Double failure

The fracas in the Maharashtra assembly over the non-release of the Ram Pradhan committee report about the November 2008 terror attacks on Mumbai points to at least two deep schisms in the state — between the ruling allies, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party and between various factions of the Indian Police Service (IPS).

The result is that the government has tabled the report but amidst objections from its own allies and the opposition, has not released its contents.

The obfuscation implicit in this can be linked to the peculiar nature of the report, which allegedly indicts Mumbai’s then police commissioner Hasan Gafoor, but clears everyone above and below him. The man who has since replaced Gafoor, D Sivanandan, who was then the state intelligence chief, has only been mildly admonished, although the failure of the intelligence agencies has been mentioned.

The rest of the report is a typical bureaucratic exercise, aimed at paying lip service to public anger rather than addressing real issues and problems. All this is of course in the realm of conjecture, as reported in various media, since the government thinks the good citizens of this city do not deserve to know the report’s findings.

Yet, surely, Mumbai and the country deserve more. It was immediately clear that the Mumbai police and the state administration were helpless, if not clueless, in the face of such a brazen attack. Several policemen and innocent citizens lost their lives. No one person can be held at fault, but surely there was systemic failure.

The objective of an inquiry report is not to point fingers but to find out what went wrong and demand some accountability. Instead, we are witness to this ridiculous farce, which insults our intelligence and further undermines the functioning of the police. The internal politics of the police force seems to have cast its shadow on the findings. It had also happened before the ghastly incident, when the state’s most senior police officers were caught in a legal tussle over who deserved the top job.

It is the state administration — this one and the last one —  however, which must face the most opprobrium. Its handling of the situation has been cynical and irresponsible. The problems facing our systems are endemic and need action. The government has failed the city twice, first when it failed to manage that crisis and now by not telling us what exactly went wrong.