America’s 9/11 and India’s 26/11 – how to tackle terrorism

Terrorists struck the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 – it was on 9/11, or 9th of September 2001. In India it was also on another ‘11’ – only, this 11 was for the month of November. And the year was 2008. Six years back, terrorists attacked Mumbai, the financial hub of India and killed 164 and left another nearly 300 wounded.
The terrorists had entered the city from the sea and had taken up positions inside posh hotels – they had made adequate preparations and had even stocked arms and ammunition in the hotel premises. The law enforcing agencies had no idea about what was happening till the attack came.
In the course of the retaliation by the Mumbai police and the NSG, several lives were lost and one terrorist was caught alive – he was, subsequently, hanged.
As a follow up of this act of terrorism, several suggestions were put forth to transform the Mumbai police force to an elite one with capabilities to handle threats following 26/11 – however, very little appears to have been done even though eight years have passed by.
In the Indian tradition, red-tapism and corruption rule supreme - and, it seems, the state had ordered 29 high-tech "bulletproof" speedboats to tackle possibility of terrorists entering from the sea. Unfortunately, the boats were not bulletproof after all. This is just one example.
Agreed – CCTV cameras have been installed at many places and metal detectors and other devices have also been positioned but when the need arises, the CCTV cameras are found to be unserviceable and there is no one to man the metal detectors. In any case, the very purpose of metal detectors at railway stations is defeated when there are yawning gaps on the boundary walls and fences – these have been made by locals who can get easy entry onto the platforms.
Incidentally, in February 2010, two years after the Mumbai 26/11 attack, there was a bomb blast in the German Bakery in Pune in which 9 people were killed and 60 injured.
And, more recently, West Bengal has been put to embarrassment by the disclosure that terrorists from across the Bangladesh border had set up bases in different parts of the state to train terrorists and carry out terrorist activities. These had been happening for quite a while and the police were apparently in the dark.
The bottom line is that tackling terrorism is everybody’s business because, when the terrorists strike, the bomb splinters do not kill selectively – the splinters cannot differentiate between the good and the bad.