by Barkha Dutt
Transcripts of wireless communication with the police control room record that at twenty-nine minutes past ten that night, the police station closest to the nursing home sent a message saying, ‘Two terrorists from CST are walking towards Azad Maidan.’ Half an hour later the message confirmed that the terrorists had reached their target. For those thirty minutes Kasab and Ismail walked unhindered. Every moment of theirs was tracked in that interlude between the train station and the nursing home but no strike teams were diverted to stop them before they entered the nursing home. In the aftermath, an analysis of the painstakingly detailed text messages, phone calls and walkie-talkie communications would highlight the criminal collapse of the command and control response of the Mumbai police.
It was now a little after 11 p.m. Spooked by the fictional, yet suddenly too-close-to-the-bone images of bombings and assassinations on my screen, I shut down the laptop and got myself a ticket on the first morning flight from Delhi to Mumbai. Like millions of other Indians I couldn’t do much more that night except watch the chaos unleashed by the terrorists on one of our great cities.
Kasab and Ismail had taken nurses and patients hostage at the nursing home and taken up positions on its terrace. A series of messages from Sadanand Date, additional commissioner of police, would later reveal plaintive cries for reinforcements, commandos and SWAT teams to help contain the situation at the nursing home. But even after 11.30 p.m., despite heavy firing and injuries to police officers—two inspectors were unconscious on the floor, Date had been shot in the leg—no reinforcements arrived. The Pakistanis hurled a final grenade in Date’s direction and made their escape from the terrace of the nursing home. Date lay injured, waiting for help that never came; finally he called a friend on the police force who came and took him to the emergency room.
It was somewhere around the time that Date had been battling Kasab that Hemant Karkare and his team also arrived at the nursing home. Not because they had been dispatched to help Date, but because by following the trajectory of the attacks, they had heard about the gun battle at Cama.
Records of the communication between Karkare (code-named Victor on the wireless channel) and the control room show he made an urgent call for intervention. The Mumbai Police headquarters was only a few blocks away. Karkare kept messaging about the need to encircle the building so Kasab and Ismail couldn’t make their escape. He asked for quick response teams and army commandos to be rushed in. ‘Noted’—was the reply from the control room.
No support teams arrived on time. With nobody to stop them, Kasab and Ismail calmly walked out of the front entrance and hid in a thicket in the adjoining lane. Karkare, Kamte and Salaskar were in a Toyota Qualis barely a hundred metres from where the terrorists were hiding. Suddenly, the terrorists opened fired on the police vehicle. As the shooting carried on, Kamte jumped out of the car and fired at the bushes where the terrorists lay hidden. He succeeded in injuring Kasab who took a bullet in his hand.
But it was an unequal battle. The bulletproof vests that the officers wore had been purchased several years earlier, and were only good enough to offer limited protection against 9 mm bullets. They could not withstand AK-47 fire. One year later the police authorities would have to explain to the courts why they had issued substandard protective gear to their personnel. Their explanation was less than satisfactory. Apparently, they had never anticipated a 26/11-like threat. But they couldn’t explain why the jackets were purchased even after the police officer vetting them had specifically warned, in writing, how obsolete they were, unable to even guard against fire from 7.62 mm self-loading rifles (SLRs). The officer had also noted that the jackets were heavier than the norm—5.9 kg against the much preferred 3 kg weight. His report was ignored by his superiors and money was paid to the vendor on advance dummy bills, carefully kept below the spending limit so the chief minister’s office did not need to sign off on them.
With no one to run point on their operation, equipped with low-grade vests and weapons, and in the absence of a coherent or clear reaction from the central control room, the police officers did not stand a chance. They were pulled out of the Qualis by the terrorists and left to die on the streets. Kasab and Ismail settled into the front seat of the vehicle and sped away. This was a few minutes after midnight, according to police records. No ambulance or help came for at least the next forty minutes. Salaskar was still alive when the dying policemen were finally taken to the hospital; he was declared dead at one in the morning. Had medical assistance come earlier he may well have lived.
Even more strangely, by the time Hemant Karkare’s body was wheeled into Mumbai’s J. J. Hospital, the vest that had failed to save him mysteriously went missing. The police chief would later argue that the five bullets that killed Karkare went through his shoulder blade and so the quality of the bulletproof jacket was irrelevant. A sweeper would testify to finding the blood-soaked vest; incredibly he did not throw it away but alerted a nurse to its existence. Karkare’s widow Kavita would devote the remaining years of her life—she died a few years later from a brain haemorrhage—to uncovering the mediocrity and malpractice that had killed her husband.
For the next sixty hours, in a complex, sequential operation, the Pakistani terrorists launched multiple attacks on different locations, dividing themselves into four assault teams, three with two members each and one with four members. High mobility was central to the tactics of the terrorist attack; they moved swiftly from target to target to overwhelm the security forces and create an impression of being in greater numbers than they actually were.
