कोणी बॉम्ब लावतो कोणी गोळ्या झाडतो, तरी भारताचा राजा झिम्मा खेळतो

My sincere condolences to all those whose near and dear ones have been killed or injured in the attack. I feel really sorry and helpless that this happened and we just watched, paused for a few days and are back to work now. Some politicians are taking the fall - some of them undeservedly, but the real problem of intelligence failure isn't even being debated.

This one aspect that isn't getting enough publicity is what I want to highlight here: The intelligence signals that the government had received, but failed to act on. I don't know why these intelligence signals were ignored, but looking at the news in the past few weeks, all our politicians were doing at the time were filling their coffers through more FSI deals at the Maharashtra state level, and at the national level, after two years of silence, fanning anger among the public by suddenly parading the likes of Thakur, Purohit and Pande in time for the state elections.

My demand here is simply that if the current government considers itself answerable to the people, we need a detailed answer as to why these intelligence reports were not acted upon, and what are we going to do to avoid such failures in the future.

1. RAW had provided several intelligence reports on the same day that they had intercepts, which included specifics like Mumbai was the target and a sea route was going to be used. These reports were given to the government from Sep 18 - Sep 24. An excellent article in livemint.com (a sister publication of the Wall Street Journal) covers this: "Why was warning on Taj ignored?"
2. US Intelligence agencies (CIA?) had warned India about specific locations including the Taj hotel were targets. A news item in ABC news covers this: "US Warned in October of Potential Terror Attack"

Another great article highlighting the intelligence failures is here in Newsweek: "Flunking the Intelligence Test"

I request our media to give this aspect more coverage, and I beg our politicians to do something about it.