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Mumbai Police called to
account
By Raju Bist
MUMBAI -
On Wednesday, two days after bombs planted in a pair of
Mumbai taxis exploded, killing at least 52 people in the
vicinity and injuring 110 others, the Times of India ran
a telling photograph on its front page. Holding a
microphone, a senior police officer knelt before Deputy
Indian Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, who, as the
home minister, is also in charge of all police forces
within the country.
Advani had flown down from
New Delhi and was addressing TV crews at Zaveri Bazaar,
one of the two sites that had seen much death and
devastation. "When the Mumbai cops are only involved in
protecting, serving and being bullied about by their
political bosses, when will they find the time to track
down criminals planning terrorist attacks?" disdainfully
asked an old-time reader of India's largest-selling
English-language newspaper.
Failure of police
intelligence, fueled largely by political interference
in the working of the Mumbai Police - which once proudly
called itself "the Scotland Yard of the East" - has been
pinpointed as the main reason for the twin blasts, the
latest in a series.
The blasts cannot be looked
at in isolation. They have to be linked to six other
bomb blasts that have taken place in Mumbai since last
December and the 11 that have rocked the metropolis in
one single day on March 12, 1993. Including Monday's
attacks, 61 people have been killed and 255 injured in
Mumbai's bomb blasts in the past nine months. And the
March 1993 attacks claimed 150 lives and 320 injuries.
In repeatedly selecting Mumbai as the scene of the
crime, the terrorist organizations behind these
activities seem to be sending a clear message: look, we
have succeeded in bringing your most affluent city to
its knees.
In the latest offensive, two taxis
were hired from the northern suburbs of Khar and Andheri
and taken to south Mumbai, the most developed part of
the city. The bombs were placed in the hand baggage of
the passengers and these were stored in the boots of the
cabs. One of them (registration number MH02-R-2022) was
driven to the parking lot between the Taj Mahal Hotel
and the Gateway of India, two very popular tourist
destinations. The other (number plate MH02-R-4421) was
taken to the crowded Zaveri Bazaar area, housing shops
and offices of some of the biggest gold and silver
jewelers in the country. The two locations were less
than 10 kilometers apart and the bombs - police now say
composed of RDX - were triggered off by remote control.
The cold-bloodedness and precision of the
attacks brought back memories of similar ones on recent
months. They also underlined the fact that the
terrorists had somehow located the city's soft belly and
were repeatedly succeeding in hitting at it. To
understand better how they accomplished their
activities, here, in brief, is a chronology of bomb
blasts in Mumbai since December:
December 2, 2002: Two persons were killed and 28
injured after a bomb exploded in a public transport bus
standing outside Ghatkopar railway station in central
Mumbai.
December 6: A bomb burst in a crowded food court in
Mumbai Central, the last stop for long distance trains
on India's vast Western Railway network.
January 27, 2003: A woman was killed and 25 persons
injured in a blast near Vile Parle station in north
Mumbai. The explosive had been placed on a bicycle,
parked in a busy marketplace outside the station.
March 13: A bomb went off in a compartment of a
local train just as it entered Mulund station late in
the evening. In all, 12 commuters were killed and 70
injured.
July 28: Four persons were killed and 32 injured
when a powerful blast ripped apart a public transport
bus, again in Ghatkopar.
Of all the detonations,
the one that really jolted the Mumbai citizen, admired
all over the country for his sang froid, was the
train explosion on March 13. For the significance of the
date was not lost on him - it was the day after the 10th
anniversary of the serial blasts in Mumbai.
In a
smoothly orchestrated operation on March 12, 1993,
terrorists struck with a series of 11 bomb blasts at
important city landmarks, including the Stock Exchange,
the Passport Office and the skyscraper housing the
corporate office of Air India, the country's
international airline. Intelligence authorities later
said that the campaign had been masterminded by Dawood
Ibrahim, Indian smuggler turned mafia don, now believed
to be in hiding in Karachi, the port city in Pakistan,
under the protection of Pakistan's Inter-Services Agency
(ISI).
The Indian government has often accused
the ISI of frequently fomenting trouble in Kashmir as
well as other parts of India. Apparently Ibrahim, a
Muslim, had agreed to a pact with the ISI to avenge the
deaths of thousands of Muslims in the 1992-93 communal
riots in Mumbai after the destruction of the disputed
Babri mosque structure in the northern Indian town of
Ayodhya.
The repeated attacks lead to one
question: Why Mumbai? A number of theories have been
propounded. According to one, by virtue of its
cosmopolitan nature, Mumbai offers outsiders, including
antisocial elements, easy scope to mingle and get lost
in a crowd. To add to the woes, it is estimated that on
an average, 400 new families migrate to the city in
search of a livelihood from the more underdeveloped
interiors of the country.
They usually end up in
the slums that are proliferating all over the metropolis
- today, 60 percent of the city is covered with slums.
Unauthorized, crowded and dirty, these slums in turn
offer a potential terrorist ideal hideouts to stay and
plan his forays. The general indifference of the Mumbai
dweller, with him being bothered only about increasing
his bank balance and not curious to know why those
shady-looking men were coming out of his neighbor's
flat, also add to the problem.
