Hyderabad Intelligence Disaster

Hyderabad intelligence disaster

By Subhash Chopra

The combined failure of national and state intelligence agencies in preventing Hyderabad blasts that cost  16 lives besides injuries to over 90 people is not just a one-off  example . It is a  clear pointer to a systemic  failure which  leaves  ordinary citizens exposed to danger again and again. Hyderabad has  not been targeted for the first time. It has suffered several  times earlier. The hanging  of Afzal Guru, the parliament  attack convict,  had clearly  made cities like  Hyderabad  vulnerable  targets of attack by  anti-national elements ,both home grown and foreign aided. 

The Central government  had  sounded  four alerts to Hyderabad included one eight hours before the explosions which turned Dilsukhnagar locality into “Dlidukhnagar”  on Thursday February 21. Hyderabd  did not need any Central alerts, it should have been wide awake  on its own. What were its police and intelligence officers doing  all along?  What were  the officers from the local thana policeman  to  SP and Inspector General doing?  Sleeping or enjoying the perks of their  posts?

For  Andhra Chief Minister Kiran Kumar  Reddy to claim , even after this disaster, that his state police was a ‘’role model’’ for others  defies all  sense and belief!

Unfortunately  it is not just Hyderabad  alone that suffers from this insomnia.  It is a systemic failure of epidemic  proportions from  which the entire  country  suffers. For instance only last week, the national capital region (NCR)of Delhi itself witnessed  a massive breakdown of law and order in NOIDA when hooligans infiltrated the trade unions during their bandh and set fire to cars and smashed factories and shops  The police ,as usual, arrived after the event  by which time  18 people had been injured, and 65 cars  had been damaged. Sixty  five people were arrested later but the damage was done.

 Wonder of wonders, the next day similar mob rule and destruction was witnessed in nearby  Okhla area?  Again the police and intelligence authorities were caught napping?

Mumbai 26/11,  the biggest  event of our national shame  in recent years, besides the attack on Parliament  itself,  betrays the same systemic slumber  of our intelligence officers. Instead of searching  our souls, we were too quick to blame the Americans for not  sharing  intelligence information on rogues like  David Coleman Headley ( Daood Gilani) and Taha wwur  Hussain Rana, who were jailed recently  by a US court on terror related charges  concerning  26/11 events in India and Denmark. Highly charged Indian media and political players have been crying hoarse over the betrayal by the US for not cooperating with India by holding back on information about Headley and Rana  and then adding  insult to injury by refusing to extradite  the pair of  them.

But what   about the ‘akal’ or intelligence of various Indian intelligence agencies and their functioning over the recent years leading up to the Mumbai carnage of 2008? What were these  highly paid, rarely questioned , far less answerable  than any other set of officers, doing  all this time? Enjoying all the perks and taking it easy at the poor citizen’s  cost ? Expecting America’s CIA and other agencies to do their work in the name of cooperation?

Headley(Gilani),  son of a Pakistani and an American woman and a self-confessed India -hater , visited India several times  for three years from September 2006 to July 2008. After spending his impressionable years in Pakistan following his parents’ divorce,  he joined his mother in America when he was 17.He himself is said to be thrice married and divorced, the latest from his Moroccan wife with whom he spent their honeymoon at the Taj hotel in Mumbai !

Headley(Gilani), an old school friend of  Pakistani army deserter Rana , was running  an immigration facilitation agency  (racket)  for US and Canada visa seekers  in Mumbai’s AC Market in Tardeo for all these years as a cover for  his anti-Indian activities in collusion with Lashkar-e-Tayyeba(LeT) and  his other masters  in Pakistan who unleashed the 26/11 assault on Mumbai. He set up his  dummy immigration office on a so-called licence  from Rana’s  Immigration Law Centre in Chicago. He even visited cities like Agra, Ahmedabad  and Kochi, ostensibly  to interview visa hopefuls or potential recruits for  his grand plan.

All this while he not only carried out  reconnaissance  of all the targets, including  hotels like the Taj on several  occasions, but also videographed  the places providing details to his handlers in Pakistan for  attacks on individual buildings.

Headley(Gilani) moved in and out of India all those years without raising the slightest of suspicion among the Indian intelligence operatives. Even after 26/11 he paid another visit in 2009, probably to gloat over his mission’s success!

Indian agencies bungled the intelligence supplied by the US agencies who had given  two specific tip-offs. In September 2008 the US agencies warned of a possible attack on targets in Mumbai , followed days later by another tip-off about a possible  coastal or maritime attack  India took up the second tip-off and strengthened coastline security but called off the patrols on November 20, just six days before 26/11, according to one report

Could there be a bigger bungle? What about the intelligence of these bunglers?

Hyderabad  is just one more chapter  in the long story  of  systemic failures of our disaster management.  Grandiose  authorities  with grand ranks keep sitting in headquarters and local thanas pushing  pens   but not  stirring outside where the  trouble  brews.

Shouldn’t   some  top heads roll  after all the tragedy and shameful  incompetence?

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