Yes, inquiry needed
The country has nothing to lose and everything to gain from a proper inquiry on the Mumbai attack
Despite his disclaimer, LK Advani might well have had a political motive in asking the government to appoint a commission of inquiry, to go into the handling of the attack on Mumbai six months ago. After all, no such commission was appointed to go into the failures in handling the Kathmandu airline hijack that led to the Kandahar fiasco, which happened on Mr Advani’s watch as home minister. The leader of the opposition has tried to distinguish between one and the other by likening the Mumbai attack to war, but that is stretching things when only eight men landed in the city.
Still, Mr Advani has a point, and the government should concede it. Instead of a full-fledged commission of inquiry which would take far too long, a proper committee of inquiry imbued with sufficient independence would be a useful exercise to understand the failures in dealing with the attack, and to learn the appropriate lessons from them. After all, although the Kargil review committee did a bit of a whitewash job when it came to the intelligence and other failures that allowed Pakistan to launch its attack in the high mountains in 1999, the committee’s report has been useful in many ways.
A proper inquiry into the Mumbai episode would be similarly useful, especially in the light of recent disclosures. The attackers at the Taj Mahal Hotel, for instance, were holed up in a single room of the hotel for well over an hour (as the hotel’s closed circuit TV showed) while the Mumbai police dithered. A quick attack on that room might have prevented the carnage that went on in the hotel for the next two days. Similarly, poor handling of information coming into the police control room, and the failure to alert senior police officers on the spot, might have caused avoidable deaths in the police ranks, including of its senior officers.
Then there is the poor use made of the intelligence that came in, of an imminent sea-borne attack, the unconscionable delays in getting the National Security Guard to fly its commandos to Mumbai, the lack of surface transport when they landed, the question of whether the NSG commandos had night vision equipment, and so on. Equally serious is the reported case of the bullet-proof jackets that the Mumbai police used, which may not have been bullet-proof at all. A television channel has reported that the vests failed the tests when trial firing was carried out, and that the file on the vests is now missing — which may be a cover-up.
It is important to get to the bottom of these and other issues — not as a witch-hunting exercise but as a way of ensuring that the next crisis (for there will almost certainly be one if the likes of Mohammed Saeed are roaming free) will be much better handled.
The government could argue, with reason, that after the change of guard at the home ministry a good deal of corrective action has already been taken. The NSG will have contingent’s posted in different parts of the country; it will be better equipped than it was in November; a National Investigation Agency has been set up; there is better inter-agency coordination; the Coast Guard has been operationally integrated with the navy; and so on.
But the last thing that the country wants is for the next attack by terrorists to prove successful because lessons that might have been learnt from a full review of the Mumbai episode were not learnt and consequently no corrective action taken. The country has nothing to lose and everything to gain from a proper inquiry; indeed, one should have been ordered long before Mr Advani asked for it.