Mumbai is also
being targeted because it is the business and finance
capital of India. The two biggest stock markets in India
- the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock
Exchange (NSE) are located here. Bhabha Atomic Research
Center (BARC), the nerve center of India's nuclear
program, is in Mumbai. Most of the biggest Indian
companies have either their head or marketing office in
Mumbai. The country's biggest airport as well as seaport
are here. It has thriving textile and metals markets and
the studios in the Mumbai suburbs churn out more than
800 films every year.
But the main cause of the
growing terrorist attacks in Mumbai is the complete
failure of the Mumbai Police. Senior commentator Olga
Tellis, writing in the Asian Age, points out, "The
emasculation of the police force has been cited as one
of the potent reasons for the failure of intelligence in
anticipating bomb blasts." Several top police officials
as well as retired officials told her that the police
force today is not concentrating on its main work.
With posts from that of commissioner of police
to a constable on sale and transfers and promotions
available at a price, policemen are more concerned with
trying to get their investment back than with their
duties as enforcers of the law. Those who are unable to
pay for postings and promotions are dejected and
demoralized, leading to chaos in the functioning of the
force.
Most police officials, present and past,
allege that things have never been as bad as they are
today under Chaggan Bhujbal, the home minister of
Maharashtra, the state of which Mumbai is the capital.
He is directly in charge of the functioning of the
Mumbai Police and it is said that his writ runs large in
all matters pertaining to the functioning of this
department. Bhujbal has been in the seat through all the
blasts that took place from last December onward.
But apart from the opposition periodically
braying for his scalp, not much has happened, simply
because he is the right-hand man of Sharad Pawar,
India's former defense minister and the powerful leader
of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which rules
Maharashtra state in tandem with the Congress Party. If
Bhujbal is dislodged from his important portfolio, Pawar
will withdraw his support to the coalition and the state
will plunge into a political crisis.
Mid-Day, a
popular afternoon paper in Mumbai, recently asked the
city's former police commissioner Julio Ribeiro how he
would rate Bhujbal on a scale of 0 to 10. Pat came the
reply, "Zero!" After his Mumbai stint, Ribeiro had been
invited by the government of Punjab to handle growing
extremist activities in the northern Indian state. He
had handled the assignment with much aplomb and, in
league with another police officer, K P S Gill, had
crushed all traces of terrorist activities. He has since
retired in Mumbai, but is still referred to as "Supercop
Ribeiro".
Immediately after the May 25 blasts,
Pramod Mahajan, the suave general secretary of the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules in New Delhi
in coalition with 23 other parties, had asked for the
dismissal of the NCP-Congress government in Maharashtra.
In response, Ribeiro was quoted as saying, "It is not
the whole government that should be dismissed on the
issue of the blasts, but only Home Minister Bhujbal.
"The higher the morale in the police force, the
better is their commitment to their jobs and the chances
of such things [blasts] happening would be reduced. They
would be more vigilant and worried about the possibility
of attacks of this type. The politicians want to run the
force for what it gets them in terms of clout and money.
All this has really demoralized the force and caused a
lot of unhappiness," he added.
"Police standards
are better today than they were 20 years ago. Brain
power is better. But they are concentrating more about
how to make money than doing their jobs. You have to
change the home minister. He's the real culprit. What
police officers tell me is that they have to pay for any
posting or promotion. It's ridiculous that the only
thought is about money."
That Ribeiro's words
carry some weight is borne out by one fact: most police
officers eschew a transfer to the Special Branch-I
(SB-I). It is the police arm for intelligence gathering,
but is not considered "sexy" enough simply because there
is not much scope to make "under the table" money there.
In fact, within the force, allotment of duty at this
wing is considered a "punishment posting". The result:
Gathering intelligence has failed to remain a priority
for the Mumbai Police.
The irony is that when
one wing of the police department actually does its job
properly, another puts the spoke in the wheels. This
happened when Syed Khwaja Yunus Khwaja Ayub, a key
accused in the first Ghatkopar bus blast, escaped from
police custody while he was being taken to Aurangabad, a
town in the interior of Maharashtra, for inquiry. The
vehicle carrying the accused met with an accident. Four
policemen who were accompanying him could not prevent
his escape. They were later suspended but Ayub has not
been caught again.
Neither have any big brains
tackled the blasts to date. Had some success been
achieved in this area, it would have saved a lot of
heartache. For the Indian government has been warned of
the existence of more independent modules of terrorists
who could strike terror in Mumbai.
Two events in
particular could lead to more fundamentalist Islamic
anger being vented against the soft target that Mumbai
is turning out to be.
The first: failure of the
courts in Britain during Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra
Modi's recent visit there to take any action for his
role in the state-sponsored massacre of Muslims. Last
year, many Muslims were killed in the western Indian
state of Gujarat in retaliation to the torching of a
railway coach carrying Hindu pilgrims in Godhra in that
state.
The second relates to the pronouncement
of the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) that its
investigations last month have led to the finding of the
remains of a 10th-century temple under the disputed
Babri structure in Ayodhya. Both Hindus and Muslims have
been claiming the land as their own. And it was this
bitter fight that resulted in the destruction of the
structure and the communal riots later on.
The
worse is not over for Mumbai's citizens. This is the
time when they need their police force to be at the peak
of its efficiency. The policemen are very highly
trained, and when needed, are capable of showing their
true mettle - provided the political bosses agree to let
go of them.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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