However, one year later, J. K. Dutt, the chief of the National Security Guard (NSG)—the elite commandos who flew in from Delhi to flush out the terrorists and saved hundreds of lives—told me that there might have been more than ten men involved in the siege. Explaining that the number of terrorists had been corroborated by matching them to the number of weapons recovered after the attack, he said, ‘When I contacted a senior official in Delhi to find out how many terrorists we had to account for, I was told that I had to account for ten AK-47s. We had nine: two had been got by the local police, two at the Oberoi, two at Nariman House and three over here… It was only three hours later as our NSG dog went around looking for unexploded grenades that it sniffed out the tenth weapon lying under a lot of soot and carbon.’ Dutt worried that the method of tallying terrorists by the number of recovered assault weapons may not have been perfect; he thought there could have been more gunmen hiding in plain sight among those trapped inside the hotel. ‘We passed on to the local authorities that since the information is that some of them may have been staying as guests, you have to screen the hostages very carefully.’
Apart from the automatic rifles, the terrorists were armed with 9 mm pistols, eight to ten hand grenades and improvised explosive devices. Each bomb was assembled using high-impact RDX, digital timers and a 9-volt battery. Two were left behind in taxis and killed the unsuspecting passengers who rode in them. The last bomb was only recovered on 3 December, from the luggage of the dead and the injured at the CST railway station. Luckily, its timer had malfunctioned.
Dutt confirmed to me that at one point his commandos made the terrorists an offer to surrender, both at the Taj and at the Oberoi; to capture a terrorist alive could have meant the unearthing of a wealth of intelligence about the terrorists and their handlers. He said the offer, made face-to-face, was met with invective in Punjabi. The men had come to kill and be killed.
Muslim groups in Mumbai refused to allow their grounds to be used to bury the bodies of the terrorists. For the next twelve months, until the investigations were completed, the corpses of nine terrorists lay embalmed in a mortuary at the J. J. Hospital, after which they were buried at a secret location. The only terrorist captured alive, Ajmal Kasab, was executed in 2012; his body was buried within the precincts of Pune’s Yerwada jail.
The NSG chief believed the 26/11 attacks could not have been possible without local support. Mumbai’s police commissio
ner, Hasan Gafoor, said something similar, and then hastily retracted his comments after they provoked an uproar. But Dutt was firm. ‘Given how well the terrorists seemed to know their targets, either they had advance teams for reconnaissance or local support that guided them to their targets.’
The missing link however was not Indian; he was American.
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Monster. That was the word Rahul Bhatt, gym owner and son of film director Mahesh Bhatt, used to describe David Headley, the man with the differently coloured eyes, one blue, one brown. Rahul met Headley, the son of an American mother and Pakistani father, through Vilas, a gym instructor Headley used to work out with at a fitness centre Bhatt owned. ‘He was a true-blue, walking, talking Yank,’ Rahul told me when I caught up with him and Vilas in Mumbai to figure out how they could not have known that the guy they hung out with every Sunday for a movie or a quick bite was the man behind the Mumbai attacks. Eerily, the nickname Rahul had for Headley was ‘Agent’. Astonishingly, the two men didn’t seem to have a clue as to Headley’s true identity.
Headley, who was once an undercover informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), scouted five Indian cities for potential terror attacks and provided intelligence to the men who terrorized Mumbai on 26/11. Yet, when the United States refused to hand him over to India, only allowing Indian sleuths to interrogate him on their turf, suspicions mounted over whether he was a CIA operative gone rogue. The Indians had unhesitatingly given the FBI access to interrogate Ajmal Kasab and the initial American reluctance to even permit a meeting between Headley and Indian investigators appeared to hide something.
There were many missing pieces to the Headley puzzle. Headley was on the FBI radar for over a year before he was arrested in October. In fact, he was already under surveillance a month before the 26/11 attacks. Why was this information not passed on to New Delhi at this time? How did Headley manage to make a trip to India in April 2009, five months after the Mumbai attacks, without India having a clue that the FBI was keeping watch on him? That Headley’s half-brother was an official in the public relations office of the Pakistan prime minister has made Indians wonder just how much Pakistan knew.
Eventually David Headley pleaded guilty to all twelve charges of being a part of the LeT’s 26/11 Mumbai terror plot and admitted to receiving training in terror camps in Pakistan. That the plea bargain he worked out with the American authorities ensured that he would not get the death sentence confirmed the suspicion in India that he was some sort of valued asset for American intelligence—or perhaps knew too much. It was ironic that Ajmal Kasab, a foot soldier in 26/11, was executed and David Headley, a mastermind and conspirator was able to live.
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The 26/11 attacks changed the discourse about terrorism in India, forcing a slew of reforms in a security set-up that had become flabby and careless. But a cover-up of the multiple lapses—in the bureaucracy, the police, the political establishment and the disconnected architecture of national security that allowed every organization to function in independent silos—would come to be part of 26/11’s untold, unexplored story. Unlike the United States where a comprehensive commission of enquiry probed what made the 9/11 strike on the World Trade Centre possible, the Congress-led government in New Delhi was quick to rule out the need for such a probe, saying it already had all the facts it needed. Some perfunctory political punishment was meted out; the sartorially fixated home minister, Shivraj Patil, resigned his job as did the Bollywood-obsessed chief minister of Maharashtra, Vilasrao Deshmukh, who took movie director Ram Gopal Varma on a terror tour of the Taj hotel.
