By Radha Basu, Senior Correspondent

THE INDIAN authorities are under fire for their failure to quickly quell the reign of terror that transfixed the world two weeks ago.

As Mumbai mourns its dead and limps back to normalcy, the search for answers has intensified. How could this city of 19 million - this city of dreams - be brought to its knees by just 10 men?

Sadly, when it comes to terror attacks, India's greatest strength - its sprawling but spirited democracy - is also its Achilles' heel. The will of the people in the world's largest democracy is frequently fractured, with elections giving no single party a majority. As a result, multi-party coalitions are cobbled together to form governments, at both the federal and state levels, with expedience rather than policies being the glue holding them together.

Reaching a consensus takes time. The response to terror threats requires decisive and swift action. Indian governments appear congenitally incapable of such action.

A post-mortem of the Mumbai attacks bears this out. After being informed of the attacks, it reportedly took Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh 90 minutes to inform New Delhi and request help. It took seven more hours before commandos from India's elite National Security Guard (NSG) began operations at the three Mumbai locations where the terrorists were holed up.

Despite dozens of terror attacks on Mumbai and other major Indian cities in recent years, the elite NSG were stationed only in New Delhi. Thus they had to be flown into Mumbai.

The Indian media reported a lack of coordination between the federal government in New Delhi and the Maharashtra state government, as well as among India's myriad intelligence, military and police systems.

Centre-state relations are crucial in the effective policing of India's borders. Since democracy dictates that the centre cannot act unilaterally, the country's borders are porous.

Last year, the Indian Parliament was presented with a report on how vulnerable the country's coasts were to infiltration by terrorists. As a result, New Delhi came up with an elaborate plan to police the coasts better, requiring the central and state governments to work together. It now appears that the Maharashtra state government declined the centre's offer to buy it sophisticated patrol boats. The Mumbai attackers, believed to be members of the Pakistan-based terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, reportedly entered Mumbai by sea.

The biggest challenge to combating terror comes from the vote-bank politics of the country's two leading political parties - the Congress, which heads coalitions both in New Delhi and in Maharashtra, and its arch-rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Congress - determinedly 'secular' in its outlook - has often been chided for being too 'soft' on Muslims, its faithful voters. It has also been criticised by the BJP for spending too much time probing 'Hindu terror'.

Indeed, Mumbai's anti-terror chief Hemant Karkare, who was killed in the Mumbai attacks, had been under fire from the BJP and its allies for the arrest of a Hindu nun in connection with a bomb blast that killed six people in September. The top cop appears to have spent much of his final days making the case against the nun watertight. We do not know whether Mr Karkare knew about the far bigger plot being hatched to decimate his city as he was prosecuting the Hindu nun.

Given its own largely Hindu vote bank, the BJP is likely to be far firmer than the Congress in cracking down on Islamic militants. But in its zeal to root out Islamic militancy and pander to its Hindu voters, the BJP and its allies may end up endangering the lives of innocent Muslims.

This fear is not imaginary. BJP leaders have been accused of complicity in riots that took hundreds of mostly Muslim lives in Mumbai in 1993 and in Gujarat in 2002.

Despite this latest round of bloodletting in Mumbai, Indian political parties seem bent on milking the crisis for petty political gains. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for an all-party meeting, but BJP leader L.K. Advani skipped it. Rather than join hands with the government, the BJP took out full-page advertisements in newspapers asking voters to root out a 'weak' Congress regime. The Congress responded by pointing out that the BJP was in power during two earlier terrorist sieges, including one on the Indian Parliament itself.

Indian politicians should take heed of how another great democracy - the United States - rose above political bickering to fight terror. The latest example came last week when President-elect Barack Obama announced the retention of President George W. Bush's Secretary of Defence Robert Gates.

When a journalist asked whether Mr Gates was a Republican, Mr Obama responded that he was 'not interested' in political affiliations, but only in the fact that Mr Gates could 'serve the American people'.

The Indian government, meanwhile, has already taken at least one leaf out of the US textbook on dealing with terror. An agency modelled on the US Department for Homeland Security will be set up to take charge of intelligence and enforcement efforts. Hopefully, the department will be allowed to override petty politics. Angry Indians are demanding just that.

On the third day of the Mumbai mayhem, a blogger made a plea that was bound to strike a chord with millions of Indians. 'Politicians, forget your vote banks for once. Think of the country instead.'

radhab@sph.com.sg

This article was first published in The Straits Times on December 8, 2008.