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The Siege: 68 Hours Inside The Taj Hotel
Mumbai, 2008. On the night of November 26, Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists attacked targets throughout the city, including the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, one of the world’s most exclusive luxury hotels. For sixty-eight hours, hundreds were held hostage as shots rang out and an enormous fire raged. When the smoke cleared, thirty-one people were dead and many more had been injured. Only the courageous actions of staff and guests—including Mallika Jagad, Bob Nichols, and Taj general manager Binny Kang—prevented a much higher death toll.
With a deep understanding of the region and its politics and a narrative flair reminiscent of Midnight in Peking, journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy vividly unfold the tragic events in a real-life thriller filled with suspense, tragedy, history, and heroism.
With a deep understanding of the region and its politics and a narrative flair reminiscent of Midnight in Peking, journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy vividly unfold the tragic events in a real-life thriller filled with suspense, tragedy, history, and heroism.
318 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2013
About the author
Adrian Levy
15 books51 followersAdrian Levy is a journalist and film maker who currently writes for The Guardian. Specializing in long-form investigative work, his pieces most often filed from Asia are published in The Guardian's Weekend magazine.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 304 reviews
December 2, 2023
“[Security Officer Puru] Petwal waded into the torrent [of people], as a second scrum of passers-by – chauffeurs, taxi drivers and police men – attempted to get inside [the Taj Hotel]. ‘Slow down,’ he screamed, panicking. ‘People are getting trampled…’ Back out on the main steps, unnoticed by Petwal, two young men with backpacks also slipped in with the current of people, seen only by the hotel’s CCTV. Inside, they stood for a few seconds, overwhelmed by the opulence. Then one, dressed in a red T-shirt and red baseball cap, calmly turned left towards the Harbor Bar, while the other, dressed in a yellow T-shirt, headed straight on for Shamiana. They knew exactly where they were going. As if on cue, they set down their bags and pulled out assault rifles…”
- Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel
Mumbai is one of the largest cities in the entire world. On November 26, 2008, ten men armed with assault weapons and grenades tried to bring it down by themselves, executing a series of ruthless attacks. Over the course of four days, twelve locations were hit, including the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the Leopold Café, the Oberoi Trident, and a Jewish center known as the Chabad House. By the time it ended, 166 people had been killed, more than 300 had been injured, and millions had watched on live television as the luxurious Taj Hotel – one of Mumbai’s most recognizable landmarks – erupted into flames, while surrounded by law enforcement.
In The Siege, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy focus their attention on the Taj Hotel, where four gunmen roamed at will for days, ultimately murdering thirty-three people. Toggling back and forth between the terrorists, the police, the guests, and – most poignantly – the employees of the Taj, Scott-Clark and Levy have produced something that is intermittently gripping, moving, and sad.
Unfortunately, The Siege is not as good as it should have been, given the material Scott-Clark and Levy have gathered.
***
When I was a kid, I used to spend much of the summer at my grandparents’ cabin, where they had towering stacks of Readers Digest magazines, along with a weird assortment of orange, yellow, and brown furniture left over from the 70s. Because fishing bored me, I spent many days in a small aluminum boat perusing Readers Digest, and especially my favorite section: “Drama in Real Life.” This popular feature narrated true-life disasters – fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, sinking ships – through the experiences of the people who were there, enduring the most consequential moments of their lives.
The Siege reminded me of “Drama in Real Life.” It’s a throwback, in a way, uninterested in surveying the big picture, drawing larger meanings, or even arguing for the historical importance of the event it covers. Instead, this is a pared down, on-the-ground tale of survival and death, and the thin membrane that separates the two.
Structurally speaking, Scott-Clark and Levy begin – after a brief, taut prologue – by introducing us to the staff and guests of the Taj, so we know who we are going to be following once the attack begins. In my opinion, this opening goes on far too long, and is of inconsistent quality. I was interested in the workers, who uniformly come across as competent and loyal. I found myself less interested in the guests, who were uniformly super rich and on glamorous vacations. This does not mean they are not sympathetic victims, only that Scott-Clark and Levy mostly fail to give them personalities beyond professional success and bulging bank accounts. The hotel itself becomes a character of sorts, and Scott-Clark and Levy do a decent job describing its history, its place in Mumbai, and its layout, assisted by a couple floor plans.
The assault on the Taj does not begin until we’re over sixty pages into the book, which is too long given the paucity of necessary information imparted beforehand. For the next forty pages or so, the attack proceeds, until Scott-Clark and Levy come to a sudden halt and circle back to tell the story of the terrorists.
***
Scott-Clark and Levy do a really nice job in this section, especially given the difficulties they faced. Only one of the ten men who besieged Mumbai survived, and he was later executed, though he gave a confession. Scott-Clark and Levy take us into a camp in the mountainous Muzaffarabad region of Pakistan, where recruits of Lashkar-e-Taiba went through an intensive training regimen. They try to give shape to the shadowy handlers, and spend a lot of time on the singularly-strange journey of American-born Daood Sayed Gilani, also known as David Headley.
According to Scott-Clark and Levy, Headley made trips to Pakistan, where he was recruited by Inter-Services Intelligence; surveilled targets, including the Taj; left a string of unsatisfied wives in his wake; and worked as an informant for the United States Drug Enforcement Agency. Of course, nothing can be said with any certainty, given that almost everyone involved in this sequence is a professional liar. Suffice to say, America’s role in allowing Headley to travel freely between the U.S., India, and Pakistan is hotly contested, though it appears to be based more on speculation than evidence.
***
The corpus of The Siege is its account of the strike on the Taj Hotel. While many other sites were attacked – with heavier loss of life – Scott-Clark and Levy stick pretty close to their subject, which is unfortunately limiting. To their credit, they have their hands full trying to overlay some coherence on a multi-pronged operation, and so it makes a certain amount of sense to focus on one place.
Even sticking to the Taj, Scott-Clark and Levy still have to deal with the confusion that naturally follows when AK-47s start rattling in your hotel lobby. Based on their source notes, it seems they did a great deal of work to collate and corroborate, interviewing hundreds of people, and cross-checking their remembrances by utilizing text messages, timestamped photos, and recordings. Subheadings in each chapter – giving the time, date, and location – are quite helpful.
At a certain point, no matter how horrifying, or frightening, or courageous the spectacle, it began to get repetitive. There are so many people it’s hard to keep track, and I had to keep flipping to the front, where there is a list of key figures. It seems almost insulting to say it – given the life-or-death reality – but The Siege starts to get drawn out, tedious even, which should not happen in a book like this.
***
Beyond that, I kept waiting for Scott-Clark and Levy to go beyond the undeniably visceral moments in the hotel, to explore some of the obvious issues raised in these pages. For instance, Scott-Clark and Levy mention that many workers at the Taj could spend a lifetime – or a hundred lifetimes – saving up to spend a single night in their employer’s most expensive suites, but they don’t really meditate on this imbalance, or the resonance it creates as a backdrop to their bravery.
Scott-Clark and Levy also do very little to put Lashkar-e-Taiba, Pakistan, and India into their broad historical contexts by explaining the legacy of Partition, the war that followed, or the ongoing struggle for Kashmir. Having picked this up as part of an attempt to learn more about the history of this region, this really stood out to me, though it might not matter as much to those with a more specific interest in the Mumbai attacks.
Finally, Scott-Clark and Levy frequently reference the corruption of the Indian government, and its failures to respond to the Mumbai attacks in a timely manner. Nevertheless, this is done offhandedly and sporadically, without a dedicated, in-depth discussion. I wanted a methodical description of the chains of command, and where the links in that chain broke so badly.
***
With all that said, a good story is its own justification. The Siege tells a powerful one, full of fateful collisions, small decisions freighted with enormous consequences, and humans scoured to their base selves, with courage or fear turned into an instinct. Most of all, it is an account of individuals – a stalwart chef, an intrepid police officer, a determined guest – overcoming the failures of institutions. While Scott-Clark and Levy do an excellent job on the people, it is less successful describing the systemic failures that resulted in mostly-unarmed guests and workers forming Mumbai’s last line of defense.
- Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel
Mumbai is one of the largest cities in the entire world. On November 26, 2008, ten men armed with assault weapons and grenades tried to bring it down by themselves, executing a series of ruthless attacks. Over the course of four days, twelve locations were hit, including the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the Leopold Café, the Oberoi Trident, and a Jewish center known as the Chabad House. By the time it ended, 166 people had been killed, more than 300 had been injured, and millions had watched on live television as the luxurious Taj Hotel – one of Mumbai’s most recognizable landmarks – erupted into flames, while surrounded by law enforcement.
In The Siege, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy focus their attention on the Taj Hotel, where four gunmen roamed at will for days, ultimately murdering thirty-three people. Toggling back and forth between the terrorists, the police, the guests, and – most poignantly – the employees of the Taj, Scott-Clark and Levy have produced something that is intermittently gripping, moving, and sad.
Unfortunately, The Siege is not as good as it should have been, given the material Scott-Clark and Levy have gathered.
***
When I was a kid, I used to spend much of the summer at my grandparents’ cabin, where they had towering stacks of Readers Digest magazines, along with a weird assortment of orange, yellow, and brown furniture left over from the 70s. Because fishing bored me, I spent many days in a small aluminum boat perusing Readers Digest, and especially my favorite section: “Drama in Real Life.” This popular feature narrated true-life disasters – fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, sinking ships – through the experiences of the people who were there, enduring the most consequential moments of their lives.
The Siege reminded me of “Drama in Real Life.” It’s a throwback, in a way, uninterested in surveying the big picture, drawing larger meanings, or even arguing for the historical importance of the event it covers. Instead, this is a pared down, on-the-ground tale of survival and death, and the thin membrane that separates the two.
Structurally speaking, Scott-Clark and Levy begin – after a brief, taut prologue – by introducing us to the staff and guests of the Taj, so we know who we are going to be following once the attack begins. In my opinion, this opening goes on far too long, and is of inconsistent quality. I was interested in the workers, who uniformly come across as competent and loyal. I found myself less interested in the guests, who were uniformly super rich and on glamorous vacations. This does not mean they are not sympathetic victims, only that Scott-Clark and Levy mostly fail to give them personalities beyond professional success and bulging bank accounts. The hotel itself becomes a character of sorts, and Scott-Clark and Levy do a decent job describing its history, its place in Mumbai, and its layout, assisted by a couple floor plans.
The assault on the Taj does not begin until we’re over sixty pages into the book, which is too long given the paucity of necessary information imparted beforehand. For the next forty pages or so, the attack proceeds, until Scott-Clark and Levy come to a sudden halt and circle back to tell the story of the terrorists.
***
Scott-Clark and Levy do a really nice job in this section, especially given the difficulties they faced. Only one of the ten men who besieged Mumbai survived, and he was later executed, though he gave a confession. Scott-Clark and Levy take us into a camp in the mountainous Muzaffarabad region of Pakistan, where recruits of Lashkar-e-Taiba went through an intensive training regimen. They try to give shape to the shadowy handlers, and spend a lot of time on the singularly-strange journey of American-born Daood Sayed Gilani, also known as David Headley.
