Mr. Chairman, Sir, the Prime Minister and my dear friends, Sir, I think, I can speak for everyone that the entire House is with the Government in the effective steps that it may take in fighting terrorism; and it is wonderful, Sir, you have suspended the Question Hour today to alert the country about the urgency of the matter, and the appeal which the State Home Minister has made for unity in the country in fighting this menace is entirely welcome.....and all of us endorse that appeal. But, Sir, the effective steps have to be taken. The Minister of State for Home Affairs has just read out a Statement in which a number of steps, which were required and which have been urged time and again, have, at last, found a mention and an endorsement by the Government. I welcome that, and I will supplement that list, Sir. I hope that you will proceed on those lines as you do, and I am sure that you will find the entire House with you. 

Before I come to making suggestions, I very much want to compliment the Government on the initiative which has yielded fruit just now. I have just seen, Sir, through Mr. Jaswant Singh's office, a report of rediff.com that 'because of the initiative that has been taken, the United Nations Security Council has placed sanctions on the Pakistan based Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which is just an altered name of Lashkar-e-Toiba, and the four top leaders of LeT, including Hafiz Mohammad Saeed whose vituperations against India have not been acceded by anybody. He and three others, including Lakhvi, have been declared 'terrorists' by the Security Council, and their assets have been frozen. In all such initiatives, Sir, the entire House, indeed the entire country, will be with you.

Sir, nine facts stand out in much of what the Minister of State has just read out. Those are, actually, things that are already known. But there are nine facts which stand out about this incident. The first of these is exactly what our attention has been drawn to by my friends from Assam, and to which the Prime Minister has so graciously responded just now. Sir, this is a sort of thing which is happening every month, every two months. In the count that Mr. Jaswant Singh and I made of the incidents that have happened only in 2008--I am not going to blame the Government, and so on, but please see this as a national problem--in 2008 alone--I could have picked up any other year--there were 49 such incidents in 19 cities; about 2,525 people have been killed in these incidents.

Sir, the second fact is that this is happening right across the country. Now, we have seen that these actual incidents have happened everywhere. But there is another telling fact which the people who follow terrorism, and this is what the Government reveals from time to time, know that in just two years, from 2004 to 2006, 81 modules were busted by our intelligence agencies. These were ISI modules in the country, all over the country; 81. These exclude the modules in J&K and the North-East. So, you can see their reach which they have been able to get. Now, we compliment the intelligence agencies, and I am sure that, because these modules were busted, many such incidents were prevented. But the fact that they were busted is a testimony to the fact that they exist, and that one of the most lethal espionage and terrorist agencies in the world, ISI, has been able to get that penetration into India.

The third fact that stands out in that, Sir,--and the Minister has just read out the Statement in which he also said that--is that the finger of suspicion points to Pakistan or to actors within Pakistan. But the first point to remember in that, Sir, is that of its 60 years of existence, Pakistan, for 50 years, has been under the heel of the army. I think that none of us, in India, can realise the terror and the pervasiveness of ISI in Pakistani state and society. Therefore, to imagine that Lashkar-e-Toiba or any other agency could do things without the knowledge, patronage, guidance, training and equipment of ISI, is to live in a fool's paradise.

Sir, Mr. Jaswant Singh has always been emphasising it and the Americans have said, not particularly they are dependent on the Pakistanis, that the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul was the handiwork of the ISI and the attack on our Embassy is an attack on the country. You will see the operational significance of this when I just come to what the Government has been doing, without criticising the Government, what India has been doing.

The fourth fact, Sir, is that in these circumstances to ask Pakistan to help nail the masterminds just does not make sense. To ask Mr.Zardari, the Pakistan President, to do anything like this is meaningless. On the one hand, we are being told that Mr. Zardari is not in control of these agencies and, on the other, we are being told that we are appealing to him, "Please help; please send the Director-General of the ISI here". This is the Zardari who, for getting the killers of his own wife identified, did not trust the Pakistani investigators. He got the Scotland Yard there. He appealed to the United Nations. And we are appealing to him! This is only to set up India in this manner and to put faith in the statement of such persons. It is a pathology in India to look for some straw of a statement on which to hang our hopes. Mr. Musharraf came here. He said, "mai is baar nayaa dil le ke aayaa huuN", and all sorts of acclamations to that. Similar is, just now, the statement of Mr. Zardari that the fellows causing all the trouble in Jammu and Kashmir are terrorists. Again, great acclamations and hope, and the moment these things came in India, Ms. Sherry Rehman, the Minister of Information there, immediately issued a statement that the President had never called the legitimate struggle of Kashmiris an expression of terrorism and she reiterated that support for Kashmir's struggle for selfdetermination has been a consistent position of the Pakistan People's Party for 40 years. Therefore, in these circumstances, to invite Pakistan to come here for even discussions to put hope in the so-called joint mechanism for fighting and investigating terror is to fool oneself. Actually, it is worse than fooling oneself, because it means that you put them in the place of judges. They will say whether our evidence is adequate or not.

