It was the evening of India’s horror, and its memory and images refuse to go away even one year after the event. The terrorist attack on Mumbai on the evening of November 26, 2008, is an event that imposed itself on the nation’s memory because of the sheer daring of the attackers, the destruction and killing they carried out, and the slow reactions of the Indian State and its various law-enforcing agencies in counteracting the terrorists and rescuing those who had been held hostage in the two principal hotels of Mumbai. These factors should not deflect attention from the fact that the event also saw acts of great heroism, fortitude, sacrifice and human kindness. The nation’s character had been put to the test, it seems in retrospect. The State had been found wanting; the common soldier and policemen and ordinary men and women doing their duty had emerged triumphant.

That last sentence might appear to be a bit harsh on the State, which after all had finally rescued the hostages, killed or apprehended the terrorists and restored a semblance of normalcy. But one cannot reflect on the event without reckoning with the colossal intelligence failure it represented. The operation must have taken months of planning, and India’s spook establishments were either ignorant or unprepared. It took the State a few hours to wake up to the enormity of what was happening: the National Security Guards and the commandos reached Mumbai nine hours after the violence had occurred. The official version continues to be that only 10 men perpetrated the horror without any local collaboration. Even before the recent revelations about the activities of David Headley, doubts had been raised about the claim that the terrorists had no local links. Those collaborators were allowed to melt into the multitude of Mumbai and have not been heard of since.

The most important aspect the attack highlighted was India’s vulnerability to terrorist attacks from within and without the country. Even after one year, this sense of vulnerability has not disappeared; if anything, the sense of impending doom has been aggravated. That there has been no repetition of Mumbai offers no comfort. One reason for this is that every single terrorist attack on India originates in Pakistan. Sometimes, the attacks exhibit pug marks that point to the direct involvement of the Pakistan government or its ubiquitous intelligence agency, the ISI. The Indian government is at its wits’ end to counter this terror primarily because no one, leader, party or military, seems to be in control in Pakistan, a country held at ransom by Islamic fundamentalists. The attack on Mumbai showed that India is condemned to be a threatened State because its western neighbour is a terror State.