India’s Home Minister resigned yesterday as the government faced public outrage at home and abroad over its failure to prevent just 10 gunmen from turning the country’s financial capital into a virtual war zone for three days.

Shivraj Patil, 74, said he took “moral responsibility” for the attack by heavily-armed Islamic militants, which began on Wednesday night and had claimed at least 174 lives by the time it finished on Saturday morning.

M.K. Narayanan, India’s powerful national security adviser, also submitted his resignation yesterday, but it was not clear if it had been accepted by Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister.

The resignations came as the coalition government, already faced with slowing economic growth, struggled to contain the political fallout from the attacks ahead of national elections due by May.

The government announced that it would set up a federal crime-fighting agency modeled on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, and replace Mr Patil with P. Chidambaram, formerly Finance Minister.

Even before the Mumbai attacks, Mr Patil had been widely criticized for failing to prevent a series of bombings in Indian cities this year. In September, he was ridiculed for changing his clothes several times in the hours immediately after a bomb attack on Delhi.

Many are now incensed that it took his Home Ministry’s counter-terrorist National Security Guards (NSG) seven hours to reach Mumbai after the attacks began. By the time they reached the attack sites, the militants had overwhelmed the poorly trained-Mumbai police, taken up defensive positions inside buildings and trapped hundreds of people.

The NSG was set up in 1985 as a counter-terrorist rapid response unit, modelled on the SAS, following security forces’ poorly executed assault on Sikh separatists in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. But 23 years later, it still does not have its own fixed wing aircraft and all of its 14,500 commandos are based at its headquarters in the northern state of Haryana, near Delhi. Many are also used to protect Indian politicians.

J.K. Dutt, the NSG Director General, admitted yesterday that his men had not arrived in Bombay until 5 a.m. on Thursday because they had to wait to commandeer a Russian-made IL 76 transport plane from the northern city of Chandigarh. “Nobody was thinking that an incident like this or the need would arise,” he said.

Vilasrao Deshmukh, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is capital, has also been criticized for failing to ask the Home Ministry for NSG commandos until 90 minutes after the attack began.

Israeli experts have been especially harsh in their criticism of Indian forces, especially over their storming of the Jewish centre where six Israeli hostages were killed. The 12-hour battle to rescue the hostages was “unreasonable”, said Major General David Tzur, a former commander of Israel’s counter-terrorist military unit.

“There is not chance in the world that captives will survive an incident that doesn’t end within minutes of the break-in,” he said. He added that the lack of prior intelligence was “a colossal failure”.

Colonel Lior Lotan, a senior officer in Israel’s elite commando unit, said Indian forces had conducted their operation as though there were no hostages.

“When you’re rescuing captives, you enter fast, with maximum force, and try to reach the hostages as quickly as possible, even at the price of casualties,” he said. “Here, they operated much more cautiously.”

Reviewing television footage of the operations, the Israeli experts wondered why other basic steps had not been taken, such as clearing the area of bystanders.

Indian counter-terrorism experts praised the NSG commandos, two of whom were killed in the operations, but panned their political masters. “They do not realise the imperatives of terrorism,” said Ajay Sahni, executive director of the Institute of Conflict Management. “No one understands how infirm India’s security systems are.”

India has suffered 11 serious terror attacks in the past year, according to the Institute, which says that the country’s economic development is now being endangered by gaping security holes.

Last year, India came second only to Iraq in terms of people killed in terrorist strikes.

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