Comment

What would you have done differently if you were commissioner of Police on 26/11?” Julio Ribeiro says he has been asked this question every day after Mumbai’s terror attacks. What he would have done differently he says, is that he would have been ‘seen’ and he would have been ‘heard’. Then he added ruefully, “that’s it. There’s no way anyone could have prevented it.”

This exchange took place in a seminar organised last week by Bombay First in collaboration with London First. Titled Lessons from 9/11 and 7/7 for a safer Mumbai, it brought together experts from New York and London who had hands on experience of the World Trade Centre and London Underground terrorist attacks. Their message can be encapsulated in one single line; the government is not the solution; it is only part of the solution.

In other words, we cannot sit back and say the government must do this and the government must do that. We have to see what we can do along with the government, the ‘we’ being business corporations, NGOs and citizens of the country. The United States and Britain have both put together a programme which involves public participation in such a way that there is now a heightened awareness of terrorist threats.

People keep a look-out for bags left unattended; apartments are not easily given on short lets; retail outlets keep a look-out for suspicious behaviour.

Are we similarly prepared? Suppose you see suspicious activity of some kind, do you report it? Do you know which number to ring and having rung the number is there a positive response at the other end? We now know that our intelligence agencies had specific information on nautical movement; we also know that there was detailed information available about multiple mobile SIM cards being bought and sold in a devious way. We also know that none of the information was acted upon. If it had been, 26/11 could well have been prevented.

Another point UK and US experts harped upon was transparency from the government so that everyone knew what the state was doing to ensure citizen safety. What we have from our government is instead opacity. For example, do we know what steps the Maharashtra government has taken to bolster security after 26/11? All we know is that a committee was constituted to study the question, but apart from knowing that it consisted of an unwieldy 65 members, do we know anything about its composition, its mandate, its deadline or its record so far?

The experts also outlined the huge amount of documentation and research brought out by the enquiries into 9/11 and 7/7. This massive storehouse of knowledge was able to provide detailed inputs to investigative agencies about the modus operandi of the terrorists, the gaps in the security systems, the failure of communication between various authorities and how they could be bridged and so on. Apparently, when the bombs went off in London’s tube stations,the Commissioner of Police advised people to stay put wherever they were, either at home or at work and watch television for
further announcements. Simultaneously however, schools were quickly closed for the day, so that thousands of school children were on the streets of London wondering what to do, while their parents sat at home waiting for further instructions. This kind of blunder caused by lack of communication is not likely to happen again.

What information has our police enquiry gathered? And why has the most important source of possible information been excluded from its purview? I am referring to what the general public may have seen or heard, information that could be available only if there were to be a public enquiry inviting any citizen with relevant information to come forward.

All these suggest that in spite of the trauma of 26/11, we are nowhere near learning any lessons at all.