Trenchcoat City The city of dreams sleeps with an eye open. But the new terrorist is protean. Will Mumbai hold up?

APOORVA SALKADE

Heavy Metal: Anti-terrorist squad troopers stand by an armoured vehicle near Haji Ali seaface

At the Gateway of India, there is no dearth of tourists, even on a weekday afternoon. Noisy sight-seeing families, larger groups, foreigners, youngsters, locals taking ferry rides to Elephanta or Alibaug or for an hour or so at sea, are all queuing to get past the security check. They file through rickety metal detectors, separate for men and women. Across from the arched, sea-facing monument built by the British stands the iconic, vintage Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, with the Taj Mahal Tower besides. People barely notice the ropes and barricades, police vans, the guards, engrossed as they are in selfie moments marking ‘I was here, at the site of the 26/11 attacks....”

Rosalind Pereira, 44, a Colaba resident, regularly goes past the crowds and security details whenever she takes a ferry at the Gateway. Seven years after the terror of the 26/11 attacks that played out at places frequented by residents like her, Rosalind, who was pregnant when 26/11 happened, still feels deeply disturbed by them—and by the sanguinary reminder from Paris 13/11. “I don’t think anyone can forget or get over an attack like that,” says Rosalind. “I notice all the changes here—the barricades, the armoured vehicles and metal detectors, the security checks—because I use the jetty often. But come to think of it, in today’s times, when a city like Paris has been att­acked, anything can happen anywhere.”

Mumbai is a city several times scarred. Militant outfits, underworld operators in league with foreign agencies, terrorists homegrown or Pakistan-trained have all struck in India’s financial nerve-centre in big and small ways since the 1990s. But nothing could match the horrific drama of 26/11, which ran into two days and in which the attackers who came by sea used bombs, indiscriminate firing and surprise appearances at multiple points to leave over 160 dead. “Nothing of this sort had happened anywhere in the world!” says chief fire off­i­cer Prabhat Rahangdale, who had taken part in rescues at the Oberoi-Trident and the Taj. “We were not only required to fight fires but also ensure safe passage for those trapped in the targeted buildings. We also had to provide cover for the NSG commandos, for there were fires obstructing their action. It was during this operation that we learnt multi-agency coordination.”

Besides, India learnt the lesson—the hard and tragic way—that the silhouette of terror attacks had changed. “We can see the pattern emerging now, the world over,” says D. Sivanandhan, who had taken charge as Mumbai’s police commissioner right after 26/11 and later as Maha­rashtra’s police chief. “It’s fidayeen type attacks—in which the young men who come in are prepared to die. Without trying to esc­ape, they kill as many people as they can.” Unusually, Ajmal Kasab, one of the att­ackers, was taken alive, tried and hanged. An unarmed ASI, Tukaram Omble, had grab­bed Kasab and his AK-47, stomached the bullets it spat, and died while his colleagues overpowered Kasab and the Pakistani hand came to light. Also exposed in the process was how unprepared Mumbai police was. The Ram Pradhan committee criticised the police for ignoring intelligence alerts and pointed to the lack of coordination and ineffective weaponry. All the same, it praised the force for extraordinary courage. Several measures for confidence-building and better preparedness were implemented.

“There are visible changes—armoured vehicles, amphibious vehicles on the coast, increased security in public places,” says Sivanandhan, now retired and enga­ged in security and intelligence work. “We enha­n­ced capabilities through training and set up agencies like Force One and Quick Response Teams...we have an NSG base in Mumbai and police commandos are also being trained. Vehicles with well-armed commandos are stationed at 40 locations and can respond within 2-7 minutes.” The state has also set up an intelligence academy to train police officers in information gathering and collation. “We’ve improved a lot and are better prepared since 26/11,” says Deven Bharti, joint commissioner of pol­ice (law and order). “The challenge is to keep up the training and motivation.” The fire force is looking to get advanced technology, such as drones and robots, which could prove extr­emely useful in 26/11-like situations, besides non-terror emergencies.

Burnt In Memory: The Taj Mahal Palace hotel, the smoke still billowing a day after 26/11

Police officers and those formerly in khaki assure us that every new measure has been important and proved useful, but over the past three or four years, there have been news repo­rts that training is still inadequate, that the force is horribly short-staffed for a crowded, overpopulated city like Mumbai and that the boats and amphibious vehicles lie unused. They say the coast, used by Kasab and his mates to gain entry, remains vulnerable. The marine checkposts have not been functioning well. Earlier this year, a report in the Indian Expresssaid half of the police personnel posted for marine patrolling duties did not know swimming. When asked about measures taken by the Coast Guard, the spokesperson said he was not in a position to explain either the measures taken nor the challenges that his force needs to overcome to keep Mumbai and other coastal cities safe from 26/11-like entries.