According to Scott-Clark and Levy, Headley made trips to Pakistan, where he was recruited by Inter-Services Intelligence; surveilled targets, including the Taj; left a string of unsatisfied wives in his wake; and worked as an informant for the United States Drug Enforcement Agency. Of course, nothing can be said with any certainty, given that almost everyone involved in this sequence is a professional liar. Suffice to say, America’s role in allowing Headley to travel freely between the U.S., India, and Pakistan is hotly contested, though it appears to be based more on speculation than evidence.
***
The corpus of The Siege is its account of the strike on the Taj Hotel. While many other sites were attacked – with heavier loss of life – Scott-Clark and Levy stick pretty close to their subject, which is unfortunately limiting. To their credit, they have their hands full trying to overlay some coherence on a multi-pronged operation, and so it makes a certain amount of sense to focus on one place.
Even sticking to the Taj, Scott-Clark and Levy still have to deal with the confusion that naturally follows when AK-47s start rattling in your hotel lobby. Based on their source notes, it seems they did a great deal of work to collate and corroborate, interviewing hundreds of people, and cross-checking their remembrances by utilizing text messages, timestamped photos, and recordings. Subheadings in each chapter – giving the time, date, and location – are quite helpful.
At a certain point, no matter how horrifying, or frightening, or courageous the spectacle, it began to get repetitive. There are so many people it’s hard to keep track, and I had to keep flipping to the front, where there is a list of key figures. It seems almost insulting to say it – given the life-or-death reality – but The Siege starts to get drawn out, tedious even, which should not happen in a book like this.
***
Beyond that, I kept waiting for Scott-Clark and Levy to go beyond the undeniably visceral moments in the hotel, to explore some of the obvious issues raised in these pages. For instance, Scott-Clark and Levy mention that many workers at the Taj could spend a lifetime – or a hundred lifetimes – saving up to spend a single night in their employer’s most expensive suites, but they don’t really meditate on this imbalance, or the resonance it creates as a backdrop to their bravery.
Scott-Clark and Levy also do very little to put Lashkar-e-Taiba, Pakistan, and India into their broad historical contexts by explaining the legacy of Partition, the war that followed, or the ongoing struggle for Kashmir. Having picked this up as part of an attempt to learn more about the history of this region, this really stood out to me, though it might not matter as much to those with a more specific interest in the Mumbai attacks.
Finally, Scott-Clark and Levy frequently reference the corruption of the Indian government, and its failures to respond to the Mumbai attacks in a timely manner. Nevertheless, this is done offhandedly and sporadically, without a dedicated, in-depth discussion. I wanted a methodical description of the chains of command, and where the links in that chain broke so badly.
***
With all that said, a good story is its own justification. The Siege tells a powerful one, full of fateful collisions, small decisions freighted with enormous consequences, and humans scoured to their base selves, with courage or fear turned into an instinct. Most of all, it is an account of individuals – a stalwart chef, an intrepid police officer, a determined guest – overcoming the failures of institutions. While Scott-Clark and Levy do an excellent job on the people, it is less successful describing the systemic failures that resulted in mostly-unarmed guests and workers forming Mumbai’s last line of defense.
March 6, 2024
“‘Children are like clean blackboards’ declared a Lashkar chief. ‘Whatever you write will leave a mark on them for ever.’”
“At 4 p.m. on 26 November, their confidence ebbed when they spotted the coastline of India. Soon after, recalled Ajmal, 'We started seeing the tall buildings of Bombay.' Stunned, they stood on deck and stared. By 6 p.m., they could see before them all the evidence a person who had never left Pakistan needed of the riches gleaned from near stability and partial secularism, a vista of palms, towers and villas, strung with lights, of hotels and offices blazing with neon. 'Make it burn. Set it all alight, my brothers.'”
“At 8.20 p.m., dry land reared up. As he slipped on the pack, Ajmal remembered a promise made by their Amir, the cleric who had sent them on their way, conjuring up their deaths: ‘Your faces will glow like the moon and your bodies will emanate scent, then you will go to paradise.’ Chacha Zaki stepped forward to drum it home: 'You are Muslims. India is not humanity. They have left you in poverty and they are now ahead of you. Be ready, your time is coming.'”
“Up in room 632, a face just inches away from Ram's ear screamed: 'Get to your feet, fat man!' The hostage banker was bound so tightly that he was in agony and his wrists and ankles were bleeding. 'Come on you old man, get moving!' shouted the red shirted gunman, impatiently kicking him in the ribs like a stray dog. A gun butt dug into the small of his back. The illogicality of being a hostage had gotten to Ram, his captors trussing him up in such a way that he could do nothing, and then becoming frustrated by his immobility; that they beat him until he was overcome by pain and then was expected to give coherent answers. He tasted tears and wondered what had happened in these young men's lives.”
“‘Switch off the lights, raise your hands and step out.' The car engine revved and the car lurched forward. At the last minute it swung around, getting stuck on a road divider. Ajmal opened his door, hauling out an assault rifle from between his legs. A policeman grabbed the barrel, pulling and tugging. Ajmal let off a long burst into the officer's stomach. The policeman lurched back but held on, the skin of his hands fused to the burning AK-47. A mob of khaki uniforms turned on the blood spattered Ajmal, kicking and beating him, bystanders joining in, until someone cried out 'Stop, we need him alive.’”
“In a private room of the casualty ward, Ajmal was stripped, cleaned up and placed on a metal bed on top of a plastic sheet, his torso left bare, a rough wool blanket thrown over his belly. He lay connected to a drip, his right arm and left hand bandaged, hands blackened with gunpowder. Facing the ceiling, eyes closed, Ajmal wailed: 'I have committed a big mistake!’ He was terrified. 'On whose orders?' With the simplicity of a country boy, Ajmal replied through parched lips: 'On the orders of the Chacha. The one from Lashkar.' Ajmal had coughed up the one thing no one was supposed to find out, the mastermind behind the attack.”
************
On the 26th of November 2008 ten young men took boats from Karachi to Mumbai, sponsored by Lashkar-e-Taiba, who were in turn sponsored by the Pakistani government. They carried with them AK-47’s, hand grenades and high grade explosives, their fathers being paid around $3000 to have their sons become martyrs. By the time it was over they had murdered 175 people and wounded 300. All of them died, except for one who lived to describe the crimes before being executed. It was more than three days before the ill equipped and disorganized Indian police ended the siege (with losses of their own lives), the slaughter of rail station commuters, gutting of a historical world class hotel and cafe frequented by foreigners.
The story unfolds as a study of the main actors in the events on both sides as well as the victims. Well known journalists and authors Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark collaborated on many news articles filed from Asia and have written six books together. It is unclear what their respective roles are. The research is extensive in this book but the writing is at times a bit awkward, delving into thoughts and words of people in the story, some dead who couldn’t be interviewed. It is a blend of popular history and journalism that is easy to read but at times lacks background insights into the role that the prior events had played between Pakistan and India. Nevertheless news sources gave only a short account of the mayhem.
Since 2000 there have been over a hundred terror attacks in India, many but not all by Muslim militants. Retaliations by Hindus have also been deadly. It helps to have seen these places in Colaba: the Leopold Cafe, the Taj Hotel and Shivaji Terminal. I went there in 2019 after an earlier trip in 2001 to northern India. The cityscape of southern Mumbai is vivid in my memory. The horror of this attack is comparable to 9/11 which we had lived through in lower Manhattan. The recent Palestinian massacre of Israelis brought a military response as did the WTC destruction, misguided and yet predictable. Luckily this didn’t provoke India into a war with Pakistan, both nuclear armed nations, as those who do these things wish they would.
************
Postscript: I thought the movie ‘Hotel Mumbai’ based on this book was very good as well.
“At 4 p.m. on 26 November, their confidence ebbed when they spotted the coastline of India. Soon after, recalled Ajmal, 'We started seeing the tall buildings of Bombay.' Stunned, they stood on deck and stared. By 6 p.m., they could see before them all the evidence a person who had never left Pakistan needed of the riches gleaned from near stability and partial secularism, a vista of palms, towers and villas, strung with lights, of hotels and offices blazing with neon. 'Make it burn. Set it all alight, my brothers.'”
“At 8.20 p.m., dry land reared up. As he slipped on the pack, Ajmal remembered a promise made by their Amir, the cleric who had sent them on their way, conjuring up their deaths: ‘Your faces will glow like the moon and your bodies will emanate scent, then you will go to paradise.’ Chacha Zaki stepped forward to drum it home: 'You are Muslims. India is not humanity. They have left you in poverty and they are now ahead of you. Be ready, your time is coming.'”
“Up in room 632, a face just inches away from Ram's ear screamed: 'Get to your feet, fat man!' The hostage banker was bound so tightly that he was in agony and his wrists and ankles were bleeding. 'Come on you old man, get moving!' shouted the red shirted gunman, impatiently kicking him in the ribs like a stray dog. A gun butt dug into the small of his back. The illogicality of being a hostage had gotten to Ram, his captors trussing him up in such a way that he could do nothing, and then becoming frustrated by his immobility; that they beat him until he was overcome by pain and then was expected to give coherent answers. He tasted tears and wondered what had happened in these young men's lives.”
“‘Switch off the lights, raise your hands and step out.' The car engine revved and the car lurched forward. At the last minute it swung around, getting stuck on a road divider. Ajmal opened his door, hauling out an assault rifle from between his legs. A policeman grabbed the barrel, pulling and tugging. Ajmal let off a long burst into the officer's stomach. The policeman lurched back but held on, the skin of his hands fused to the burning AK-47. A mob of khaki uniforms turned on the blood spattered Ajmal, kicking and beating him, bystanders joining in, until someone cried out 'Stop, we need him alive.’”
“In a private room of the casualty ward, Ajmal was stripped, cleaned up and placed on a metal bed on top of a plastic sheet, his torso left bare, a rough wool blanket thrown over his belly. He lay connected to a drip, his right arm and left hand bandaged, hands blackened with gunpowder. Facing the ceiling, eyes closed, Ajmal wailed: 'I have committed a big mistake!’ He was terrified. 'On whose orders?' With the simplicity of a country boy, Ajmal replied through parched lips: 'On the orders of the Chacha. The one from Lashkar.' Ajmal had coughed up the one thing no one was supposed to find out, the mastermind behind the attack.”
************
On the 26th of November 2008 ten young men took boats from Karachi to Mumbai, sponsored by Lashkar-e-Taiba, who were in turn sponsored by the Pakistani government. They carried with them AK-47’s, hand grenades and high grade explosives, their fathers being paid around $3000 to have their sons become martyrs. By the time it was over they had murdered 175 people and wounded 300. All of them died, except for one who lived to describe the crimes before being executed. It was more than three days before the ill equipped and disorganized Indian police ended the siege (with losses of their own lives), the slaughter of rail station commuters, gutting of a historical world class hotel and cafe frequented by foreigners.
