Coastal security is a joke: Mumbai is sea-blind

There are two aspects to securing Mumbai and the region around it from terror attacks. One is to secure it from within by scanning every suspicious move, anything and everything that is out of place. The other thing is to secure the city from incursions from the sea. All serious attacks have come from there. The huge quantities of RDX used in the 12 March 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai arrived via the sea and landed on the Raigad coast. Ajmal Kasab and his cohorts arrived in Mumbai after travelling by the sea route. They landed at a fishermen’s colony between Colaba and Nariman Point in south Mumbai for perpetrating their acts of terror on 26 November 2008. Then came the floundering MV Wisdom, all of 9,000 tonnes, which ran aground near Juhu beach on 12 June this year. Only when she was almost upon Mumbai did the authorities come to realise its import. When it came so close, the worry was more about the vessel hitting the Bandra-Worli sea-link. It was less about how she stole upon the city. Then, as if to give another lesson in what hasn’t been learnt, on 31 July, the 999-tonne MV Pavit, drifting towards Mumbai from Oman since 29 June, ran aground metres from the city’s Versova beach. Until she did, no one was in the know. The security apparatus was, it seems, afflicted with a mote in the eye. When MV Pavit’s crew was taken off the vessel after it was stricken with technical failures, it was left to the Dubai-based owners to monitor its drift; the authorities went into slumber. The possibility of the vessel being a danger to Indian and other sea-faring vessels did not occur to them. The possibility of her eventually landing up in Mumbai, cutting across a busy sea-lane, did not strike them. [caption id=“attachment_54197” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“An Indian Navy helicopter leaves after dropping a bundle of metal cables onto the deck of the merchant ship, MV Wisdom which ran aground at Chowpatty Beach in Mumbai, on 16 June 2011. Punit Paranjpe/Reuters”]  [/caption] This, to say the least, was not a nice thing to do. It is also tragic, for it exposed the weakness of the coastal defence, especially against possible incursions by terrorists. It showed how, despite official action – or claims to action – the city and its coastal region were vulnerable. The enormity of the task of scouring the vast seas, especially during monsoons, for suspect boats — even as one is fighting the elements — cannot be understated. But neighbouring Gujarat, with its longer coastline, has established superiority with GPS-based tracking systems by which one can tell if there was an alien vessel on the seas approaching the coast. Maharashtra has failed here. Even policy-makers have allowed themselves to believe all is well. Recently, after being taken on board a coast guard ship Samudraprahari for a briefing, Maharashtra Home Minister RR Patil and Leader of the Opposition Eknath Khadse proclaimed they were satisfied. That one is hard to swallow, especially after MV Pavit’s drift into Mumbai waters. Much after the Samudraprahari visit, a television news channel, CNN-IBN, had exposed the many holes in the coastal system, the 500-odd unmonitored points, 56 of them in Mumbai alone, the bogus identity cards given to people claiming to be fishermen, and the jurisdictional confusion. Not comforting at all. Every successful terror attack has to be seen as a pointer to intelligence failure and lack of preparedness for any eventuality, these being the cornerstones of terror management. But failures, for instance, are camouflaged by overt steps like erecting barricades outside attacked targets like the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. It is just to show that something, tangible or otherwise, was being done. However, to prevent future threats, one requires a demonstrably functional preventive apparatus, which is currently missing. MV Pavit showed the gaps with such ease. It needn’t have, if only the authorities had looked at the actual functioning of the system in place and the incremental, if any, improvements to it. Importance, however, is given to the hardware, right from the Union Home Ministry to the local agencies. Only physical targets matter, not whether they are employed purposefully. It is not that everything is on paper alone. Some 28 sophisticated speedboats have been commissioned, five of them as recently as September 2010, and 29 more are to join the fleet. A dozen coastal police stations have been ‘operationalised’ — one takes officialdom’s word for it here — and 32 coastal check-posts activated and 24 barracks built. The hitch, as the Maharashtra government admitted at a meeting convened by Union Home Minister P Chidambaram, was that trained personnel to man even the speedboats were hard to find. And those who are at the operational end of this system have been screaming within the departments that while they have the boats, and even a motley crew, they are without fuel. Two of the new three Coast Guard stations, one each at Dahanu and Murud Janjira in Maharashtra, and a third at Veraval in Gujarat, are meant for scanning the high seas. But the progress, if any, made on the proposals is unknown. In short, Mumbai and the coast along either side of the island city is ‘sea-blind’.  It’s not the best way to run a system. But, that is all we get: a shield full of holes.