People seem to be aware of the pros and cons. “Things have chan­ged quite a bit in terms of security—such as, there are a lot of regular nakabandis, increased secu­rity at entry points of major hotels, and even the watchmen of my building have amped up security: they check thoroughly before allowing people and vehicles into the premises. I do feel safe but I don’t think it’s any more so than I felt earlier,” says Akshata, a Colaba resident, who couldn’t help thinking of the 26/11 attacks when Paris happened. “The police are mostly just playing on mobile phones or chatting. I don’t know how one can feel secure after looking at them,” says another disgruntled resident.

Although there are deficiencies, security experts point out that, even if all the measures were in place and worked well, there can be no guarantee that attacks won’t happen. “We have been a victim of terrorism of some form or the other since independence. Our situation is very different from Europe, which is now seeing increased attacks, or America, which has never fought a war on its soil but for 9/11,” says D.B. Shekatkar, a retired lieutenant general who has spent more than 20 years in counter-terrorism assignments all over India.

The new challenge is that of radicalisation through the internet. Terror outfits are able to find committed footsoldiers with deep local knowledge. 

“Terrorists are three to four years ahead, always—9/11 was planned in the late 1990s. One must be able to contain internal strife, because a hostile neighbour will always jump at that chance. Proximity to trouble zones—in the case of Europe, it is Syria—is a challenge. But one has to address it at multiple levels: at the religious level, and by addressing the youth, education and economy. We must stop targeting one particular religion or one particular community,” he says. “Hate speech will only aggravate the problem.”

In the seven years since 26/11, the police have arrested members of militant Hindu outfits, recognising that terror is not an exclusively Islamic phenomenon; on the other hand, the fact that a middle-class youth from suburban Kalyan has been arrested for alleged participation in ISIS activities in Syria, has them worried. “Technology has changed and now people are getting radicalised through the internet. Home-grown networks, radicalised through the internet—these are the most dangerous, because their local knowledge will be abundant,” says Sivanandhan. He also believes that a separate anti-terror law, which “should be used with restrictions”, is the need of the hour, previous experiments such as TADA, POTA notwithstanding. “MCOCA has not been misused,” he says. “We need restrictions on application and it needs to come into force without any religious bias.”

No Stops: Leopold cafe, which was targeted by the attackers, was back in business within a week. (Photograph by Apoorva Salkade)

Karthikeya, a research scholar at the department of security and crime science at University College London (UCL), says, “The way forward is for security services to act and disrupt plots while they are in planning. There are two ways to do it. One is purely intelligence-based, where electronic surveillance plays a major role. The second is the soft policing approach, through outreach to groups at risk of radicalisation and using figures within them for information. It is the latter—quiet, steady police work and constant evaluation of intelligence—that works better in preventing events like 26/11 than just paramilitary police units.” After the train bombings in London, the UK initiated a ‘PREVENT’ programme, reaching out 1.3 lakh people and training them to “identify and prevent extremism”.

While Sivanandhan warns of kneejerk reactions by any country after an attack, and wishes that civil society members “become the eyes and ears of policing authorities”, it may not be easy. Measures that were started by the police after the 1992-93 riots with the help of moh­alla committees are hardly functional now. The challenges are intensified by the atmos­phere of identity-based and divisive politics prevalent today. Also, police forces and government agencies are unable to keep track of the changes wrought by techno­logy, through which radicalisation is achieved, and often, attacks are planned. “We have improved, but tremendous improvement is required. Eighty per cent of our efforts are to pacify people, but a determined terro­rist can still infiltrate,” says Shekatkar.

This is the reality that survivors of the attack and the rest of the city live with. But not everyone is negative. Some may look at the execution of Kasab as a closure to their agony, but there are others trying to do something positive. Like Ragini Sharma, who lost her husband at CST station, where he was posted as a ticket collector, on 26/11. In 2009, a year after the attacks, she set up the Shahid Sushil Kumar Sharma Foundation, which works in Kalyan, where she lives with her joint family, and Gwalior, their native place. “We help children in orphanages and people in old-age homes with their educational and medical needs. We hold competitions for children to mark my husband’s birth anniversary. We do as much as we can,” she says.

While Ragini takes a positive attitude, in keeping with the spirit of Mumbai, at Leopold’s, the first site that was attacked, it’s business as usual. After marking the anniversary for the first few years, Farhan, a partner at the iconic cafe, feels it is time to move on. He answers the phone wearily, “Oh no, it is that time of the year. I have no comments, really.” However, he adds, with utmost sincerity, “I really feel that you have to move on. You can get unlucky and get caught in an incident, but what can you do? It can still happen. But we have to live our lives, and we must live it to the fullest.” Seven years since, Mumbai, tired and wary, is trying to do just that.