Sir, the fifth point that comes out is that no one in Pakistan has suffered for the 50,000-60,000 people who have been killed since the early eighties in India by Pakistan-sponsored action and what the Minister of State for Home Affairs has just read out has to be seen in the light of the fact that his very Ministry has been placing in Parliament papers saying that infrastructure for terrorism in Pakistan has not been rolled up at all. "Dismantled" is the precise word. There is a Status Paper on internal security situation which was presented by Mr. Shivraj Patil to the Parliament on 30th November. It says that the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and PoK is yet to be dismantled and is being used by Pakistan-based and Pakistan ISI sponsored outfits like Jaish-e- Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Toiba, Al Badr, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, etc., and they want to do nothing about it. Why? Because these organisations are the instruments of the ISI and the Pakistan Army. When there was international pressure on them, they made a show of it. Mr. Musharraf banned these organisations, and the Pakistani newspapers immediately published the old name and the new name. Their offices continued in the same way and their meetings for collection of donations for terrorism continued in the same way.

[And it wasn't as if they were operating from some bank account that could be freezed] So to repose hope is to put ourselves in for difficulties. The sixth point that comes out is local help. Yes, these are ISI inspired; they are ISI orchestrated. Their principal instruments are Lashker-e-tayeba, etc. But none of this could have happened without local help. Just see what the Home Minister has revealed. They come to Colaba. They must know something about the coastline. They immediately know where to go for the targets, which he has just listed out. Within the hotels, as everybody has said, they knew the entire layout. They went into the Taj Hotel, precisely to the place where the Manager's wife and two children were. How could that be known from satellite photographs or to somebody sitting in Karachi? So, it was because of the local help. And we are politically hamstrung in pursuing that and talking openly about it.

The seventh point is -- it is a very important point -- as you have just said about the Coast Guard and so on, it has been established, time and again, that these agencies abroad and these networks abroad like Lashker-e-tayeba, use existing channels, for instance, of smugglers. I only have to remind you, because we are talking about Mumbai, that in 1993, it has been established by the Government that 1,800 kilograms of RDX and other arms and ammunitions also were smuggled into India by using those smuggler's networks. Just to get a ban there is a wonderful first step, but unless we get at these networks and the existing channels -- I will come to that as to what we are doing in this regard a little later -- we will never get anywhere.

Sir, I completely endorse what the Home Minister has said that the entire nation feels grateful for the bravery and the sacrifice of our poor NSG people and the other security personnel. The fact of the matter is, if you look at the institutional response to the attack, there was much to be desired, not because of the fault of any individual in the Forces. In the first account, when the poor Mumbai policemen and the Mumbai Anti Terrorist Squad got there with their exemplary courage, you should have seen their arms and unpreparedness. I have tried to make a timeline of the whole sequence. Even the Naval Commandos, who were in Mumbai, were not called and did not come to the scene till two hours after the attack. Everybody, who has studied terrorism, knows that whatever you have to do to neutralise the terrorist plans can only be done in the first few minutes. After that they have already succeeded. I am very happy that the Home Minister, at last, has acceded to requests and entreaties from many quarters for many years that there must be many NSG hubs. What has happened, Sir? Sir, from the timeline that I have been able to establish, it took three hours for the Government to decide to deploy the NSG. Whether it is because of the late request from Mumbai or because of decision-making here, I do not want to cast any aspersions. But it took three hours. After that it took five-and-a-half hours, a total of nine hours, before our specialised Force was able to reach there. When they reached there, after nine hours of the beginning of the assault, they were blind. They did not have maps of the hotels and targets.

The ninth fact, which has now been acknowledged here on page 3 of the statement, which the Home Minister has read out, is about Intelligence reports actually having come. There are many qualifications to what has been acknowledged. But if you see para 12, it says: "Intelligence, regarding a suspected LeT vessel attempting to infiltrate through the sea route, was shared with the Coast Guard..." And then, of course, what the Navy did or did not do. There have been earlier reports, and the Home Minister says that it is not right for him to comment on them. But the fact of the matter is that it has been leaked by intelligence agencies that there were intercepts that these two hotels would be among the targets. The third factor, which has now been acknowledged, is that the coordinates of this vessel were given the information. You say now that, at that moment, it was in the Pakistani territory. But you also say that it was two days earlier. Do you mean that nothing happened after that? Somebody has said, "Here is the Lashkar-e-Toiba vehicle. Hijack it." And we can just forget about it, [ke abhii to Pakistan ke waters meN hai..that it is still in Pakistan waters]

So, intelligence was given. Yet what was our response? Again, I am not blaming anybody. I am requesting everybody to kindly look upon it as an institutional matter of what we have to strengthen and what we are up against. And the fact that the Intelligence has been saying all these for a long time is evident from very, very high, and I say, heavy quarters. I will read out to you how much advance warning the Government has been giving to other people. In the annual meeting in November, 2006, -- the Home Minister has an annual meeting with the Director-Generals of Police and the Inspector General of Police -- which the Prime Minister also was kind enough to address, the Home Minister tells them, "Our coastal areas are coming under increased threat from terrorist groups which have decided to use the sea route to infiltrate into India. They also plan to induct arms and ammunitions through the sea routes." That was in November, 2006. Then, he says: "Some Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives are also being trained specifically for sabotage, etc. There are plans to occupy some uninhabited islands of the country's coastline to use them as basis for launching operations on the Indian coast." What I want you to remember in this is that these things could not have been said off-hand. I will come to several of these; [koii alhaam to aa nahii rahaa thaa], that by a certain revelation, the Ministers were saying all these things. 