The story unfolds as a study of the main actors in the events on both sides as well as the victims. Well known journalists and authors Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark collaborated on many news articles filed from Asia and have written six books together. It is unclear what their respective roles are. The research is extensive in this book but the writing is at times a bit awkward, delving into thoughts and words of people in the story, some dead who couldn’t be interviewed. It is a blend of popular history and journalism that is easy to read but at times lacks background insights into the role that the prior events had played between Pakistan and India. Nevertheless news sources gave only a short account of the mayhem.
Since 2000 there have been over a hundred terror attacks in India, many but not all by Muslim militants. Retaliations by Hindus have also been deadly. It helps to have seen these places in Colaba: the Leopold Cafe, the Taj Hotel and Shivaji Terminal. I went there in 2019 after an earlier trip in 2001 to northern India. The cityscape of southern Mumbai is vivid in my memory. The horror of this attack is comparable to 9/11 which we had lived through in lower Manhattan. The recent Palestinian massacre of Israelis brought a military response as did the WTC destruction, misguided and yet predictable. Luckily this didn’t provoke India into a war with Pakistan, both nuclear armed nations, as those who do these things wish they would.
************
Postscript: I thought the movie ‘Hotel Mumbai’ based on this book was very good as well.
March 16, 2024
4 ☆
"26/11" may not have been the most lethal terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, but the nearly 60 hours of chaos that commenced the night of November 26, 2008, were painfully memorable. Ten young men from Lashkar-e-Toiba targeted multiple high-profile targets: Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (the central railway station), Malabar Hill (the city's most expensive residential neighborhood), the Leopold Café (a popular tourist hotspot), Chabad House (a Jewish welfare center), the Trident-Oberoi hotel and the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Their objectives were to take hostages from the two luxury hotels and to kill non-Muslims, especially those from America, Britain, and Israel.
The Siege was an account of the pandemonium created not just by highly-trained fidayeen (aka Muslim assassins) but augmented by the ineptitude exhibited by the police and paramilitary bureaucracy.
Born in 1990 in Punjab, Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Toiba fed off the anger, destitution and sense of dislocation that permeated every household. They despised India. To the best recruits, the Lashkar leaders provided training in a hardcore military regimen and sophisticated tradecraft. The latter included Hindi language instruction, fake identity papers, and a phone system that obscured the location of the controllers. Initially, the 10 terrorists were divided into pairs that would simultaneously launch attacks against their targets. Then four of them would rendezvous in the massive Taj Hotel to find hostages while burning parts of the opulent edifice. Within a few hours, they were successful beyond expectation. In a call between the fidayeen at the Taj and their Pakistan handlers --
The Siege was the indictment the people of Mumbai would never get from their government. There were many tactical errors as sufficient personnel weren't sent to active hot spots. The officers who did go soon melted away as their antiquated weaponry was outclassed by the terrorists' arsenal of military-grade ammunition.
During the first night, Deputy Commissioner of Police Rajvardhan Sinha believed that
The authors primarily organized their book chronologically. The greatest effort by the two writers were on events within the Taj as they highlighted the bravery and sacrifices made by the hotel staff. These employees exemplified their grand institution's ethos of atithi devo bhava ("the guest is god"). Two flashback chapters described the perpetrators in greater detail. I found these chapters to be uncomfortably interesting, especially as one of the planners was a psychopathic American citizen. The final toll of the injured and the dead was high. The Taj vignettes had been personalized while the victims at the other locations had been aggregated into anonymity. That made the last part of The Siege a bit choppy as it felt as though the writers rushed to wrap up. I would also have liked more of an explanation for the animosity between Pakistan and India. Overall, The Siege provided interesting coverage and analysis of a traumatic time.
"26/11" may not have been the most lethal terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, but the nearly 60 hours of chaos that commenced the night of November 26, 2008, were painfully memorable. Ten young men from Lashkar-e-Toiba targeted multiple high-profile targets: Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (the central railway station), Malabar Hill (the city's most expensive residential neighborhood), the Leopold Café (a popular tourist hotspot), Chabad House (a Jewish welfare center), the Trident-Oberoi hotel and the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Their objectives were to take hostages from the two luxury hotels and to kill non-Muslims, especially those from America, Britain, and Israel.
The Siege was an account of the pandemonium created not just by highly-trained fidayeen (aka Muslim assassins) but augmented by the ineptitude exhibited by the police and paramilitary bureaucracy.
Born in 1990 in Punjab, Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Toiba fed off the anger, destitution and sense of dislocation that permeated every household. They despised India. To the best recruits, the Lashkar leaders provided training in a hardcore military regimen and sophisticated tradecraft. The latter included Hindi language instruction, fake identity papers, and a phone system that obscured the location of the controllers. Initially, the 10 terrorists were divided into pairs that would simultaneously launch attacks against their targets. Then four of them would rendezvous in the massive Taj Hotel to find hostages while burning parts of the opulent edifice. Within a few hours, they were successful beyond expectation. In a call between the fidayeen at the Taj and their Pakistan handlers --
Even the gunmen were amazed by the lack of a counter-attack. 'We are roaming on the third, fourth, fifth floor, waiting for them. Nobody is coming up. Tell those bastards to come up. Someone talk to us, this is no fun.'
The Siege was the indictment the people of Mumbai would never get from their government. There were many tactical errors as sufficient personnel weren't sent to active hot spots. The officers who did go soon melted away as their antiquated weaponry was outclassed by the terrorists' arsenal of military-grade ammunition.
Fidayeen rules were in play, while the police were wrapping themselves up in red tape, and the state and the center appeared inflexible. 'They learn and adapt. We stagnate, squabble and steal from one another.' [Joint Commissioner] Maria wondered if this force of 40,000 protecting a city of 13 million --well below the UN recommend minimum-- was even capable of getting a grip on the crisis.
Self-criticism was actively discouraged, the state institutions preferring to create glycerine versions of events that ultimately stifled truth.
During the first night, Deputy Commissioner of Police Rajvardhan Sinha believed that
there would be no inquiry worth its salt, when all of this was over. ... The establishment would thwart any such investigation... and afterwards the old, inefficient, corrupt regime would continue to rule the roost.
The authors primarily organized their book chronologically. The greatest effort by the two writers were on events within the Taj as they highlighted the bravery and sacrifices made by the hotel staff. These employees exemplified their grand institution's ethos of atithi devo bhava ("the guest is god"). Two flashback chapters described the perpetrators in greater detail. I found these chapters to be uncomfortably interesting, especially as one of the planners was a psychopathic American citizen. The final toll of the injured and the dead was high. The Taj vignettes had been personalized while the victims at the other locations had been aggregated into anonymity. That made the last part of The Siege a bit choppy as it felt as though the writers rushed to wrap up. I would also have liked more of an explanation for the animosity between Pakistan and India. Overall, The Siege provided interesting coverage and analysis of a traumatic time.
September 6, 2016
Let’s talk about incompetence.
Political incompetency is not a new thing for India. In fact, Indian politicians would make a clean sweep of Gold, Silver, and Bronze if there was such a thing as “The Incompetency Olympics”.
Talks about 26/11 terrorist attacks of Mumbai usually start with the involvement of Pakistani rogue intelligence agency, ISI, the terrorist organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and end with the only captured terrorist, Ajmal Kasab (hanged on 21st November 2012). What people don’t talk about is what Indian politicians and Mumbai police really did (or didn’t do, rather) at the time of the attacks.
There were multiple warnings given by various agencies (both at home and abroad) about possibilities of such attacks. 11 warnings suggested the plan would involve multiple simultaneous attacks. 6 warnings pointed to a seaborne infiltration. But as is always the case, the people responsible for the security of the nation were unmoved. The only exception was Vishwas Patil, Deputy Commissioner of Police for Zone 1, Mumbai, who contacted the coast guard and asked what was being done to beef-up security. ‘Nothing,’ was the reply.
On the other hand, Lashkar-e-Taiba had already amassed an Operation Bombay war chest of 21,68,000 rupees (£14,000). They were so confident of lack of any retaliatory action by India that its moneyman kept the funds in his own account (under his real name) at the Allied Bank in Drigh Colony, Karachi.
Finally, the day arrived when 10 terrorists attacked 6 juicy and vulnerable targets in Mumbai simultaneously: Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Malabar Hill, the Leopold Café, the Trident–Oberoi hotel, Nariman House, and the Taj hotel.
Mumbai police were in total disarray right from the start. No one had the slightest inclination about what in the hell was actually happening. Mumbai ATS chief Hemant Karkare was killed along with 3 other officers by the terrorists Kasab and Khan on the first night. On the other hand, Commissioner Gafoor sat outside the Trident–Oberoi Hotel in his staff car, 1.5 km away from the main target, the Taj, where he would remain right till the end. Later, he would defend his decision by saying that he was playing it by the book, which required him to lead from a secure position out in the field.
Meanwhile, the besieged city and its guests were expecting an immediate counter-attack, which would come after the elite counter-terrorism force, the NSG (National Security Guard), arrived from New Delhi, 3 hours away from Mumbai by air. But thanks again to the inefficient and indifferent government; it would take them much much longer than that to arrive in Mumbai.
At the Taj, the Quick Response Teams stationed in Mumbai finally arrived, but in a tragi-comic turn of events, they were assigned to marshal the press instead of storming the besieged hotel. Small units of police and soldiers aimlessly circled the hotel, following Commissioner Gafoor’s instructions to not to take any action on the terrorists until the “correct” agency (the NSG) arrived.
The whole deplorable situation could be summed up perfectly by a snippet of conversion (overheard by the police) between a terrorist and his handler in Pakistan who were in constant contact with each other during the whole siege:
Qahafa [handler] greeted him and Ali [terrorist] replied: ‘By the grace of Allah we have broken the doors with our legs to light the fire. And we found five chickens. We don’t roam around this freely at home.’ Even the gunmen were amazed by the lack of a counter-attack. ‘We are roaming on the third, fourth, fifth floor, waiting for them. Nobody is coming up. Tell those bastards to come up. Someone talk to us, this is no fun.’
It’s not that it was NSG’s fault for the delay. In a forensic account submitted after the event to the Home Ministry, it was detailed that a combined task force was unofficially mobilized at 10.05 p.m., on 26 November 2008, just 22 minutes after the first shots were fired. By 10.30 p.m., they were ready to deploy to the nearby Palam airstrip, from where an aircraft would fly them to Mumbai. Even at the time of such unprecedented crisis, in a series of purely bureaucratic hogwash, after much paper pushing, they were finally given a ‘go’, three hours after the first shots had been fired. But then, it was revealed that NSG’s transporter plane was 250 km away in Chandigarh, so Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s foreign intelligence service, was contacted for help. RAW agreed to lend an Ilyushin 76, which could only carry 120 troops, which meant it would require three trips to Mumbai to assemble the necessary force. It didn’t end there; the plane crew was missing, and the transporter had not been fuelled. Finally, when at 01.45 am, they were leaving; they were requested to pick up the Home Secretary from his residence, although this meant a significant deviation from their intended route, hence further delaying the mission. The plane took off around at 02.30 am, when the slaughter in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus had already finished, and terrorists had set in at Chabad House, the Trident–Oberoi, and the Taj.
