Pakistan, especially under its military, has done little to combat the scourge of terrorism. Several terrorist and extremist leaders such as Masood Azhar & "Prof" Hafeez Mohammed Saeed, continue to thrive in Pakistan, often under official patronage. Extremists openly preach terrorism in jihadi gatherings overseen by ISI.
The Pakistani establishment has also dragged its feet on prosecuting Omar Saeed Sheikh, an accused in the Daniel Pearl murder because of his influential connections in the higher echelons of the ISI. Another terrorist Rashid Rauf, also known as the shoe-bomber, was killed last week in a US predator strike, months after he 'escaped' from Pakistani police custody while being escorted for a hearing. Western & Indian intelligence communities believe men like Sheikh and Rauf are protected by the ISI or rogue elements in the ISI.
The Pakistani military, which controls the ISI, has resisted any attempt to make it subservient to the civilian government because the army uses it both as a fighting arm for its proxy war against India & also to spy on its own civilian government.
Among the several question that security experts are grappling is the motive behind the latest attack & who stands to gain by it. The terrorists have notably not even raised the Kashmir issue for their action to be linked to the separatist cause. Nor did they attempt to extract any specific concession in exchange for hostages, other than to demand the release of "all mujaheddin".
They seemed intent on causing mayhem & dying in the same suicidal jihadi manner that was evident in the attack on India’s parliament & on the Akshardham temple earlier in this decade. Their victims, besides the scores of people who died, included India’s booming economy and tourism, both of which was the envy of a troubled neighbourhood.
While initial reports suggested that Mumbai carnage was a localised attack by militant malcontents in India because of the "Deccan Mujaheddin" decoy that was used to claim responsibility, evidence cited by Indian army & security experts based on phone intercepts, nature of weaponry, mode of entry by sea etc., has quickly focused the attention on Pakistan.
The statement by India's normally cautious & restrained prime minister, Manmohan Singh, that groups based across the border, a thinly-disguised reference to Pakistan, has also galvanized the strategic and security community into examining Islamabad's role in the region that has already been subjected to scrutiny in the past.
Intelligence experts have zeroed in on Pakistan's role in the terrorist activities in Indian Sub-Continent. "There have been reports from credible sources for years that Pakistani intelligence has used terrorist groups to conduct war-by-proxy against traditional rival India. With the latest horrific attacks throughout Mumbai, evidence continues to accumulate that may add new substance to such reports," the website Washington Examiner noted.
What has added potency to the latest charges against Islamabad is the Bush administration's own assessment - leaked to the US media - that Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI was linked to the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul some weeks back that killed nearly 60 people including a much-admired Indian diplomat and a respected senior defense official.
This time, the US scrutiny is more intense because American, Israeli & other western nationals appear to have been singled out during the carnage. 100's of Indians have died in dozens of terrorist attacks in India in the past two decades without Washington losing too much sleep over it. In fact, Indian officials have often complained in private that successive US administrations have been incredibly indulgent about Pakistan's brazen involvement in fomenting terror in India, believing it would not touch the US.
Part of the coddling goes back to US patronage of the ISI during the Afghan war. As a result, Washington has done little to bring to book Dawood Ibrahim, a terrorist charged with masterminding the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993 that took 258 lives, although Indian intelligence agencies have identified him as living in Karachi under ISI protection.
While all major terror attacks in India are typically accompanied by knee-jerk charges from India & shrill denials by Pakistan, analysts point to mounting evidence Pakistan, especially under its military, has done little to combat the scourge of terrorism. Several terrorist and extremist leaders such as Masood Azhar & "Prof" Hafeez Mohammed Saeed, continue to thrive in Pakistan, often under official patronage. Extremists openly preach terrorism in jihadi gatherings overseen by ISI.
The Pakistani establishment has also dragged its feet on prosecuting Omar Saeed Sheikh, an accused in the Daniel Pearl murder because of his influential connections in the higher echelons of the ISI. Another terrorist Rashid Rauf, also known as the shoe-bomber, was killed last week in a US predator strike, months after he 'escaped' from Pakistani police custody while being escorted for a hearing. Western & Indian intelligence communities believe men like Sheikh and Rauf are protected by the ISI or rogue elements in the ISI.
The Pakistani military, which controls the ISI, has resisted any attempt to make it subservient to the civilian government because the army uses it both as a fighting arm for its proxy war against India & also to spy on its own civilian government.
Among the several question that security experts are grappling is the motive behind the latest attack & who stands to gain by it. The terrorists have notably not even raised the Kashmir issue for their action to be linked to the separatist cause. Nor did they attempt to extract any specific concession in exchange for hostages, other than to demand the release of "all mujaheddin".
They seemed intent on causing mayhem & dying in the same suicidal jihadi manner that was evident in the attack on India’s parliament & on the Akshardham temple earlier in this decade. Their victims, besides the scores of people who died, included India’s booming economy and tourism, both of which was the envy of a troubled neighbourhood.
Quick Links
Latest Comment
Re: Im a Ruff Ryder Filling Up With Christ's Love - ugh, its so stupid its painful
| Terms of Service
| Privacy Policy