As everyone knows, from ground intelligence, things must have gone upwards, and then, it made it, through the bureaucratic ladder, into the Home Minister's statement. This was in November, 2006. Then, on 8th March, 2007, the Home Minister was asked in the Lok Sabha: Whether intelligence agencies have warned about the possibility of terrorists trying to infiltrate through the sea route and trying to target offshore installations." The answer was: "Yes, Sir. There are reports about terrorists of various tanzeems being imparted training and likelihood of their infiltration through sea routes." He was then asked: "Whether maritime terrorism, gun-running, drug-trafficking and piracy are major threats which India is facing from the sea borders of the country?" His answer was: "Yes, Sir." Then, we come to 9th May, 2007, what he said in this very House. On 9th May, 2007, the Home Minister was asked in the Rajya Sabha: "Is it a fact that there are strong apprehensions of terrorist threats to the country through the sea route?" He says: "As per available reports, Pak based terrorist groups, particularly LeT, have been exploring possibilities of induction of manpower and terrorist hardware through the sea route." Then, on 8th December, 2007, the National Security Advisor, Shri M.K. Narayanan, was educating the world at Manama, in the Middle-East, at a Security Conference. He says, "According to our intelligence reports, there are now certain new schools that are being established on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border which now specialise in the training of an international brigade of terrorists to fight in many climes. According to our information, recruits from 14 to 15 countries have come."

Then, he says, "The sea route, in particular, is becoming the chosen route for carrying out many attacks, even on land. References to this are to be found replete in current terrorist literature. I would like, therefore, to sound a note of warning" -- he is telling other people -- "that there is no scope for complacency." Sir, that is in 2007, December. Now, on 11th March, 2008, Mr. A.K. Antony, the Defence Minister, also addresses the same thing. He is addressing the International Maritime Search and Rescue Conference in Delhi. He says that the dangers of terror attacks from the sea in the region are now mounting, and he says, what you are now acknowledging, Sir, that you are taking steps, he says then, a year ago, that the Coast Guard has deficiencies, but as bureaucrats say, all necessary steps are being taken.

Then, Sir, I come to the Prime Minister himself, and his alertness in these matters. On the 13th November, 2008, just a fortnight before the assaults, he is educating the BIMSTEC leaders that terrorism and threats from the sea continue to challenge the authority of the State. But, that is just a fortnight before the assaults. But, on the 22nd November, 2008, four days before the assaults, the Home Minister is addressing the Directors-General of Police again, and he says, "To control terrorism in the hinterland, we have to see that infiltration of terrorists from other countries does not take place through the sea route." [Arre, aap kisko kah rahe ho? Hey, who are you saying this to?

"Or through the borders between India and... you can't say Bangladesh, friendly countries. The coast lines also had to be guarded through the Navy, the Coast Guard and the Coastal Police." I am reading this because that is the context in which we must now see the new assurances which have been given, whether they will also become like this. "The States' Special Branches and the CID should identify the persons forming part of the sleeper cells and lodging in cities and towns and studying in educational institutions" -- they got those fake passes of educational institutions -- "and working in industries and professions." Sir, they are not consultants to the Government; they are the Government. [You are saying this to the states…] But, it is the IB's job to identify these. Sir, I want to supplement this by drawing the attention of the House to the fog of unreality in which all this is being done. [I just read out the statement of the hon home minister that he had given on November 22, 2008. Now look at the facts of that day.] On the 25th and 26th November, 2008, that is, very literally on the eve of these attacks, our Home Secretary and his entire senior team was in Islamabad for a Joint Conference with the Secretary, Interior of the Pakistan Government. In their joint statement, what do they say? Now just see what is our psychology? This Joint Statement is issued on 26th November, 2008. Just now, Sir, you said that the terrorists came in those inflatable boats between 8.00 and 8.30.Now let's see what statement was given there, after gol gappas

"The meeting was held in a cordial and friendly atmosphere. Both sides discussed the issues related to terrorism and drug trafficking and reviewed the implementation of decisions taken during the last round." Now, see, "Both sides noted with satisfaction the progress made and identified ways to further promote cooperation in a number of areas. Both sides condemned terrorism in all its forms and manifestations." [And they are organising!] "Both sides condemned terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and affirmed their resolve", as just now we have been asked to affirm our resolve, "to cooperate with each other to combat the menace of terrorism."

Exactly these are the words that have been used for Assam.