On the other hand, many politicians from all around the country were already arriving before the NSG with their entourage in Mumbai without any delays - an added pressure for the already confused Mumbai police who had to provide them with additional guards for their security.
The NSG was aware of the shortcomings of their mobilization strategy and had reported the same to the ministry in 2006 that its mobilization strategy was ‘critically flawed’. They had proposed creating four regional hubs, but the proposals went unanswered (naturally). Moreover, it was reported that the Black Cats (as the soldiers of the NSG were called) were just ‘limping along’ because of corruption and lethargy in procurement by the ministry. Their applications for lightweight boots, Kevlar helmets and modern body armour, as well as hands-free communications sets, were collecting dust.
Meanwhile at the Taj, Commissioner Gafoor (still stationed in his car outside the Trident hotel), flatly refused a request of some officers to enter the hotel. Only the MARCOS (Indian equivalent of US Marines) was allowed to do what they could until the NSG arrived. Sunil Kudiyadi, the Black Suits chief, went into the hotel, supported by a small unit of marine commandos. Needless to say, the Mumbai police still roamed the perimeter of the hotel.
Some might find the criticism of Mumbai police in the light of these events a bit harsh, but the fact is that that Sunil Kudiyadi made it in and out of the hotel numerous times, while the Mumbai police looked on. A few officers of Mumbai police did went inside the hotel, but had to retreat as they were severely outgunned (The terrorists had hand grenades and AK-47s, while the police officers only had their side-arms). As an added disgrace for the police, the majority of guests were rescued by the Taj hotel staff. The Taj staffers went out of their way and showed commendable courage in the face of a crisis and did the work which the Mumbai police should have been doing in the first place. Without the staff’s initiative, the death toll would have been tenfold.
When one staffer – after much running and hiding – managed to come out of the Taj through a backdoor, he found two police constables languishing on the hotel steps and chewing tobacco. They were thoroughly disinterested with anything he had to say and shooed him away. When another Taj employee went to a nearby police station after coming out of the Hotel (by himself) to present his eyewitness account, he found that the station was locked.
Under such dismal conditions, the NSG finally arrived and rescued the remaining 300 guests from the Taj, 250 guests from the Trident-Oberoi, and 60 people from the Nariman House. Apart from the terrorist killed earlier and Ajmal Kasab (who was captured alive), the rest of the terrorists were eliminated, but not before they had claimed 166 victims.
After the attacks, many foreign connections were discovered. As expected, most of the perpetrators were from Pakistan, but some clues also pointed towards David Headley (real name Daood Sayed Gilani), who had done the recon of Mumbai for the attacks. Headley was a double agent, who worked for the DEA of the USA as a paid informant, so after his arrest, USA refused to extradite him and sentenced him to 35 years in a US prison instead.
As is the norm with any post-crisis investigations in India, a laughably unacceptable two-man panel of Pradhan Commission was formed to investigate the ‘war-like’ attacks on the city. They were not allowed to cross-examine the intelligence services, politicians or the NSG. They finally filed a flimsy 64 page report in which they acquitted the Mumbai police, only accusing Commissioner Hasan Gafoor for remaining invisible throughout the ordeal.
The Commission also recommended various methods and equipments to be installed to detect future attacks. Surprising nobody in India, none of them have been implemented as of writing this. Just a month back, I read in Times of India that the procurement process of CCTV cameras for Mumbai was still in a limbo as there was confusion and disagreement regarding the tendering process. Remember, 5 years have already passed since the Mumbai attacks.
This book does not wade much into the muddled and corrupt waters of Indian politics (and frankly, I don’t blame the authors), but Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy has done a commendable job of writing this much needed book about the siege of the Taj Hotel, which, in my opinion, is a slap on the faces of Indian authors who have disgustedly shied away from their duty of reporting about their country’s most trying plight in recent times.
Unavoidably, after the debacle, party-paid media and politicians started talking about the undying spirit of Mumbai (and India) and how it always overcomes every grief. Spirit has nothing to do with it. People still have to pay their bills, and unlike Indian politicians, they actually have to go to work and earn their living, come what may.
February 14, 2014
There are two ways in which I could write this review :
1. Tell you about the incompetency of the system which allowed such a brazen act of terrorism on Indian soil to escalate to previously unseen levels. Right from the botched up handling of external and domestic intelligence handling to the readiness of the police, the security groups or the nation there are countless things I can talk about.
2. Puff up my chest and say that even after this mayhem, India saved a lot of hostages and the battle no matter how bloody it turned out to be, was a victory.
However, I am not going to take either of these routes. Instead I wanted to put into words a few images that I can recollect which are closely linked to this incident. This review has nothing to do with the book and yes you have been warned !
#1. 26 November 2008 : It was close to 11 PM and I had my nose buried in some book. My mobile phone lights up with a text from a friend which says 'Turn on the TV. Something's happening in Mumbai.' With no inkling as to what is going on, I did as I was asked to and got the first glimpses of what was to become a fever that gripped the country for the next three days. What the news told me first was that it was a series of explosions and knowing Mumbai for what it was, I went off to sleep thinking it would all be normal by morning. It wasn't. I still remember the first thing I heard the next day from the TV ' Mumbai situation : Army Deployed.' Every minute at office and home for the next few days was of updates from the media. A colleague of mine runs to us as we are wrapping up a meeting in office and says ' Pardon me for barging in but they have rescued all the hostages at the Taj !' We all cheered at the top of our voices.The National Security Guard (NSG) commandos who led the rescue operation became overnight heroes. In the days that followed, there were kids who tried jumping from heights and hurt themselves reenacting the way they saw the commandos rappel down to Nariman house in Mumbai. The violence left a lot of people bristling, armchair generals who wanted immediate war with Pakistan. Then again there were the armchair commandos among us who sat at home and dissected the operation saying they should have gone this way or that way or shot at the terrorists in this fashion, all from the comfort of their living rooms. As it happens in India, all this was forgotten in a day or two.
#2. Late 2012 : It was the second day of a national conference I was attending and we were all fresh after lunch and at the verge of sleep. The next speaker of the day was a middle aged man who looked rather inconspicuous. He introduced himself as the VP HR of the Taj group and without preamble began by saying that ' I was there in 2008 when it happened at the Taj.' The crowd slowly quietened down. Following this, in a very calm and unpretentious way and without the aid of a presentation he delivered a stunning account of what happened as a business group's management team watched its flagship property being destroyed and its employees being massacred. He told us about men and women who gave up their lives trying to protect their customers. There was an anecdote he recounted of a waiter in one of the dining rooms who helped 32 diners escape from the burning room before being cut down by a hail of bullets from the terrorists. He looked at us and said ' The man would have earned in a month what some of you here earn in a half day or a day. Yet he showed no hesitation to put his life on the line.' The management team went to visit his widow days later in a small one room apartment who politely refused the compensation offered to her. She put her arms around her young son and said 'Sir thank you for the money but I cannot take it. I want my son to aspire to be like his father and nothing else.' He continued in this vein telling us of all that happened and how the TATA group finally emerged from this pit of despair with all its employees rallying around it in the hour of need. Somewhere as he went along, the first tear rolled down my cheek. Suddenly self conscious, I wiped it away to see almost everyone in the room in a similar state. No one made an effort to hide their tears and when finally the man finished speaking, we gave him and the team a standing ovation. To this day, nothing has moved me as much as that 20 minute speech.
#3. April 2013 : I stood before the Taj hotel leaning on a brick lined railing and looking up at the mighty structure. There were no signs anywhere from what happened 5 years ago. I looked behind me at the sea where fishing boats bobbed and tourists clamoured on passenger boats en route to the Elephants caves. For those of you who have not been to Mumbai, it might tough to explain how much grandeur and the daily humdrum of life intermingle at this place. To your one side is the majestic gateway of India and the Taj hotel to the other side. The streets are filled with tourists and vendors and the place is never quiet even for a second. To my one side stood a bunch of school goers, happily snapping selfies in front of the hotel and to my other side was a teenaged couple with their hands entwined and smiling that happy smile of being in love. A tea vendor strolled over to me asking 'Saab, chai ?' smiling a toothless smile. I could only wonder how fast the scars would have healed for the Mumbaikar.
Later that day, I sat in Cafe Leopold where the senseless shooting had begun. There are still scars and bullets lodged in the pillars and the wall of this place and a waiter who caught me staring at them smiled and nodded before walking along on his errand. Mumbai always comes back to normal, no matter how much anyone tries to hurt the sense of life in her !
1. Tell you about the incompetency of the system which allowed such a brazen act of terrorism on Indian soil to escalate to previously unseen levels. Right from the botched up handling of external and domestic intelligence handling to the readiness of the police, the security groups or the nation there are countless things I can talk about.
2. Puff up my chest and say that even after this mayhem, India saved a lot of hostages and the battle no matter how bloody it turned out to be, was a victory.
However, I am not going to take either of these routes. Instead I wanted to put into words a few images that I can recollect which are closely linked to this incident. This review has nothing to do with the book and yes you have been warned !
#1. 26 November 2008 : It was close to 11 PM and I had my nose buried in some book. My mobile phone lights up with a text from a friend which says 'Turn on the TV. Something's happening in Mumbai.' With no inkling as to what is going on, I did as I was asked to and got the first glimpses of what was to become a fever that gripped the country for the next three days. What the news told me first was that it was a series of explosions and knowing Mumbai for what it was, I went off to sleep thinking it would all be normal by morning. It wasn't. I still remember the first thing I heard the next day from the TV ' Mumbai situation : Army Deployed.' Every minute at office and home for the next few days was of updates from the media. A colleague of mine runs to us as we are wrapping up a meeting in office and says ' Pardon me for barging in but they have rescued all the hostages at the Taj !' We all cheered at the top of our voices.The National Security Guard (NSG) commandos who led the rescue operation became overnight heroes. In the days that followed, there were kids who tried jumping from heights and hurt themselves reenacting the way they saw the commandos rappel down to Nariman house in Mumbai. The violence left a lot of people bristling, armchair generals who wanted immediate war with Pakistan. Then again there were the armchair commandos among us who sat at home and dissected the operation saying they should have gone this way or that way or shot at the terrorists in this fashion, all from the comfort of their living rooms. As it happens in India, all this was forgotten in a day or two.
