Delhi car blast points to the broken security apparatus, now is the best time to fix it

Till investigations throw up a culprit, it is premature to blame Iran or its agents for Monday’s terrible attack on an Israel embassy vehicle. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed Tehran for the attack: Israel and Iran are at loggerheads.

Iran denies involvement and claims that four of its scientists have been killed by terrorists in the last two years, some by magnetic bombs planted on their vehicles. For this, it points fingers at Israel.

Right now, Tehran has little reason to offend India, which will continue to buy sanctioned Iranian oil. However, India should not get sucked into this blame game. After all, terrorists from Pakistan had, indeed, hunted down and killed Jews in the Chabad House attack in Mumbai.

David Headley, one of the main accused of the 26/11 conspiracy, claimed that he had surveyed the Israeli embassy in Delhi as a possible target for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The government should put all its resources together to nab the attackers, who injured four, including the wife of Israel’s defence attaché.

The government should also overhaul its intelligence and policing apparatus. After all, Monday’s attack took place in broad daylight, on Aurangzeb Road, supposedly one of New Delhi’s best-policed areas, a few metres from the Israeli embassy and an equal distance away from the fortress-like home of the Prime Minister. A motorcyclist approached the vehicle and attached the magnetic bomb, which investigators now say was a very sophisticated device.

Indian intelligence, obviously, was caught flat-footed. Unlike 26/11, when several warnings about an impending attack were lost in the maze of police and intelligence agencies, this time, everybody was clueless.

Simply creating a new agency, the National Investigative Authority (NIA), has not been enough to anticipate or stop terror attacks. Our Keystone Kops-style sleuths simply lack the intelligence-gathering and investigative abilities of modern police and intelligence agencies elsewhere. Beat policing, the backbone of city security, is on its last legs, riddled by ineptitude and graft. If terror can strike in what is arguably India’s most secure zone, then surely the security apparatus is badly broken. Fix it, now.