My first blog....

Blogging is supposed to be an expression of ur own thoughts...... well its me, and if its me, it has to be something different.... so here is the difference.... my very first blog is a complete "copy-paste" blog from different news articles about the "Mumbai terrorist attacks". You may ask why so? or you may feel that i am just trying to be different for the sake of being different but that is not so.

The reason for this "copy paste" is that I have nothing new to say. You have already felt and expressed and discussed the same things that i felt about the incidents and hence there is no point repeting it. So the following part of the blog are the key lines of some of the articles i went through about the attacks. 

India is an easy target.


Not only are its intelligence units understaffed and lack resources, coordination among State police forces is also poor. "The country's anti-terror legal architecture is also inadequate; there is no preventive detention law, and prosecutions can take years," it said.

"On taking office in 2004, one of the first acts of the ruling Congress Party was to scrap a federal antiterrorism law that strengthened witness protection and enhanced police powers," he wrote.

Dhume, a Washington-based writer said the Indian approach to terrorism has been consistently haphazard and weak-kneed.

n an address to the nation on Thursday, the Singh said the group that carried out the attacks "was based outside the country" and warned its neighbours "that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated."

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's allegation that he was not allowed to visit Maharashtra yesterday and barred from visiting terror attack spots today is 'politically motivated', Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said here today.
Reacting strongly to Modi's charge that although he wanted to visit Mumbai yesterday, he was not allowed to do so, Deshmukh said "Modi need not be told that there is no point visiting places where police, NSG and the army is engaged in combating terror"."Modi's statement is reflective of the tendency of some politicians to make political capital out of any issue", Deshmukh said.

But what one fails to understand is the predictable ham-handed response that we as nation seem to adopt when dealing with terrorist attacks.One would have thought that with every successive experience our ability to deal with a terrorist situation would improve. The truth though is that the state has failed to put together any sort of credible mechanism, either at the policy level or at the ground level, to deal with a terrorist situation and responses are at best ad hoc. At the policy level after every terrorist strike various political leaders pay lip service to the need for a national body to deal with terrorism.While on the one hand there is no centralised body to deal with terror, on the other hand the NSG, which is the elite force to deal with such situations, is centralised and located only in Delhi. After every terror attack, intelligence agency of some state or the other will claim that it had warned the victim of the possibility of an attack and the warning was ignored.Scores of terrorist attacks on and with hundreds of policemen dead or wounded, nobody gives the structural problems of the police force a thought While the terrorists seem to have state-of-the-art weapons, most of our policemen are still armed with only a stick. Despite so many incidents of terror, there is still no attempt to create an elite force of cops which can deal with terror situations.Only a few months ago there was much ado about the installing of what are supposedly bomb detectors. Yet yesterday morning when we visited the station most of these contraptions were not working and there were numerous points where you could enter the station without ever passing through any of these detectors.The local administration may have many parking laws but turns a blind eye to all infractions, which means that the commandos are busy trying to move scooters and cars before they can take any action on terrorists holed up in a building.

A leading US daily has blamed "squabbling" Indian political leaders' failure to put national security above partisan politics

But a far-reaching strategy to combat terrorism remains non-existent.It certainly hasn't been for a lack of time. The first wave of terrorist violence erupted in 1984."What are we supposed to do?" asks the officer plaintively. "Most of the attacks are planned somewhere in the countryside where there is hardly any police presence. And in cities like Mumbai, where there are 15, 16, maybe even 20 million residents, there's not much we can do," he says. "In a country as big as India, we can't be everywhere. And the military isn't responsible for combating domestic terror." India has 1.2 million police and about one million paramilitary troops. It is the biggest security force in the world, but given that India's population hovers around 1.2 billion, it is still much too small. 


When broken down, the situation appears even starker. In India, there are just 126 domestic security personnel for every 100,000 people. In most Western countries, that ratio is closer to 400-500 to 100,000. Furthermore, around a fifth of police jobs are currently unfilled in India due to a lack of qualified applicants.

PM calls for a meeting with security agencies, Home Minister not invited

PAK HAND IN MUM SIEGE CONFIRMED: INTELLIGENCE

These are all broken fragment of information and i want to connect these pieces together to get a complete picture of the situation. How various factor are "using" this situation and what each one will gain or loose from this attack on humanity.  So please help me join the dots by connecting these pieces of the jigsaw.

As regards to the regularity of this blog, i am too lazy to be posting any thing regularly but once in a while when i post, it will surely be about something which I really care about (bcos thats what made me take the efforts to write it) And because it is dear to my heart,  your comments (positive or negative) will be appreciated.