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The three days of excruciating pain that Mumbaikars suffered and survived last month hit home like no other terrorist attack in India, as I watched the horror unfold, safe in my living room 10,000 miles away. I lost a former senior colleague to the Taj Mahal Palace hotel siege. I was saddened, shaken and sobered. The next time, it could be my family or my close friends, in their own homes, in my home country.
Much has been said, and rightly, about the failings of a country -- which easily qualifies as a terror veteran -- to secure its people against such attacks, to put in place a semblance of a viable anti-terror system.
But it's the utter lack of purpose or urgency that has enraged me more than anything else. And, luckily, it has angered an entire nation. Besides the obvious big hole we have for anti-terror tactics, some of us have shown, and again, a blatant lack of character: a basic instinct that not even a national emergency like Mumbai could suppress for long.
That, to me, was most hurtful, enraging, and calls for some immediate introspection.
Like always, it begins at the top, with our leadership.
First the good news: heads rolled. Finally. The bad news: when and why they rolled.
Until December 26 -- when terror claimed the Indian elite as well -- the common man was the target of most attacks. I don't recall a single politician worth a national mention losing his/her life in a similar terror attack. (Former prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi died in attacks, but they were targets of a different political story).
Is this the reason for such remarkable callousness on the part of our leaders?
Or is it sheer lack of character?
The Leadership
Let's start with the Home Minister (Minister of Home Affairs), who is responsible for law and order, and internal security. According to its own vision statement, the ministry should strive to "eliminate threats to internal security including militancy, insurgency and terrorism". As a citizen, this is the office I'd go for answers. But for some curious reason, no one in power has been answerable thus far.
Until now, no one has even so much as taken responsibility for failing to protect the country's citizens. We are just expected to live with terror, like bad weather. After Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New Delhi were attacked in quick succession barely six months ago, the Home Minister came under pressure to quit, and that too in style (one TV channel got after him for finding time to change his shirt three times while Delhi burned).
It never happened. We are not used to taking responsibility for anything. Accepting our failings, somehow, shows us in poor light, no? We don't see that as strength of character.
But Mumbai did it. The attacks were high-profile, stunning and had caught the world's attention. The pressure to quit was acute, despite the fact that the country goes to poll next year and the ruling party will have to do a lot of explaining while campaigning.
The home minister, Shivraj Patil, finally quit, taking "moral responsibility" for the attacks. So did the national security adviser (how could he not?).
* Next on the guillotine was R.R. Patil, deputy chief minister of Maharashtra -- the western state of which Mumbai is the capital -- for calling the attacks a "minor incident". Here's his masterpiece:
In a big city such as Mumbai, incidents likes these keep happening.
He had to be asked to resign by his party chief, a move that he later had no qualms crediting to his "own conscience".
* Next to go was his boss, the chief minister of Maharashtra, Vilasrao Deshmukh. While he said he took "moral responsibility" (that's the new catchphrase) for the attacks in his capital city, the fact that he walked into the damaged hotels with his Bollywood actor son and a filmmaker days after the attacks, didn't help either (the press called it a "terror tour") . He pleaded that the film maker's presence was a coincidence, but it didn't look too good.
* Our leadership hit a new low, when the chief minister of the southern state of Kerala put his ego ahead of a dead officer -- Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan -- who lost his life in the gun battle at the Taj hotel. The CM turned up at the officer's parents house in Bangalore to