But oddly the bulk of public angst, at least among the middle-class TV-viewing segment, was reserved for the media. What was it about this television coverage that so rankled a section of the citizenry, while drawing generous praise from others? Was it that the journalists—I among them—were not in control of the story, or was it that there was something about the nature of the attacks themselves that had unleashed a typhoon of urban rage?
Quite apart from the fact that it brought home, again, the frequent thanklessness of being a television journalist—you could spend days in perilous situations without food or sleep but still return to a volley of feedback steeped in hatred—I was curious to understand what these responses revealed to us about the changing response to terrorism.
What collective nerve had the attacks touched that suddenly none of the old rules applied? When I took my place, by turns opposite the Oberoi Hotel and the Taj, jostling with not just other camera crews but also the bhel-puri wallah for a little patch of space, I had already been covering terrorism and violence in society for a long time. Apart from years of experience both at the border and within the Kashmir Valley, I had reported on countless encounters and explosions in cities as varied as Jammu, Varanasi, Delhi and Mumbai. In these situations, we had often chronicled the despair and anguish of relatives—mothers, sons, and sisters—sometimes through wordless images, at other instances with spot interviews. We all drew our own red lines of course—no thrusting of mikes in the faces of survivors or grieving families, no ambulance chases, utmost circumspection about how graphically you could show a body that had just been blow up by a bomb and so on. What was different about the public response to the media, during and after 26/11, was the fact that this was the first time we were being individually and collectively criticized for the job we were doing. Why was this so? Why was it palatable to these viewers for the mother of ten-year-old Yash Vyas to speak to us in a cramped public hospital in Gujarat just hours after her husband died and while her son was still battling for his life in the ICU, and not okay for the husband of journalist Sabina Saikia to walk up to me in Mumbai and ask to be on my live broadcast, just in case his wife was still alive inside the Taj and watching the news? Like so many other distraught family members who waited with us in those seventy-two hours in Mumbai, her husband wanted his voice to be heard by his wife and by all the people watching. Perhaps talking about his loved one would serve to alleviate the panic just a little rather than just helplessly waiting for whatever outcome there was going to be. Perhaps he wanted his beloved partner, the person who was possibly on the verge of death, to be humanized, understood intimately and celebrated, before she became just another forgotten number on the list of those killed.
None of the angst about television coverage came from the families we met; those who were outraged on their behalf were not living their horror, they were watching the news from the distant and safe comfort of a TV monitor.
Afterwards I heard some snide comparisons made between the US media and ours. People asked why we couldn’t be more like the American networks had been while reporting on the 9/11 attacks—no stake-outs at hospitals where the injured were taken, no interviews with heartbroken husbands or mothers and no mention of the dead, just sanitized studio talking heads. The United States, under President George Bush, also banned the images of military coffins that came home from his ill-chosen war in Iraq. Explaining the government censorship—mutely complied with by TV stations—the Washington Post had written in a 2003 op-ed: ‘Since the beginning of the Vietnam War presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of US soldiers arriving at air bases in flag draped coffins.’ Big networks did not fight the decision in a country where the First Amendment on free speech is considered sacrosanct; it did not dwell on funerals and the suffering of the families that had been left behind either. The point I’m trying to make is that the supposed restraint displayed by the US media in recent times has had a lot to do with political imperatives rather than any self-imposed curbs rising out of some moral code. And, in any case, hasn’t the same western media today opted to showcase the haunting photograph of a dead Syrian boy washed ashore on a Turkish beach to underline the humanitarian refugee crisis unfolding in a war zone torn asunder by the Islamic State (ISIS)? They have, in a break from their self-censorship of grief during 9/11, also interviewed the f
ather of the boy who was trying to emigrate with his family to Canada, when their boat capsized. The photograph drew instant comparisons with Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning picture of a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked, tormented by the scalding burns of a napalm attack. Both these photographs were graphic and disturbing but they also reinforced the power of the single image that becomes too strong to turn away from.
Most Indians have shared the photograph of the three-year-old Syrian boy on their Twitter timelines and Facebook pages. But how would TV viewing classes—who were already apoplectic about us interviewing families and friends—have reacted to a similar image of a dead child killed in the Mumbai terror strike? Television never broadcast such an image but we faced a violent backlash nevertheless.
By contrast—and with the cushion of a few years separating the trauma of the Mumbai attacks from our information-saturated age today—our viewers did not complain when a ten-year-old girl stood in salute at her soldier-father’s funeral when television broadcast the funeral ceremony live or when the teenage son of an assassinated police officer on duty in the Maoist-controlled forest promised through a flood of tears that once he grew up he too would don the uniform. We did not ask for the censorship of these raw emotions because psychologically they made us feel better about our future; perhaps they tapped into our need for hope and our search for heroes.