#2. Late 2012 : It was the second day of a national conference I was attending and we were all fresh after lunch and at the verge of sleep. The next speaker of the day was a middle aged man who looked rather inconspicuous. He introduced himself as the VP HR of the Taj group and without preamble began by saying that ' I was there in 2008 when it happened at the Taj.' The crowd slowly quietened down. Following this, in a very calm and unpretentious way and without the aid of a presentation he delivered a stunning account of what happened as a business group's management team watched its flagship property being destroyed and its employees being massacred. He told us about men and women who gave up their lives trying to protect their customers. There was an anecdote he recounted of a waiter in one of the dining rooms who helped 32 diners escape from the burning room before being cut down by a hail of bullets from the terrorists. He looked at us and said ' The man would have earned in a month what some of you here earn in a half day or a day. Yet he showed no hesitation to put his life on the line.' The management team went to visit his widow days later in a small one room apartment who politely refused the compensation offered to her. She put her arms around her young son and said 'Sir thank you for the money but I cannot take it. I want my son to aspire to be like his father and nothing else.' He continued in this vein telling us of all that happened and how the TATA group finally emerged from this pit of despair with all its employees rallying around it in the hour of need. Somewhere as he went along, the first tear rolled down my cheek. Suddenly self conscious, I wiped it away to see almost everyone in the room in a similar state. No one made an effort to hide their tears and when finally the man finished speaking, we gave him and the team a standing ovation. To this day, nothing has moved me as much as that 20 minute speech.
#3. April 2013 : I stood before the Taj hotel leaning on a brick lined railing and looking up at the mighty structure. There were no signs anywhere from what happened 5 years ago. I looked behind me at the sea where fishing boats bobbed and tourists clamoured on passenger boats en route to the Elephants caves. For those of you who have not been to Mumbai, it might tough to explain how much grandeur and the daily humdrum of life intermingle at this place. To your one side is the majestic gateway of India and the Taj hotel to the other side. The streets are filled with tourists and vendors and the place is never quiet even for a second. To my one side stood a bunch of school goers, happily snapping selfies in front of the hotel and to my other side was a teenaged couple with their hands entwined and smiling that happy smile of being in love. A tea vendor strolled over to me asking 'Saab, chai ?' smiling a toothless smile. I could only wonder how fast the scars would have healed for the Mumbaikar.
Later that day, I sat in Cafe Leopold where the senseless shooting had begun. There are still scars and bullets lodged in the pillars and the wall of this place and a waiter who caught me staring at them smiled and nodded before walking along on his errand. Mumbai always comes back to normal, no matter how much anyone tries to hurt the sense of life in her !
February 3, 2014
This is an account of the terrorist siege in Mumbai, India in November/2008. There were ten terrorists, well trained and well armed, who attacked a major railroad station, a restaurant, a Jewish Chabab House, and two large hotels. They killed 166 people and over 300 hundred were wounded. Anyone in the vicinity of this heinous attack had their lives transformed forever. They killed indiscriminately, firing their AK47s into large crowds, maiming and killing young and old, poor and rich, women and children.
This book details the siege at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel chosen deliberately because it is a landmark in India. We are given eyewitness descriptions of what took place – and most interestingly a background to this terrorist attack. One of the members was captured alive and immediately revealed much information.
The attack originated and was planned over several months in Pakistan. The terrorist group is called Lashkar-e-Toiba and they are directly supported by Pakistan’s ISI (the intelligence network). After the attack, with the obvious links to Pakistan, an internal Pakistani investigation ensued. This ended abruptly when the chief lawyer and prosecutor was killed in Islamabad. So once again Pakistan is a difficult country with several halls of mirrors – all vicious and protracted.
We are also provided with a most interesting portrait of an American-Pakistani (his mother American, his father Pakistani) named David Headley (aka Daood Saleem Gilani). He scouted and mapped out the areas, like the Taj Hotel, for Lashkar-e-Toiba months before the attacks took place.
I also got a very uncomfortable feeling for the security and policing arrangements in Mumbai; one of the twenty largest cities in the world. The closest SWAT team was a three hour flight away. For over 24 hours the terrorists, who were equipped with AK47’s, grenades and explosive devices were merely confronted by a few policemen with glock pistols and antiquated rifles. The people in the hotel coped as well as they could – they were essentially on their own for many, many long horrifying hours.
This book provides us with a dark view of the “new age” we live in. We have a foreground – the events that happened; and a background of the misguided people who organized this carnage.
This book details the siege at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel chosen deliberately because it is a landmark in India. We are given eyewitness descriptions of what took place – and most interestingly a background to this terrorist attack. One of the members was captured alive and immediately revealed much information.
The attack originated and was planned over several months in Pakistan. The terrorist group is called Lashkar-e-Toiba and they are directly supported by Pakistan’s ISI (the intelligence network). After the attack, with the obvious links to Pakistan, an internal Pakistani investigation ensued. This ended abruptly when the chief lawyer and prosecutor was killed in Islamabad. So once again Pakistan is a difficult country with several halls of mirrors – all vicious and protracted.
We are also provided with a most interesting portrait of an American-Pakistani (his mother American, his father Pakistani) named David Headley (aka Daood Saleem Gilani). He scouted and mapped out the areas, like the Taj Hotel, for Lashkar-e-Toiba months before the attacks took place.
I also got a very uncomfortable feeling for the security and policing arrangements in Mumbai; one of the twenty largest cities in the world. The closest SWAT team was a three hour flight away. For over 24 hours the terrorists, who were equipped with AK47’s, grenades and explosive devices were merely confronted by a few policemen with glock pistols and antiquated rifles. The people in the hotel coped as well as they could – they were essentially on their own for many, many long horrifying hours.
This book provides us with a dark view of the “new age” we live in. We have a foreground – the events that happened; and a background of the misguided people who organized this carnage.
November 29, 2020
A few hours into their attack on the Taj Mumbai (an exclusive five star hotel located in the Indian city of Mumbai), frustrated and tired terrorists complained to their Pakistani handler that they were getting bored waiting for Indian security forces to engage them. One terrorist in fact said this was "no fun". The irritated handler told them to blow up portions of the hotel in the meantime. For some reason they kept failing to do so, probably because they were too tired. This is hilarious (not if you were a hostage at the Taj Mumbai) - the terrorists were worn down not by the alacrity of the Indian security establishment, but by their inefficiency.
The NSG (National Security Guard), a special forces unit of trained commandos had begun to mobilize in New Delhi, 20 minutes after the first shots were fired at the Taj. But there was no plane to fly them to Mumbai. Once the plane was procured, there was no machinery to load their kits onto the plane. So the commandos had to do it manually. They had to wait for their boss to pick up the Indian Home Secretary despite the Home Secretary being informed that this would lead to more wastage of valuable time. Once the plane carrying the NSG and the Home Secretary reached Mumbai, there was a large convoy of cars waiting for the Home Secretary. But there was nobody to transport the NSG to the Taj Mumbai. They had to unload their kit manually yet again. This is the kind of uniquely Indian absurdity that would inspire cynical cartoonists and humorous columnists. But cynicism and humor in India are often poor masks to hide tears of impotence.
Quite a few senior police officers of Mumbai police refused to engage the terrorists citing the reason of outdated weaponry. The Mumbai Police Commissioner Hasan Gafoor failed to follow procedure on many occasions much to the anger of senior officers who reported to him. If procedure had been followed, more hostages could have been saved and terrorists could have been trapped in one building by the time the NSG arrived. The terrorist Ajmal Kasab was captured through the foolhardiness of unfit Mumbai policemen who were desperate enough to take on AK-47 carrying terrorists with their lathis and fists. Without Kasab's confessions, it would have been tough for India to establish that the terrorists came from Pakistan. It was not the elite commandos with modern weaponry who captured a terrorist alive, but Indian police - a symbol of Indian mediocrity, wretchedness and inefficiency.
The Siege contains many such humbling revelations that I have listed above. I liked the book's slow build up. Like William Friedkin took time to introduce Demon Pasusu to us, Levy and Clark take a long time establishing characters (mostly the Taj's staff) and place (there are long descriptions of the labyrinthine interiors of the Taj). There are many Demon Pasusu's - David Headley, the recce man (who sold this "project" to the Lashkar) would rival Anders Breivik for sheer wickedness and ingenuity even though he never killed anybody, Ajmal Kasab - the brainwashed terrorist who later regretted his acts and the many faceless spooks within the Lashkar and Pakistan ISI.
I was working in Navi Mumbai (a newly built Mumbai suburb with its own malls, pubs, restaurants and slums that was becoming overpopulated when I left it in 2012) when this terrorist attack happened. I remember some of my colleagues saying that the attack was a blessing in disguise because "rich people were affected" and hence something might actually get done. This might seem callous. But they were merely reacting to a Indian callousness and tendency to forget. As V.S.Naipaul pointed out - “No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.”
The NSG (National Security Guard), a special forces unit of trained commandos had begun to mobilize in New Delhi, 20 minutes after the first shots were fired at the Taj. But there was no plane to fly them to Mumbai. Once the plane was procured, there was no machinery to load their kits onto the plane. So the commandos had to do it manually. They had to wait for their boss to pick up the Indian Home Secretary despite the Home Secretary being informed that this would lead to more wastage of valuable time. Once the plane carrying the NSG and the Home Secretary reached Mumbai, there was a large convoy of cars waiting for the Home Secretary. But there was nobody to transport the NSG to the Taj Mumbai. They had to unload their kit manually yet again. This is the kind of uniquely Indian absurdity that would inspire cynical cartoonists and humorous columnists. But cynicism and humor in India are often poor masks to hide tears of impotence.
Quite a few senior police officers of Mumbai police refused to engage the terrorists citing the reason of outdated weaponry. The Mumbai Police Commissioner Hasan Gafoor failed to follow procedure on many occasions much to the anger of senior officers who reported to him. If procedure had been followed, more hostages could have been saved and terrorists could have been trapped in one building by the time the NSG arrived. The terrorist Ajmal Kasab was captured through the foolhardiness of unfit Mumbai policemen who were desperate enough to take on AK-47 carrying terrorists with their lathis and fists. Without Kasab's confessions, it would have been tough for India to establish that the terrorists came from Pakistan. It was not the elite commandos with modern weaponry who captured a terrorist alive, but Indian police - a symbol of Indian mediocrity, wretchedness and inefficiency.
The Siege contains many such humbling revelations that I have listed above. I liked the book's slow build up. Like William Friedkin took time to introduce Demon Pasusu to us, Levy and Clark take a long time establishing characters (mostly the Taj's staff) and place (there are long descriptions of the labyrinthine interiors of the Taj). There are many Demon Pasusu's - David Headley, the recce man (who sold this "project" to the Lashkar) would rival Anders Breivik for sheer wickedness and ingenuity even though he never killed anybody, Ajmal Kasab - the brainwashed terrorist who later regretted his acts and the many faceless spooks within the Lashkar and Pakistan ISI.
I was working in Navi Mumbai (a newly built Mumbai suburb with its own malls, pubs, restaurants and slums that was becoming overpopulated when I left it in 2012) when this terrorist attack happened. I remember some of my colleagues saying that the attack was a blessing in disguise because "rich people were affected" and hence something might actually get done. This might seem callous. But they were merely reacting to a Indian callousness and tendency to forget. As V.S.Naipaul pointed out - “No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.”
