The Government of India has named Rajiv Mathur the next Director of the Intelligence Bureau, the country’s inept domestic intelligence agency.

Mathur, a 1972 batch IPS officer from the Uttar Pradesh cadre, is currently Special Director of the Intelligence Bureau.

Mathur, a native of Agra, will replace P.C. Haldar on his retirement on December 31.

Under Haldar’s watch, Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad and other Indian cities have been the sites of horrendous terrorist attacks with Indian security forces invariably being in reactive mode.

The incompetent Haldar is scheduled to retire on January 1, 2009.

Mathru has been appointed as OSD (Office on Special Duty) in the Intelligence Bureau with immediate effect.

Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) is involved in the deadly terrorist strike on Mumbai, say news reports emanating from India in what could signal a retaliatory military strike on the Islamic nation by India.

In a new story, the Times of India is reporting that:

India has proof that the Inter Services Intelligence was involved in planning the Mumbai terror attacks and training the terrorists who killed more than 180 people during a 60-hour siege of the country’s financial capital, sources said in New Delhi on Thursday.

The names of trainers and the places where meticulous training took place are also known to the government, the sources said.

The United States is believed to have even more evidence, some of which it has shared with India, they said.

Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, who was in Pakistan on Wednesday, is believed to have told his Pakistani interlocutors that Washington had enough evidence to show a Pakistani hand in the attack, the sources said.

It’s not clear to what extent ISI’s involvement in the Mumbai attacks is

The horrific terrorist attacks on Mumbai since November 26 that cost the lives of 195 people has ended 60-hours later with the last of the terrorists being killed by Indian commandos at the five-star Taj Hotel on Saturday morning (IST).

The coordinated rampage by the team of 12 terrorists at 10 locations also wounded some 327 people.

Although a little known outfit called Deccan Mujahideen has claimed responsibility for the attack, Indian officials have been hinting at the attacker’s connections to Pakistan.

The violence also claimed the lives of 22 foreigners including five Americans and five Israelis.

For over four decades now, it’s been apparent to all but the completely blind or the utterly senile that India is a blundering, doddering democracy that has totally lost its way.

A soft state, to borrow Gunnar Myrdal’s terminology where the government institutions have become so weak and corruption so endemic that the Indian state has failed to provide the most basic needs like water, transport, shelter and uninterrupted electricity to its citizens.

Six decades after independence, India’s Silicon Valley Bangalore reels under massive blackouts because of acute electricity shortage, at least four million of Mumbai’s 16 million people live in filthy conditions that people here in America wouldn’t subject their dogs to and hundreds of thousands of Chennai residents inhale the noxious stench of the Cooum.

And seven million Mumbai commuters travel every day in packed cattle cars that even the most depraved Nazis would flinch from using to transport Jews to Auschwitz or Belsen for the final solution. In the last five years alone, Mumbai commuter trains have killed over 20,000 people.

Let the clowns shout Mera Bharat Mahan and the Alisha Chinais croon Made in India till their throats are hoarse but we say Tera Bharat Bahut Gandha Hai because India’s political institutions have all but decayed and atrophied with the fading from the scene of India’s first generation of political leadership, the Nehrus, Sastris and Patels.

In their place rose a new degenerate political class in the late 1960s – coinciding with the rise of Indira Gandhi and her shameless minions in the different states – for whom politics became the shortest path to the desired trinity of power, pelf and privilege. 

The apogee of the political decline was reached with the Emergency between 1975-77 and ascent of vermin like Sanjay Gandhi and court jesters like D.K.Barooah whose contribution to the Indian political lexicon was the asinine slogan India is Indira, Indira is India.

As institutional structures were replaced by individual fiat, the first casualty was the public interest.

Four decades ago, the foremost political scientist of our age Samuel Huntington wrote prophetically in his classic work Political Order in Changing Societies:

A government with a low level of institutionalization is not just a weak government; it is also a bad government.

How true. Study after study in state after state has documented that very little of the development resources apportioned to the poor actually reach the intended beneficiaries in India, whether it’s Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh or any of the other states.

Neither the Sarkaria Commission nor the Shah Commission, Grover Commission, Maruti Affairs Commision, Bofors inquiry or the numerous other commissions that spent the people’s money to look into alleged improprieties involving the high-and-mighty have yielded anything but employment for a few retirees.

Plunder and pillage is not the mere monopoly of the netas but has seeped

Terrorists Strike Mumbai Again

A catastrophe of the magnitude of the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 26, 2008 demands a quick revamp of the Indian intelligence apparatus.

After the last terrorists are flushed out from the Oberoi and Taj hotels in Mumbai, one of the first tasks before India’s Ministry of Home is to revamp the domestic and external intelligence agencies – the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) respectively.

Time and again, India’s intelligence agencies have proved woefully inadequate to anticipate and prepare for the nightmares that terrorists have unleashed at frequent intervals with impunity.

As we have written on other occasions, lack of strong intelligence has always been the achilles heel of India’s law enforcement.

One of the first to be kicked out must be P.C.Haldar, Director of India’s Intelligence Bureau.

A 1970 batch Indian Police Service officer of the Bihar cadre, Haldar has

 Terrorists Strike Mumbai Again

With a hitherto little known outfit called Deccan Mujahideen claiming responsibility for the November 26, 2008 attacks in Mumbai, the big question is who are these whackos?

Frankly speaking, we (and most Indian media sources too) have nary a clue who these maniacal killers are (the idea behind this post is to see if we can get other readers to contribute whatever they may have heard on this outfit).

Obviously, given their name the Deccan Mujahideen is an Islamic militant outfit.

We doubt Deccan Mujahideen is a completely new outfit because the resources required to launch a terrorist operation of this magnitude is likely to beyond the reach of a new-born organization.

There are at least twenty terrorists armed with grenades, AK-47 guns and other small arms. Media chatter that they came in via boat adds credence to suspicion that some of them could even be foreigners.

There are also reports that Deccan Mujahideen could be closely