Remembering the dead and injured: A candlelight vigil in Mumbai on Nov. 30, the day after the city's nightmare ended
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India's Katrina
There is one glaring discrepancy in comparing the Taj to the Twin Towers. Americans of all political stripes came together on 9/11 and during its aftermath. In India, the feud between the ruling Congress Party and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), composed of Hindu nationalists, never paused. On Nov. 28, while Mumbai was still in the grip of terror, the BJP released a campaign ad for coming state elections that said, "Brutal terror strikes at will. Weak government: unwilling and incapable. Stop terror. Vote BJP." Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat who has been widely criticized for failing to stop the 2002 anti-Muslim violence, appeared before the cameras to announce an award of $200,000 for the families of those "who have been martyred while fighting the terrorists" and to criticize Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's address to the nation the day before as "disappointing."
The political fallout has made this tragedy look more like Hurricane Katrina — a shock that exposes a nation's structural weaknesses. The most obvious problems were the inability of the central and state governments to anticipate the terrorist attack and to respond adequately once it had begun. Home Minister Shivraj Patil, in charge of internal security at the central government, was the first to resign. He has been under intense criticism for months, the pressure mounting with each new bombing elsewhere in the country. There have been at least 10 major blasts over the past 18 months, the most recent one in Assam. Two Maharashtra state officials fell next: Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who took his actor son Ritiesh and the Bollywood director Ram Gopal Varma on a tour of the gutted Taj, and Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil, who resigned after he was quoted saying, "Small things do happen in big cities. They wanted to kill 5,000 people; we have minimized the damage."
The intelligence infrastructure that Patil leaves behind is a hornet's nest of competing interests and gaps in coordination. There were warnings earlier this fall based on telephone intercepts of an attack targeting the city, originating in Pakistan and using a sea route from Karachi, the same route used by those who smuggled explosives into the city before the 1993 Mumbai blasts. That intelligence was passed on from the foreign-intelligence bureau to the domestic-intelligence bureau and then, according to procedure, to the state police. But there was no follow-up with the local Mumbai police, who would have been the only ones to notice unusual activity in the days before the attacks. "Internal intelligence could have done better if they tried to work out the details on the ground," says M.K. Dhar, former joint director of India's intelligence bureau. "We were exposed very badly."
Perhaps most disturbing, the attacks revealed a lack of training, organization and equipment among the police. Bob Nicholls, a South African security consultant who was dining on the top floor of the Taj, decided to act as soon as he heard blasts because he figured there would be no hotel security or police at hand. He herded fellow guests into a secured room, but for two hours was unable to get any official information about what was happening. He and his team saved 150 people. An eyewitness who saw two gunmen walk toward Cama Hospital said that more than 30 minutes passed between the first blast he heard and the arrival of the police.
The men in khaki were everywhere around Mumbai after the attacks, and 16 of them lost their lives in the blasts and gunfire, but their leaders failed to fulfill one of their basic functions: to secure calm and order in a crisis. Police and army leaders gave out little information to the public, and Mumbai's police chief, Hasan Gafoor, gave his first press conference to the hundreds of journalists gathered in Mumbai on Dec. 2, six days after the attacks. In the absence of any official line, sensational cable-television broadcasts and newspapers were full of anonymous police sources giving out conflicting information about the number of terrorists, the number of hostages, the number of people trapped and the progress of the siege. At one point, while the siege was still on, several local channels reported that fresh firing had erupted at four locations near the railway station. This time, the police arrived immediately with sirens blaring — but the rumor turned out to be false.
The India That Doesn't Shine
In these days of extreme emotions, one of the biggest surprises has been the relative calm of the Indian stock market. It is about where it was the day before the attacks, with no sudden drop or panicked selling. Yet investors have certainly noticed the attacks; Mark Matthews, chief Asia strategist for Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong, says that India missed the rally over the past week enjoyed by the rest of the Asian markets. "India didn't get a share of that bounce." In the long term, he says, investors may simply start thinking of India as a place where terror attacks happen regularly and price its market accordingly. "Investors tend to get used to it."
Multinational firms doing business in India make a different calculation. One terrorist attack, or even a series of them, might change their security arrangements, but it does not affect their business plans. War with Pakistan, on the other hand, is a much bigger risk, says Amitabh Dubey, director of India research for Trusted Sources, a London-based risk consultancy firm. "An increased probability of conflict — that would change people's business plans," he says. That's exactly what happened in 2001, when the two countries moved to the brink of war and companies moved their operations out of India. "At the back of everyone's mind is the nuclear factor," he says. And the memory of that global crisis of confidence may well keep the two countries from reaching that point again.