December 11, 2013
Quick Book Review : The Siege by Cathy Scott - Clark and Adrian Levy
What's it about : The 26/11 attack on Taj (focussed on that specifically)
Good Things : Breadth and Depth of Research - both Primary and Secondary.A google search on the references alone will blow ur socks off) - yet a humble acknowledgement from the writer duo that such deep trauma often twists recollection of reality and hence versions of the same event could be different / opposed. Narrative chronology and veracity verified by cctv coverage, transcripts of conversation between terrorists and handlers and also by text messages of survivors.Secondly, page turning writing esp for a non fiction book. A ticktock acccount- after the first 50 pages this book is totally Un-putdownable.
Bad Things : First 50 pages are terribly written. Please skim through and have hope. Excessive details sometimes which get into the private lifes of those deceased. Also at places gets over dramatic. Loses sharpness in last 30 pages of the story but picks up in conclusion.
All in All - a must read book but not for the faint hearted.
If you plan to read this book - please choose an appropriate time (recommend weekend). Will keep you up at night.
Undoubtedly one of the best non fiction (which reads very much like fiction) of 2013.
What's it about : The 26/11 attack on Taj (focussed on that specifically)
Good Things : Breadth and Depth of Research - both Primary and Secondary.A google search on the references alone will blow ur socks off) - yet a humble acknowledgement from the writer duo that such deep trauma often twists recollection of reality and hence versions of the same event could be different / opposed. Narrative chronology and veracity verified by cctv coverage, transcripts of conversation between terrorists and handlers and also by text messages of survivors.Secondly, page turning writing esp for a non fiction book. A ticktock acccount- after the first 50 pages this book is totally Un-putdownable.
Bad Things : First 50 pages are terribly written. Please skim through and have hope. Excessive details sometimes which get into the private lifes of those deceased. Also at places gets over dramatic. Loses sharpness in last 30 pages of the story but picks up in conclusion.
All in All - a must read book but not for the faint hearted.
If you plan to read this book - please choose an appropriate time (recommend weekend). Will keep you up at night.
Undoubtedly one of the best non fiction (which reads very much like fiction) of 2013.
May 25, 2021
Thoughts soon.
August 10, 2014
I only got 1/2 way. Insanity coupled with incompetence; it's just too dire for me to want to read any more. When will this threat of fanatic jihad be seen for what it is? Since 9-11 or this horrid, horrid event inside The Taj, nor numbers of other bombings and massacres of innocent victims on 3 or 4 continents doesn't seem to have rung any of the right bells now, I do despair.
They are continually soliciting more killer volunteers every day from Europe and the Americas on the internet for this exact kind of work. And getting 10,000 takers a year from a Reuters report, I just read.
Looking at the lives of the terrorists themselves in these last days before this siege in this book! Complete insanity structured by "nice" family men for the proper ways to say "good-bye"?
It's too stomach turning to continue reading for me. And we argue and hold hubris about use of language or team names or offense! Being blown up or tortured is a fairly larger offense, and is given a tsk-tsk or deemed in the same "fairness" arena? Bread and circuses here in the USA are coupled with a "don't look behind the curtain" politico in free world countries. We are living right now in a fantasy land about this fanatic Islamic movement. Our government reaction dwells in a place similar to a cross between types of distraction from the latter days of Rome coupled with The Wizard of Oz orchestration.
Hate abounds, and it seems it is blind to any other alternative but theirs. It is as real as dirt and sky. And it is coming. And I wouldn't be at all surprised that my grandchildren will have to deal with its consequences as my Father's did with the Nazis.
They are continually soliciting more killer volunteers every day from Europe and the Americas on the internet for this exact kind of work. And getting 10,000 takers a year from a Reuters report, I just read.
Looking at the lives of the terrorists themselves in these last days before this siege in this book! Complete insanity structured by "nice" family men for the proper ways to say "good-bye"?
It's too stomach turning to continue reading for me. And we argue and hold hubris about use of language or team names or offense! Being blown up or tortured is a fairly larger offense, and is given a tsk-tsk or deemed in the same "fairness" arena? Bread and circuses here in the USA are coupled with a "don't look behind the curtain" politico in free world countries. We are living right now in a fantasy land about this fanatic Islamic movement. Our government reaction dwells in a place similar to a cross between types of distraction from the latter days of Rome coupled with The Wizard of Oz orchestration.
Hate abounds, and it seems it is blind to any other alternative but theirs. It is as real as dirt and sky. And it is coming. And I wouldn't be at all surprised that my grandchildren will have to deal with its consequences as my Father's did with the Nazis.
September 20, 2021
Americans like to say every American remembers where he or she was when 9/11 happened. The 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, called 26/11, had a similar feel to me. I used to live in a students’ hostel just a hundred meters from the Taj Mahal Hotel, the epicenter of that attack. I lived for four years in that part of Bombay and was well familiar with every one of the twelve targets the terrorists had attacked. The attacks rocked me as I watched it unfold live on television in November 2008. This book by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark recaptures in meticulous detail the assault on the Taj Mahal Hotel and how the security forces wrested it back after 68 hours. It provides a look into the assault from many angles. We get the view from the cornered hotel guests, the view from the security forces, and the view from the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan. It is a well-researched book citing sources in India, Pakistan, the UK and the US.
The assault had extensive coverage worldwide on live television over the three days it raged. Hence, I wouldn’t go much int o the events themselves, which are described in great detail in the book. However, I shall recap the assault in summary as a background to further discussion on it.
Ten young, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) fidayeen jihadis, trained, indoctrinated and armed with AK-47s, grenades and plenty of ammunition, sail from the port of Karachi in Pakistan for Mumbai. Once they cross into Indian waters, they hijack a commercial trawler, kill its inhabitants and proceed to Mumbai, landing on the coast of south Mumbai. Their goal was to attack twelve high-value targets, kill as many people as possible, take hostages, and extract live media coverage doing it. Towards the end, they would execute the captives, set fire to famous Mumbai landmarks, and martyr themselves in a final spectacular shootout. Throughout the assault, their LeT handlers will guide them in real time over internet telephony from Karachi, changing tactics depending on the live-feed on television from Mumbai. It was an audacious plan which they execute with outstanding success, stunning the Indian security establishment and other intelligence services around the world. The entire operation was surreal. Imagine terrorists taking an entire mega city hostage, calling phone numbers in Austria for guidance as they kill, and their handlers directing them from US phone numbers, while all the phones were in Pakistan. India overcomes the terrorists after three days of mayhem, death, bureaucracy, and much heroism by the Taj Mahal Hotel staff. India’s one success was to capture a terrorist, Ajmal Kasab, alive. The Indian state puts him on trial later, convicts and hangs him. But Kasab was a poor, illiterate peasant, with little knowledge of the world outside. The murderous jihadi outfits exploited his ignorance of the world outside and his poverty, and sent him to the gallows in pursuit of their fanaticism. He too was a victim from this viewpoint, though he ruthlessly opened fire in a crowded train station, killing fifty-eight people.
The attack saw 170 people killed and over 300 injured. There were calls for revenge in India for a military strike on Pakistan. In Pakistan, there was disbelief, claiming it was all a fiction created by India and the United States. However, the Mumbai attacks were highly provocative, inviting the risk of a military confrontation between two nuclear powers. The Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI) is Pakistan’s dominant intelligence outfit. It owns the LeT. Why would the ISI take such a gigantic risk? What could have been the provocation or compulsion? The book provides some clues.
July 2007 saw armed clashes between the Pakistan army and anti-government jihadis inside the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in central Islamabad. The jihadis attacked the LeT as well, calling it a tool of the army, which was close to the truth. It was a rude wake-up call for the LeT. The Lal Masjid uprising impressed a sizeable section of LeT which veered to the jihadis’ view of their armed struggle. They argued LeT should dump ISI’s patronage, join hands with Al-Qaeda and attack US-coalition forces in Afghanistan and not Indian forces in Kashmir. LeT knew it will lose ISI’s support if they did not do their bidding in Kashmir. It will then come under attack from other jihadi groups the moment it loses ISI’s support. The ISI also wanted to prevent the LeT from falling apart. Together, they felt the pressure to pull off an extraordinary terror strike to keep their cadre’s faith. The Mumbai attack plan sounded spectacular and hence got approved. Who would have thought a strike against an Islamic state by its own Islamic extremists would have such a repercussion far away in Mumbai?
I have often wondered why LeT and the Jaish-e-Mohammad cadres have such hatred for India and give up their lives to liberate Kashmir. After all, the cadre comprises young, less educated Punjabi men who might have little knowledge of the history of the subcontinent or its partition. This book says the ISI is the reason for the focus on Kashmir. It also provides some education about these jihadi organizations.
LeT is a Salafist outfit. It has strict religious, political, and ideological guidelines. It recruits illiterate and less educated young men from poor families in Punjab, who have few other options to make a living. Besides, these families live along the border with India and are likely to have suffered in the violence during the partition of India in 1947. So, there is a likelihood of anti-India feelings already prevalent in the family and the village community. LeT converts every recruit from being a Sunni to an Ahl-e-Hadeethi, a Salafist movement. It would then train some as fidayeen fighters. A Fidayeen is one who dies trying to achieve a virtuous goal. So, he fights to win and dies to win. He is not a suicide bomber. A suicide bomber is one who kills himself in desperation after he cannot achieve the goals that are set. Both are jihadis as they take part in a holy war. LeT trains Fidayeen commandos by infantilizing them, instilling in them a child-like reverence. This is necessary because the fidayeen had to contemplate their own deaths or kill others by submitting to orders that a free-thinking adult might resist. LeT had realized that a child was like a clean blackboard. Whatever you write will leave a mark on them forever.
One glaring facet of the horrid affair was the inept response of the Indian authorities - the Mumbai police force, the elite Black Cats, the politicians, and the bureaucrats. It took an endless twelve hours to get the elite Black Cats to Mumbai from Delhi once the terrorists struck. The four terrorists were free to destroy and kill for 28 hours in the Taj Mahal Hotel before the security forces engaged them. It took a total of 58 hours to eliminate them. The authors say most heroism came from the unarmed hotel staff and other individuals. In the aftermath, India’s bureaucratic culture showed little desire to learn the lessons to prevent another terror attack from across the border. There was no searching enquiry to test the police force’s response, test the efficacy of the Black Cats and the Intelligence agencies. In the US, the 9/11 commission enlisted a ten-man bi-partisan board of politicians to probe every facet of the attack. In the UK, the 7/7 inquest spent six months recording every detail and witness statement. The Pradhan Commission into the Mumbai 26/11 attacks comprised just two men. The government prevented it from cross-examining the Intelligence services, the politicians or the Black Cats. It produced a sixty-four page report that got lambasted all over.
It is no surprise then that India suffered three more deadly terror attacks in Pathankot, Uri and Pulwama military establishments between 2016 and 2019. Sixty-five Indian soldiers lost their lives in these attacks. But the Modi government, in characteristic fashion, lied in 2019 through its minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, claiming India did not have one major terrorist attack after 2014. That was the year Modi assumed office! The Indian Government’s own data shows that terrorist incidents in Kashmir saw a rise of 176% between 2014 and 2018 and that 11 terrorists infiltrate into Kashmir every month!
