Mumbaikars in particular and Indians in general should be grateful that what they got after a Panama-registered tanker ran aground last weekend were tarballs of oil and gunk on Juhu beach. The environmental crisis, grave as it certainly is, could easily have been overshadowed by another 26/11. Given the time it took before the Coast Guard and anyone in authority thought fit to act, M V Palit could well have disgorged AK 47-wielding terrorists on to one of India’s most crowded beaches instead. After all, that was the chosen mode of entry for 10 heavily armed men who held Mumbai hostage for 60 hours in 2008. Or the ship may have been packed with explosives that could have killed many hundreds of curious onlookers who thronged the beach until the police belatedly decided to clear it. The inaction over M V Palit was inexplicable and worrying for several reasons. While Union Home Minister P Chidambaram had assured a Parliamentary Consultative Committee in October last year that “significant progress has been made since the 26/11 terrorist attack in Mumbai to strengthen coastal security”, it appears the defence ministry has remained a laggard. The home minister had provided details of a two-phase scheme to provide assistance to strengthen infrastructure in terms of “boats, police stations, jetties, vehicles, equipment and trained personnel”. Neither this, nor the Rs 70-crore three-tier security ring (Coast Guard, Navy and newly created maritime police) was in evidence when another tanker, M V Wisdom, ran aground on Juhu in June and was stuck for 20 days before a foreign salvage company managed to do what the Navy and other domestic salvage companies could not. Yet this incident does not appear to have alerted anybody – certainly not the Indian Navy nor the Coast Guard – to the possibility of similar incidents. Second, the drifting M V Palit, which was abandoned many weeks ago in the Gulf of Oman, was no small skiff. It was a 1,000-tonne vessel that was visible on the horizon for nearly 100 hours before the authorities decided to take action.
Just before the Pune bomb blasts in 2010, Mr Chidambaram had drily observed that the fact that there had been no terrorist assaults since 26/11 was pure luck. He is justified in his honesty since pre-empting domestic terrorists of any religious hue is a challenge in a polyglot, crowded country like India. But the same cannot be said of maritime security. The coastlines are hardly so crowded that a ship should be able to slip under a detection system for which the taxpayer has paid so much money. The home ministry is reportedly awaiting an inquiry report from the Chief of Naval Staff. Hopefully, the defence ministry will also wake up and find out what is happening and order a satisfactory review of maritime security procedures.