Nine years after 26/11 attack, India is safer today but still vulnerable

India has become inexplicably safer over the past years since the horrific 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks but her vulnerabilities have not diminished, argues Ajai Sahni. Crucially, India's policing apparatus – the 'first responders' in case of terrorist attacks and the most productive sources of counter-terrorism intelligence – remains decrepit, ill-equipped, and substantially unprepared.

India's internal security apparatus continues to move with characteristic and elephantine slowness nine years after the Mumbai 26/11 attacks, when the national leadership had promised it would take all possible measures to ensure that such incidents would never be repeated. A constellation of factors – domestic, regional, and global – have nevertheless worked to ensure that there have been no repeats of the 26/11 attacks since, but vulnerabilities remain endemic. Indeed, speaking of the threat of Islamist terrorism, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh rightly observed, "There has been a decline in the incidents of extremism. The credit for this should go to the followers of Islam in India."

Nevertheless, despite enveloping deficiencies and deficits, the intelligence and policing establishments have also responded with surprising alacrity and effectiveness. Specifically, with regard to the threat from the Islamic State (Daesh), at least 112 persons have been arrested, including at least 33 in 2017, and another 60 detained, for linkages with, plots connected to, or attempts to travel to join this global terrorist formation. In over three years of strident Daesh and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) incitement, one fairly incompetent plot has come to fruition in the form of a low-intensity explosion on the Bhopal-Ujjain Passenger Train on March 7, 2017, which left at least 10 passengers injured. Through 2017, there has been just one fatality relating to Islamist terrorism outside Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), the killing of the leader of the Bhopal-Ujjain train blast conspiracy, Saifullah, in Lucknow. There were 11 such fatalities in 2016 (in two incidents in Punjab, essentially an overflow of the J&K insurgency); 13 in 2015; four in 2014; and 25 in 2013. The sobering reality, however, is that while there have been significant augmentations to technical intelligence capabilities, and these have been reflected in several counter-terrorism successes, the overall capacities of central and state intelligence agencies remain cripplingly inadequate in terms of their growing mandate.