The authors show that the US and Pakistan also have much to answer for their roles in 26/11. European and British intelligence alerted the Bush administration in 2007 about Lashkar-e-Taiba expanding its tentacles into Europe and the Gulf, leaving behind sleeper cells. The Pakistani American, Dawood Gilani aka David Coleman Headley, is a double-agent for the CIA. He chose the sites to attack in Mumbai, did extensive reconnaissance trips to Mumbai, photographing all the sites and documenting their GPS co-ordinates. His estranged second wife, Portia Peter, reported to US authorities about Headley’s hatred for Hindus and Jews and admiration for suicide bombers. His third wife, a Moroccan woman named Faiza Outalha, also told the US embassy in Islamabad Headley made repeated trips to Mumbai, despite hating India. She correctly deduced Headley was either a terrorist or working for the US and told the embassy so! The CIA listened carefully, but did nothing. But it informed the Intelligence Bureau in India on May 24 and August 11 of 2008 that a Lashkar-e-Taiba terror attack on the Mumbai Taj Mahal Hotel was likely. Indian authorities didn’t act on them, though some police officials in Mumbai wanted to. Once 26/11 happened, the US protected their agent Headley and declined to extradite him to India.
Pakistan conducted an inquiry into 26/11 after much pressure from the international community. It sounds farcical when the world watched live on TV much of the violence being choreographed from Pakistan. Chaudhry Zulfikar Ali was at the heart of the inquiry as the prosecutor. But he couldn’t proceed as someone gunned him down to death in Islamabad in May 2013. No one knows who did it. Pakistan blamed India for not providing clear and admissible evidence to pursue the 26/11 inquiry. However, the authors say that many Pakistani investigators wondered in private at the complexity and reach of the Mumbai attacks. They believed official knowledge and sanction would be necessary to carry it out.
The book ends with Ajmal Kasab, the lone captured terrorist, being taken to the hospital to see the dead bodies of his nine other colleagues. As Ajmal looks at the nine trays of half-burnt bodies, his police interrogator taunts him. He asks, “So, Ajmal, did you see the glow on their faces and smell the fragrance of roses rising from their bodies?”. Bitterly, Ajmal wept.
We can read the book as a thriller. For me, it is a scary account of how an innocent villager gets recruited, trained, nurtured, indoctrinated, and unleashed on the world as a terrorist. I could not escape the irony that LeT hates the West but depends on the technology of the West for its own successes. The Mumbai police even found Mountain Dew soft drinks in the backpacks of the jihadis. Couldn’t LeT send them with purified water, made in Pakistan?
The assault had extensive coverage worldwide on live television over the three days it raged. Hence, I wouldn’t go much int o the events themselves, which are described in great detail in the book. However, I shall recap the assault in summary as a background to further discussion on it.
Ten young, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) fidayeen jihadis, trained, indoctrinated and armed with AK-47s, grenades and plenty of ammunition, sail from the port of Karachi in Pakistan for Mumbai. Once they cross into Indian waters, they hijack a commercial trawler, kill its inhabitants and proceed to Mumbai, landing on the coast of south Mumbai. Their goal was to attack twelve high-value targets, kill as many people as possible, take hostages, and extract live media coverage doing it. Towards the end, they would execute the captives, set fire to famous Mumbai landmarks, and martyr themselves in a final spectacular shootout. Throughout the assault, their LeT handlers will guide them in real time over internet telephony from Karachi, changing tactics depending on the live-feed on television from Mumbai. It was an audacious plan which they execute with outstanding success, stunning the Indian security establishment and other intelligence services around the world. The entire operation was surreal. Imagine terrorists taking an entire mega city hostage, calling phone numbers in Austria for guidance as they kill, and their handlers directing them from US phone numbers, while all the phones were in Pakistan. India overcomes the terrorists after three days of mayhem, death, bureaucracy, and much heroism by the Taj Mahal Hotel staff. India’s one success was to capture a terrorist, Ajmal Kasab, alive. The Indian state puts him on trial later, convicts and hangs him. But Kasab was a poor, illiterate peasant, with little knowledge of the world outside. The murderous jihadi outfits exploited his ignorance of the world outside and his poverty, and sent him to the gallows in pursuit of their fanaticism. He too was a victim from this viewpoint, though he ruthlessly opened fire in a crowded train station, killing fifty-eight people.
The attack saw 170 people killed and over 300 injured. There were calls for revenge in India for a military strike on Pakistan. In Pakistan, there was disbelief, claiming it was all a fiction created by India and the United States. However, the Mumbai attacks were highly provocative, inviting the risk of a military confrontation between two nuclear powers. The Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI) is Pakistan’s dominant intelligence outfit. It owns the LeT. Why would the ISI take such a gigantic risk? What could have been the provocation or compulsion? The book provides some clues.
July 2007 saw armed clashes between the Pakistan army and anti-government jihadis inside the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in central Islamabad. The jihadis attacked the LeT as well, calling it a tool of the army, which was close to the truth. It was a rude wake-up call for the LeT. The Lal Masjid uprising impressed a sizeable section of LeT which veered to the jihadis’ view of their armed struggle. They argued LeT should dump ISI’s patronage, join hands with Al-Qaeda and attack US-coalition forces in Afghanistan and not Indian forces in Kashmir. LeT knew it will lose ISI’s support if they did not do their bidding in Kashmir. It will then come under attack from other jihadi groups the moment it loses ISI’s support. The ISI also wanted to prevent the LeT from falling apart. Together, they felt the pressure to pull off an extraordinary terror strike to keep their cadre’s faith. The Mumbai attack plan sounded spectacular and hence got approved. Who would have thought a strike against an Islamic state by its own Islamic extremists would have such a repercussion far away in Mumbai?
I have often wondered why LeT and the Jaish-e-Mohammad cadres have such hatred for India and give up their lives to liberate Kashmir. After all, the cadre comprises young, less educated Punjabi men who might have little knowledge of the history of the subcontinent or its partition. This book says the ISI is the reason for the focus on Kashmir. It also provides some education about these jihadi organizations.
LeT is a Salafist outfit. It has strict religious, political, and ideological guidelines. It recruits illiterate and less educated young men from poor families in Punjab, who have few other options to make a living. Besides, these families live along the border with India and are likely to have suffered in the violence during the partition of India in 1947. So, there is a likelihood of anti-India feelings already prevalent in the family and the village community. LeT converts every recruit from being a Sunni to an Ahl-e-Hadeethi, a Salafist movement. It would then train some as fidayeen fighters. A Fidayeen is one who dies trying to achieve a virtuous goal. So, he fights to win and dies to win. He is not a suicide bomber. A suicide bomber is one who kills himself in desperation after he cannot achieve the goals that are set. Both are jihadis as they take part in a holy war. LeT trains Fidayeen commandos by infantilizing them, instilling in them a child-like reverence. This is necessary because the fidayeen had to contemplate their own deaths or kill others by submitting to orders that a free-thinking adult might resist. LeT had realized that a child was like a clean blackboard. Whatever you write will leave a mark on them forever.
One glaring facet of the horrid affair was the inept response of the Indian authorities - the Mumbai police force, the elite Black Cats, the politicians, and the bureaucrats. It took an endless twelve hours to get the elite Black Cats to Mumbai from Delhi once the terrorists struck. The four terrorists were free to destroy and kill for 28 hours in the Taj Mahal Hotel before the security forces engaged them. It took a total of 58 hours to eliminate them. The authors say most heroism came from the unarmed hotel staff and other individuals. In the aftermath, India’s bureaucratic culture showed little desire to learn the lessons to prevent another terror attack from across the border. There was no searching enquiry to test the police force’s response, test the efficacy of the Black Cats and the Intelligence agencies. In the US, the 9/11 commission enlisted a ten-man bi-partisan board of politicians to probe every facet of the attack. In the UK, the 7/7 inquest spent six months recording every detail and witness statement. The Pradhan Commission into the Mumbai 26/11 attacks comprised just two men. The government prevented it from cross-examining the Intelligence services, the politicians or the Black Cats. It produced a sixty-four page report that got lambasted all over.
It is no surprise then that India suffered three more deadly terror attacks in Pathankot, Uri and Pulwama military establishments between 2016 and 2019. Sixty-five Indian soldiers lost their lives in these attacks. But the Modi government, in characteristic fashion, lied in 2019 through its minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, claiming India did not have one major terrorist attack after 2014. That was the year Modi assumed office! The Indian Government’s own data shows that terrorist incidents in Kashmir saw a rise of 176% between 2014 and 2018 and that 11 terrorists infiltrate into Kashmir every month!
The authors show that the US and Pakistan also have much to answer for their roles in 26/11. European and British intelligence alerted the Bush administration in 2007 about Lashkar-e-Taiba expanding its tentacles into Europe and the Gulf, leaving behind sleeper cells. The Pakistani American, Dawood Gilani aka David Coleman Headley, is a double-agent for the CIA. He chose the sites to attack in Mumbai, did extensive reconnaissance trips to Mumbai, photographing all the sites and documenting their GPS co-ordinates. His estranged second wife, Portia Peter, reported to US authorities about Headley’s hatred for Hindus and Jews and admiration for suicide bombers. His third wife, a Moroccan woman named Faiza Outalha, also told the US embassy in Islamabad Headley made repeated trips to Mumbai, despite hating India. She correctly deduced Headley was either a terrorist or working for the US and told the embassy so! The CIA listened carefully, but did nothing. But it informed the Intelligence Bureau in India on May 24 and August 11 of 2008 that a Lashkar-e-Taiba terror attack on the Mumbai Taj Mahal Hotel was likely. Indian authorities didn’t act on them, though some police officials in Mumbai wanted to. Once 26/11 happened, the US protected their agent Headley and declined to extradite him to India.
Pakistan conducted an inquiry into 26/11 after much pressure from the international community. It sounds farcical when the world watched live on TV much of the violence being choreographed from Pakistan. Chaudhry Zulfikar Ali was at the heart of the inquiry as the prosecutor. But he couldn’t proceed as someone gunned him down to death in Islamabad in May 2013. No one knows who did it. Pakistan blamed India for not providing clear and admissible evidence to pursue the 26/11 inquiry. However, the authors say that many Pakistani investigators wondered in private at the complexity and reach of the Mumbai attacks. They believed official knowledge and sanction would be necessary to carry it out.
The book ends with Ajmal Kasab, the lone captured terrorist, being taken to the hospital to see the dead bodies of his nine other colleagues. As Ajmal looks at the nine trays of half-burnt bodies, his police interrogator taunts him. He asks, “So, Ajmal, did you see the glow on their faces and smell the fragrance of roses rising from their bodies?”. Bitterly, Ajmal wept.
We can read the book as a thriller. For me, it is a scary account of how an innocent villager gets recruited, trained, nurtured, indoctrinated, and unleashed on the world as a terrorist. I could not escape the irony that LeT hates the West but depends on the technology of the West for its own successes. The Mumbai police even found Mountain Dew soft drinks in the backpacks of the jihadis. Couldn’t LeT send them with purified water, made in Pakistan?
