26/11: It was Mumbai Police’s darkest night ever

Dhanraj Vanjari was a senior police inspector and station in-charge at the Cuffe Parade police station at the southern-most tip of Bombay in November 2008. Beyond his jurisdiction was the naval and Army headquarters and much of his area of command abutted the sea.

For days before the 26/11 attack in Mumbai, he had been receiving information from the fishermen at the Sassoon Docks and nearby areas of strange boats they had been seeing around their fishing docks, some of them even dropping anchor for a while before disappearing back into the sea. An investigation revealed that these boats were unlicensed and sailing in from the direction of Gujarat. Vanjari was a seasoned investigator and the fact of several of these boats sailing in and out at frequent intervals for no good purpose aroused his suspicion.

"As station in-charge of Cuffe Parade, I may have been sitting across an expanse of the sea but we had no jurisdiction over the waters. So I wrote and alerted the naval headquarters, the Coast Guard and even my senior officers including the then Police Commissioner, Joint Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner," Vanjari, who recently retired as an Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), told this correspondent.

Vanjari, who later deposed before the Ram Pradhan commission that inquired into the attacks, says he was troubled by the fact that instead of paying heed to his warnings, not just his own top bosses but also both the naval command and the Coast Guard were concerned more about the hierarchical order of things than about probing the uncharacteristic landings of these unlicensed boats from Gujarat.

"I was merely a senior PI. Not even an ACP then. The naval officers and Coast Guard felt the letter should have come to them from the top police officers, not a mere station head."

And though he had copied his senior officers on the warnings, they ignored his letter too.

"It just went into their respective dustbins," says Vanjari bitterly.

At the time, the dual civilian authority in the then Congress-NCP government had divided the chain of command and created serious fissures among the top IPS officers, a fact that was much remarked upon and blamed for the manner in which the situation got out of hand on the night of 26/11. Then Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh was in Kerala, the Deputy Home Minister R R Patil was in his village of Tasgaon. The police officers did not know even before 26/11 whose orders to take and many were not beyond taking advantage of this dual command to play one against the other or align with one or the other and divide themselves into factions.

The matter went clearly out of the hands of the civil authorities that night, leading to the deaths of several brave officers who were ill -equipped to fight the Pakistani terrorists on their own home turf.

Vanjari was on leave on the night of the attack but the moment he learnt of it, he knew his instincts had been right. Two days after he filed the warnings with his officers, he had been asked to go on leave pending the investigation of an old case against him and the matter had been taken off his hands. Even today he believes that was just a pretext to punish him for his lack of deference that had such tragic consequences. He believes that not just the naval and Coast Guard officers, even his own top bosses were miffed at his temerity in breaking the protocol to seek urgent intervention in the matter of the landing of the unlicensed boats which, it is now clear, were in the nature of a recce before the actual attack.

"I was not on duty when the final landings took place. Had I been and the fishermen had informed me, I might have been in a position to understand what was happening and swifter, preventive action might have been possible."

The tragic deaths of innocents in the next three days might have thus been avoided had top military and civil authorities been less concerned about egos and protocol and more about national security. As such we might never have got to know about Pakistan's complicity in the attack had it not been for the brave act of abother "junior" police officer, sub-inspector , Tukaram Omble, posted at the Gamdevi police station, who rushed out of his night shift when he heard a commotion nearby on Marine Drive. He spotted Ajmal Kasab with a machine gun, grappled him and clung to the Pak terrorist in a death grip, even as Kasab pumped bullets into his stomach, until reinforcements arrived. Soon he was surrounded by other cops, disarmed and taken into police custody. For Omble, however, it was too late - he had succumbed to the bullet injuries even while hanging on to Kasab for dear life.

Since then the government, aware of the tragic folly of its ways, closed ranks on the issue of dual command and also shook up the senior police officers and restored the Mumbai Police to nearly its original reputation of being second only to Scotland Yard.

"Usually, even if a Maoist sneezed in Gadchiroli, we would hear that sneeze at the Crawford Market police headquarters. It was a tragic day for both us and the people of Mumbai that we could not see even as far as the sea waters a few kilometres away for all the wrong reasons, bringing on our darkest night at a time when it was crucial for us to have presented a united front and taken joint action with the naval authorities and coastal guard," says one serving officer who was then on the margins of the fight back against the terrorists that fatal night.

The Mumbai Police are unlikely to be caught sleeping on the job again.