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India promises tougher security but worries remain
By RAVI NESSMAN,Associated Press Writer AP - Thursday, December 11
MUMBAI, India - At one entrance to Mumbai's main train station, police stand guard behind sand bags. At another, they search baggage. But come in a different door and there's almost no security at all.
Since gunmen rampaged through the city, security has been visibly beefed up and politicians are promising reform. But critics say police forces across India are so poorly staffed, trained and funded that only a complete overhaul can bring them into the 21st century.
"They talk about it after every (terrorist) incident. When we see it, we will see it," said Ajai Sahni, head of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.
During the Nov. 26 assault on Mumbai, two militants carrying assault weapons raided the cavernous rail station, overpowering the more than 60 police officers inside, who were mainly armed with batons and a few antiquated rifles. Eight other gunmen took over two luxury hotels and a Jewish center in a siege that last 60 hours.
With no SWAT team, Mumbai police had to wait 10 hours for commandos based near New Delhi to reach the city and take charge.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh swiftly proposed security improvements, including the creation of a federal investigative agency modeled on the FBI and placement of commandos at several bases around the country.
Local officials also promised improvements for their police forces, which are widely viewed throughout the country as poorly trained and corrupt.
But there have been new embarrassments. Police in Calcutta were widely mocked for hiring high school students to sit in trees and watch for suspicious people during a visit by the prime minister over the weekend.
A.N. Roy, the police chief for Maharashtra state, which includes Mumbai, said the state government is undertaking a complete review of its security forces and will discuss offering better training and better weapons to officers and establishing a local SWAT-like force.
"There is urgency. There is a serious sense of urgency," Roy said. However, officials have no plans to expand the police force, he said.
That is a major problem, said Sahni.
In 2007, this nation of 1 billion-plus people had 1.4 million police officers _ the vast majority armed with only batons _ even though the government authorized a force of 1.65 million, according to India's National Crime Records Bureau.
Even the latter number is far too small, Sahni said. He says police ranks should be tripled and officers should be given intense training courses to bring the force up to international standards.
Afsir Karim, a retired army general who is an expert on terrorism, said Indian police forces have changed little in the decades since the British colonial rulers established them to keep the local population in line. Tinkering with the police force won't solve the problem, he said. It needs a complete overhaul to cope with modern threats.
Police must coordinate better with other security forces, stamp out corruption, increase pay to attract better personnel, provide officers with counterterrorism training, radios and modern arms and stop catering to powerful local politicians who use police to settle personal scores, Karim said.
"They are making frantic efforts now, but how far they will go we will see in a few months time," he said.
At the train station, security was significantly tightened after the shootings.
Fortified sand bag positions stand at some entrances. Officers carrying assault rifles and wearing uniforms with "commando" stenciled on their caps guard the platforms, while vastly more police officers, many in bulletproof vests and some sent from the volatile Kashmir region, patrol the area.
During a reporter's visit, well-armed officers at one small side entrance flanked metal detectors, scanned the crowd, pulled out anyone suspicious and ran their bags through an X-ray machine.
At another entrance, however, commuters passed through a long row of largely ignored metal detectors, and a few officers, some unarmed, stood at some of the doorways and searched a few bags.
One mammoth entrance had no metal detectors at all, and a sprinkling of police scanned thousands of passengers as they rushed by.
Kishore Tonde, a police officer, looked over the crowd from his perch on a bench. He held an assault rifle, a major upgrade from the outdated rifles he was given on previous patrols here, though he has not fired the weapon in two years, he said.
Inspector General B.J. Sidhu, head of the Railway Protection Force at the station, said the inconsistent security probably resulted from the division of responsibility between his force, which comes under the railway ministry, and another force that falls under the state police.
Regardless, neither force has the manpower to search every passenger entering the terminal, especially at rush hour when as many as 1,500 commuters enter every minute, he said. Lines to enter would stretch for miles, he said.
"If you really start stopping passengers and checking them all, they might put up with it for 15 days because there was a fresh incident," Sidhu said, but eventually they would revolt.
Sidhu said his force traditionally focused on stopping pickpockets and unauthorized hawkers, and his men were completely unarmed when the gunmen attacked two weeks ago.
Now, he is planning to form a special force to man the sandbag posts, sending them to a rigorous anti-terror course and ensuring they get regular target practice with their weapons.
"Terrorism is a completely different ball game," he said. "When it comes to terrorism, it has to be fought at a different level."
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