Ten Men Came by Sea. Sixty Hours Later, India Rebuilt How It Defends Itself

The thing almost nobody says about 26 November 2008 is that it began as a boat journey.

Ten men crossed the Arabian Sea, hijacked an Indian fishing trawler on the way, and stepped ashore in south Mumbai in the dark. There was nothing to stop them. India has a coastline of more than seven thousand kilometres and, in 2008, no serious system for watching it. The men walked off a dinghy into a city of twelve million people carrying assault rifles, grenades and improvised bombs, and split into teams.

By the time the last of them was killed on the morning of 29 November, 166 people were dead and about 300 injured. Nine of the ten attackers were killed by Indian forces. One was taken alive.

Mumbai remembers the sixty hours. What is less remembered, and matters more now, is what those hours revealed about how India was defended, and what the country did about it afterwards.

The night

The first shots came around half past nine in the evening. The attackers, operatives of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group based in Pakistan, had picked targets that were crowded, famous, or both.

At Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the great Victorian railway station that moves millions of commuters a day, two gunmen walked into the main hall and fired into the crowd. That was the deadliest single scene of the night, and its victims were overwhelmingly ordinary working people waiting for trains home.

Others hit the Leopold Cafe, a tourist restaurant. Others reached two hospitals and a cinema. And three locations turned into sieges that ran for days: Nariman House, a Jewish outreach centre, and the Oberoi Trident and Taj Mahal Palace hotels.

The hotels are what the world watched, because the world’s cameras were pointed at them. The Taj burning against the night sky became the image of the attack. Inside, hotel staff who could have run stayed to move guests through service corridors they knew and the gunmen did not. Some of them died doing it.

The man who grabbed the barrel

One episode from that night deserves more attention than it gets, because everything India was later able to prove rests on it.

Late on the 26th, a police party intercepted two of the attackers in a hijacked car at a roadblock at Girgaum Chowpatty. In the struggle, an assistant sub-inspector named Tukaram Omble, armed with a stick, took hold of the barrel of an assault rifle at point-blank range and would not let go. He was shot and killed. His colleagues took the gunman alive.

That gunman was Ajmal Amir Kasab. Because Omble held on, India did not have only bodies, wreckage and denials. It had a living participant, in custody, who could be questioned, identified and tried. Kasab was prosecuted in an Indian court with defence counsel, convicted, sentenced to death in 2010 and executed in 2012.

It is worth being clear about what that trial was, because it is the part of 26/11 India can be least ambivalent about. A man caught in the act of mass murder was given a lawyer, a hearing and an appeal. Omble was awarded the Ashoka Chakra, India’s highest peacetime gallantry decoration.

What the sixty hours exposed

Strip away the shock and the attack reads as an audit of Indian security, and the findings were bad.

The coast was open. The route in was the whole plan, and it worked because no agency was clearly responsible for the water.

The response force was in the wrong city. The National Security Guard, India’s specialist counter-terror unit, was based near Delhi. Getting it to Mumbai took hours the hostages did not have.

The police were outgunned. Mumbai’s constabulary met automatic weapons with bolt-action rifles from another era and, in many cases, no body armour.

Nobody was in charge of everything. Police, state government, the NSG, the Navy and the central agencies were each doing something, without a single command able to see the whole city at once.

The intelligence was not joined up. Fragments existed. They sat in different buildings.

What India built

Here is the part that gets skipped, and it is the reason this piece exists. India’s answer to 26/11 was not a war. It was paperwork, budget lines and institutions, which is duller than a military response and has probably done more.

The National Investigation Agency was created by an Act passed within weeks of the attack, giving India for the first time a federal agency that could investigate terrorism across state boundaries without waiting to be invited.

The NSG was decentralised. Regional hubs were established so that the answer to an attack in Mumbai or Chennai or Hyderabad no longer starts with an aircraft leaving Delhi.

Coastal security was rebuilt in three tiers. State marine police patrol out to twelve nautical miles, the Coast Guard from twelve to two hundred, and the Navy beyond that, with the Navy designated as the authority responsible for overall maritime security. The gap the attackers used now has an owner.

Maharashtra raised Force One, its own quick-reaction unit, so the state is not waiting on anyone. Intelligence sharing was pushed through a strengthened Multi-Agency Centre.

Not all of it went well, and saying so is not disloyalty. NATGRID, the plan to let authorised agencies query databases quickly, took well over a decade and repeated restarts to get anywhere. A coastal security law has been drafted and redrafted for years without being enacted. Institutions built in a hurry after a catastrophe tend to have the shape of the catastrophe, and India’s still do.

But the direction was right, and it held across changes of government. That continuity is itself unusual, and worth noticing.

The accountability that has not arrived

Now the uncomfortable part, and it belongs in any honest account.

The men who planned 26/11 have not been convicted for it in Pakistan. Prosecutions there have been opened, adjourned and left. Public figures associated with the organisation behind the attack have moved in and out of detention on charges that mostly concern financing rather than the killings in Mumbai. India has handed over dossiers. The trials have gone nowhere.

The exceptions have come from elsewhere. David Headley, the Pakistani American who scouted the Mumbai targets, was arrested in the United States and cooperated with investigators there, and his account remains one of the most detailed available. And in April 2025, after years of litigation, the United States extradited Tahawwur Rana to India to face charges over his alleged role, the first time a person accused of conspiring in the attack has faced an Indian courtroom since Kasab.

That is a real result. It is also, eighteen years on, a thin one, and Indians are entitled to say so plainly without it being called grievance.

What the city did

There is a habit of praising Mumbai’s “spirit” after every attack, and it always sits slightly wrong, because it can sound like a compliment paid to people for absorbing something that should not have happened to them.

What is true, and better than the slogan, is more specific. The dead at CST were commuters. The staff who stayed at the Taj were waiters, cooks and housekeepers. The men who stopped Kasab were police constables on ordinary pay. The doctors who worked through the night were at a government hospital. The city’s response was not spirit in the abstract. It was a very large number of unremarkable people doing their jobs while being shot at.

The attackers came to Mumbai believing they could set its communities against each other. Sixty hours of murder did not do it. That failure is the single most important thing about 26/11, and it was not achieved by any agency, any law or any new institution. It was achieved by the people who were there.