Over Thanksgiving break, the world was gripped by the coordinated terrorist attacks throughout the city of Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, in India. Mumbai is India’s financial capital and is a city that is gradually representing India’s rise as a global player. The recent violence, though, has shocked Indians to their core and caused doubts in the international community as to the effectiveness of the war against al-Qaeda and its followers.
The attacks, which claimed 174 people as of this briefing, were carried out by ten gunmen. Nine of those gunmen were killed when Indian forces raided the three major targets of the terrorist forces: the Taj Mahal hotel, the Oberi-Trident hotel, and a Jewish community center. The one gunmen who was caught alive and interrogated has said that the group received training in Pakistan, a fact that is bound to upset the already tense relationship between India and Pakistan.
This briefing will give a brief summary of the attacks, the implications for the India-Pakistan relationship, and what these attacks mean for India’s future. It is with these facts that extempers can start to sift through the information that has been published about the attacks and start to create a grounded understanding that can aid them in rounds this week.
The Attacks
The attacks on Mumbai were launched on a Wednesday, when the ten gunmen took a hijacked Indian boat and landed in the city. The gunmen, armed with AK-47s and grenades, were said to have looked more like backpackers than terrorists. Upon landing in the city, the gunmen came through Mumbai’s main train station and opened fire into the crowd of waiting passengers. After firing into the crowd, the gunmen came out of the train station and are said to have ambushed a police van, killing Mumbai’s counter-terrorism head and four other policemen, and then hijacking the vehicle.
Commentators have argued that Mumbai was poorly prepared for such an attack. Indian journalists who were in the train station when the gunmen opened fire argued that many police were content to hide instead of engaging in a gunfight with the militants, a decision that might have helped the gunmen flee rather than pinning them down in the train station when they were outnumbered sixty to ten. Other observers note that Indian police were only equipped with batons or World War I-era weapons and were no match for the firepower of the militants.
Due to the fact that Mumbai does not have a SWAT team, unlike large American cities such as Los Angeles, the gunmen were able to take up refuge at the Taj Mahal and Obert-Trident hotels as a well as a Jewish community center. Here they preferred to take hostages of American, Israeli, or British descent. According to the AP News wires, the only SWAT-like force in India, the National Security Guards, had be called in from New Delhi which gave the gunmen as much as a ten hour head start.
During the standoff, Israeli intelligence officials criticized the execution of the Indian national forces in stopping the gunmen. These intelligence analysts have argued that the raids on both hotels happened far too slowly and demonstrated that Indian troops were too concerned in looking out for their own safety rather than stopping the gunmen and rescuing the hostages inside.
Coupled with these facts, and the deaths of six Americans as well as civilians from countries such as Japan, China, Singapore, Italy, and Britain, it is no surprise that Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh has promised to bolster defense forces and overhaul the national police forces. It is just unfortunate that such a tragedy had to occur for India to reconsider the way that it provides for its domestic security. What makes this even more startling is that this is not the first time Mumbai has been under attack from terrorists. As the latest edition of The Economist indicates, Mumbai suffered through seven different explosions at railway stations in a coordinated attack in 2006 that killed over 180 people.
Relations with Pakistan
India and Pakistan have had a very tense relationship since the partition that created both countries in 1947. Tensions have been high because of the different religious makeup of each country, with Pakistan being Muslim and India Hindu, and are especially high over the territory of Kashmir, which each country has claimed a share of since partition. The area of Kashmir is divided by a 450 mile Line of Control (LoC), where Indian and Pakistani troops were stationed and sometimes take “pot shots” at each other. Although there is a burgeoning independence movement in Kashmir, neither India or Pakistan is willing to acknowledge it, and due to that fact the most likely solution to this problem will eventually be a semi-autonomous state where both countries have equal influence.
To get to this point in negotiations, though, requires a high degree of trust. Before the Mumbai attacks, India and Pakistan, helped by the new government of Asif Zardari, were making great strides in their negotiations. Trade between the Indian and Pakistani controlled parts of Kashmir was opened on October 21st for the first time since 1947 and trade between both countries according to the Christian Science Monitor on November 26, 2008 has gone from $345 million in 2004 to $2.2 billion this year.
Despite these strides, tensions still exist beneath the surface between the Indian and Pakistani governments and extempers must always be aware of these tensions in their speeches on issues that concern India and Pakistan. Extempers who currently compete do not remember how close India and Pakistan came to going to war in 2002 following the bombing of India’s parliament the year before. Due to the fact that India and Pakistan both have nuclear weapons, any conflict between the two sides is an area of grave international concern.
Intelligence experts believe that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai must have been trained by outside forces due to their efficiency and the length of time they were able to hold off Indian security forces. Observers have noted that the attackers were very deadly, making sure one was always firing and giving another attack time to reload their weapon. Due to this fact, the Indian government believes that the gunmen received outside help, which usually leads to the finger being pointed at Pakistan.
This finger pointing has been justified by a revelation by the surviving gunmen that they received training in Pakistan and that he had been part of a group of Muslim separatists in Kashmir. If this remark is true then it would make Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda, at the forefront of this recent conflict. Lashkar was created by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s intelligence agency, to fight India in Kashmir. However, the group was banned by then-Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in 2002 due to pressure from Western nations.
When extempers evaluate the India-Pakistan relationship over this conflict they must keep in mind that there has long been suspicion that the ISI is not being controlled by the Pakistani government. Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto once argued that the ISI operated like a “state within a state.” The Council on Foreign Relations, in a write up on the ISI on November 27th, indicate that the ISI has more loyalties to the army than to the prime minister, who it is supposed to be accountable to. Also, the ISI is responsible for the support of the Taliban when they took over Afghanistan (and some in the U.S. would argue the current Taliban insurgents) and for supporting Islamic rebels when they fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1979 because they did not want a Communist Afghanistan aligning with a Communist India. I suggest going to the Council on Foreign Relations website (http://www.cfr.org) and reading about this organization as they can cover it in more depth than I can here.
India’s Future
The current Indian administration under Singh is being very restrained in its current criticism of Pakistan. Although India seems to be pointing the finger at Lashkar, this could be considered a more direct attack on the ISI rather than the current Pakistani government. In fact, the Zardari administration in Pakistan has gone ahead and gotten rid of the ISI’s political wing.
However, the slow response to the crisis could play into the hands of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who opposes Singh’s Congress-led government. Singh’s government faces a mandated general election in May and that could create problems considering that Indian voters have a tendency to throw out incumbent administrations, sometimes with little cause to do so. If the BJP were to win the elections, it would harden relations with Pakistan due to the Hindu extremist bent of the BJP. This election result might also create more terrorism because Muslims, who make up a little over 13% of India’s population, already feel oppressed due to the Indian government’s stand on Kashmir (India’s only Muslim majority state) and lagging behind Hindu’s in terms of income, jobs, and education.
Extempers should take notes of some quick changes in the Indian administration, some of which may eventually help the Indian economy. Not surprisingly, India’s home minister, Shivraj Patil, resigned over the attacks and was replaced by the finance minister, P. Chidambaram. Chidambaram was chosen to take over this ministry in the government because two decades ago he was the minister of state for internal security. The Congress-led coalition hopes that his experience in security matters will repair the image of a party that failed to protect India’s citizens from terrorism. Singh is going to temporarily take charge of the financial portfolio for the government, which has stabilized markets because Singh is an economist by trade. However, it is interesting to note that even in a time of global economic crisis, India felt comfortable to make a change at its financial ministry, which demonstrates that the government is on the run from this militant attack. There is even the chance of Singh being forced to resign over the attacks, although attempts to push him to that point appear to have gotten nowhere.