November 6, 2013
Meticulously researched by authors Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, The Siege: 68 Hours Inside The Taj Hotel is a riveting account of the Nov. 26, 2008, terrorist attack on Mumbai, India, by ten young Pakistani men affiliated with the group Lashkar-e-Toiba.
The staff of the Taj Hotel — men and women who were chefs, waiters, restaurant managers and security personnel — performed countless acts of heroism during the siege and many sacrificed themselves so that others could escape. Although ill-prepared materially for the attack — some patrolmen were armed with pre-World War II bolt-action rifles, others only with bamboo canes — many of the Mumbai police displayed exceptional valor and commitment while attempting to stop men armed with assault rifles, grenades and plastic explosives.
The narrative is gripping, filled with tension and stories of heroism and heartbreak. In turns the reader will experience dread, triumph, tragedy and simmering frustration at the inadequate response by city, state and national authorities. Mumbai was not prepared for the violence these ten men visited upon it, which is all the more staggering given its proximity to Pakistan and prior record of terrorist bombing activity.
I give full credit to the authors, as they tell a highly complex story — interweaving the personal stories of a dozen or more people swept up in the attack — in a natural, eminently readable style. I’ve seen this book favorably compared to Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down — an assessment I wholeheartedly agree with.
Veteran investigative reporters well versed in the region, Scott-Clark and Levy provide insight into the motivations of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the different paths the ten men took to get to the point where they were stepping off a boat on the shores of India, bent on killing and sowing terror. Without relying on a linear timeline, the narrative shifts seamlessly between various eyewitnesses and participants, with some events told from multiple perspectives.
Although the attack against Mumbai involved more targets than the Taj Hotel, as the title suggests the luxury hotel is the prime focus of this book. The events at the Trident-Oberoi Hotel, train station and Chabad House are referred to, but not examined in detail. The narrower focus doesn’t make this book any less critical to understanding what happened; future readers should just be aware it is not all-encompassing.
I highly recommend it.
The staff of the Taj Hotel — men and women who were chefs, waiters, restaurant managers and security personnel — performed countless acts of heroism during the siege and many sacrificed themselves so that others could escape. Although ill-prepared materially for the attack — some patrolmen were armed with pre-World War II bolt-action rifles, others only with bamboo canes — many of the Mumbai police displayed exceptional valor and commitment while attempting to stop men armed with assault rifles, grenades and plastic explosives.
The narrative is gripping, filled with tension and stories of heroism and heartbreak. In turns the reader will experience dread, triumph, tragedy and simmering frustration at the inadequate response by city, state and national authorities. Mumbai was not prepared for the violence these ten men visited upon it, which is all the more staggering given its proximity to Pakistan and prior record of terrorist bombing activity.
I give full credit to the authors, as they tell a highly complex story — interweaving the personal stories of a dozen or more people swept up in the attack — in a natural, eminently readable style. I’ve seen this book favorably compared to Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down — an assessment I wholeheartedly agree with.
Veteran investigative reporters well versed in the region, Scott-Clark and Levy provide insight into the motivations of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the different paths the ten men took to get to the point where they were stepping off a boat on the shores of India, bent on killing and sowing terror. Without relying on a linear timeline, the narrative shifts seamlessly between various eyewitnesses and participants, with some events told from multiple perspectives.
Although the attack against Mumbai involved more targets than the Taj Hotel, as the title suggests the luxury hotel is the prime focus of this book. The events at the Trident-Oberoi Hotel, train station and Chabad House are referred to, but not examined in detail. The narrower focus doesn’t make this book any less critical to understanding what happened; future readers should just be aware it is not all-encompassing.
I highly recommend it.
November 12, 2013
Pop history in the vein of "Black Hawk Down". Well written, well researched. Brings home the horror and cold blooded evil of the attack very well. A bit thin in the "afterword" section. In fact, surprisingly so. Considering how much research the two authors seem to have managed, a little more information about what happened (or did not happen) in the aftermath would have been nice.
PS: the authors show the full horror of the attack as well as all the ineptitude and bungling in the Indian response (and a lot of heroism as well), but say very little about the unusual nature of the terrorist network that produced this horror. That their aims and abilities are "above average" is one thing, but that the state support they receive also goes beyond the norm is never explicitly stated. This is a mistake. If you have gone to the trouble of writing this book and feel so strongly about it, its good to put in perspective as well...to bring out the novelty and shock of the new (and the worse) about this network and its supporters.
PS: the authors show the full horror of the attack as well as all the ineptitude and bungling in the Indian response (and a lot of heroism as well), but say very little about the unusual nature of the terrorist network that produced this horror. That their aims and abilities are "above average" is one thing, but that the state support they receive also goes beyond the norm is never explicitly stated. This is a mistake. If you have gone to the trouble of writing this book and feel so strongly about it, its good to put in perspective as well...to bring out the novelty and shock of the new (and the worse) about this network and its supporters.
December 27, 2019
A well researched book on the accounts of 26/11. How the authors weave the true events of the tragedy into a book, deserves the praising. A big salute to all the people who help to save many lives without caring for their own.
A must read!!!
A must read!!!
April 7, 2020
The Siege: 68 Hours Inside The Taj Hotel is riveting account an Islamic terrorist from Pakistan that carried out horrific attacks across the city of Mumbai, India in 2008. The book chronicles what happen to people at the Hotel Taj the night the terrorist attacked. Unless you are from India or Pakistan get a notebook ready because there is lot of names, places, and events happening. The book jumps around between terrorist and the victims. The reader learns about the origins of the attack, the upbringings of the terrorist and the victims. Among the victims the book switches from one individual to another and to be honest it was hard to keep track of who was who. After while I got to the point with such a comprehensive detailed account of the attack the details became overwhelming for me as a reader. The book is very well researched and the writer does a great job of looking at the tragedy from all sides. Maybe not knowing much about this incident I thought the writers would present the material in more easy going fashion. Instead to many details were thrown at the me I got lost at times. Other then that you get a gripping descriptive true account of the events that day. Just have a tablet handy to record anything you question. The books index will point you to that page you need to reread.
November 5, 2022
I already saw Hotel Mumbai, which is basically the movie version of this book, so I do remember a lot of the scenes of the siege. What really stood out to me in this book was the details of everything before the attack, which is new and a great depth into how Pakistan harbors these terror cells, then "doesn't seem to know about them". Great reporting, great detail, and a truly horrific story that really rocked the world at the time.
March 13, 2019
Review to come soon!
April 23, 2014
It's hard to say one enjoys a book such as this, but I do think it's an important event worthy of wider familiarity, especially in the West. Based on this book, along with the recently released The Wrong Enemy, it's pretty clear now that Pakistan should have been included in the so-called "axis of evil." Actually, an argument could be made that they are Member #1 of such an axis.
One of the frustrating lessons to be drawn from the attacks in Mumbai relates to how unprepared the Indian government was, and apparently remains. Whether it be the lack of appropriate equipment, training, or a clear-cut chain of command, it's still shocking to learn that just ten well-trained and highly motivated terrorists were able to attack a heavily trafficked train station, a Jewish center, a restaurant, and two luxury hotels, killing more than 160 people and wounding hundreds of others, all over a period lasting days.
This also speaks to a weakness of the book, at least for me: Very little is mentioned about the attacks elsewhere from the Taj hotel. Certainly, that was the most lengthy and dramatic, but the other locations are barely mentioned and aren't discussed in any detail whatsoever. That said, the almost hour-by-hour coverage of the events within the Taj is compelling reading, to say the least.
Incredibly well researched, particularly with respect to the Lakshi training centers within Pakistan and how terrorists are "formed,' but also with the amount of detail the authors uncovered in their investigation of this horrific attack.
Finally, it's hard to consider terrorism anything other than an unrestrained psychopathology, since its implementation rarely achieves much more than a shot-lived effect, shocking though it may be. And often, it's impossible to understand how any rational person could believe their long-term strategic goals would ever manifest from such tactics.
One of the frustrating lessons to be drawn from the attacks in Mumbai relates to how unprepared the Indian government was, and apparently remains. Whether it be the lack of appropriate equipment, training, or a clear-cut chain of command, it's still shocking to learn that just ten well-trained and highly motivated terrorists were able to attack a heavily trafficked train station, a Jewish center, a restaurant, and two luxury hotels, killing more than 160 people and wounding hundreds of others, all over a period lasting days.
This also speaks to a weakness of the book, at least for me: Very little is mentioned about the attacks elsewhere from the Taj hotel. Certainly, that was the most lengthy and dramatic, but the other locations are barely mentioned and aren't discussed in any detail whatsoever. That said, the almost hour-by-hour coverage of the events within the Taj is compelling reading, to say the least.
Incredibly well researched, particularly with respect to the Lakshi training centers within Pakistan and how terrorists are "formed,' but also with the amount of detail the authors uncovered in their investigation of this horrific attack.
Finally, it's hard to consider terrorism anything other than an unrestrained psychopathology, since its implementation rarely achieves much more than a shot-lived effect, shocking though it may be. And often, it's impossible to understand how any rational person could believe their long-term strategic goals would ever manifest from such tactics.
December 8, 2020
This book in one word: harrowing. Before reading this, I'm embarrassed to admit that I knew essentially nothing about the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008 that were centered on the Taj Hotel. To that end, the book usefully served as a densely-packed primer about the incident. The authors' legwork is impressive—the level of detail is striking enough that at times I felt like I was right there on the ground along with everyone else at the Taj. But often that same meticulousness was too distracting to be effective, as it felt like the authors were haphazardly throwing in anecdotes from victims' lives just to "show their work," so to speak. Despite their best efforts, too, I never got a good sense of the geography of the Taj, and the constant cacophony of hotel lingo and South Asia points of interest was confusing and sometimes overwhelming (though perhaps this is my fault for not knowing enough about the region). And most importantly, confronting line after line of vividly-described horror and bloodshed simply made for a less-than-enjoyable reading experience. If the authors' goal was to portray the Mumbai attacks with unflinching brutality, they certainly succeeded, but I can't help but feel like this book would have been better with a slightly softer edge and more of a narrative hilt.
June 3, 2018
If any book should come with a trigger warning, this one should. Especially for Mumbaikars. I could never read more than a few pages at a time. It's as spine-chilling as any thriller I have read, and much more terrifying. It's really well-researched and the events unfold in elaborate detail. Right from the political incompetencies to the silent heroism of the Taj staff, this book brings the horror of 'the seige' alive. It's terrifying but a story worth reading.
I salute every staff member of the hotel who risked their lives to save their guests. Right from the hotel's manager Karambir Kang who lost his entire family in the attack but still led the evacuation and rescue mission from the front lines to the 'Kitchen Brigade' who risked their lives to enter the hotel, after escaping the horror once, to save more guests, and laid down their lives as human shields for the guests.
The conclusion is just as chilling as the rest of the book. Chef Oberoi, after watching his colleagues die, volunteers after the battle to clean up the kitchen. Amit Peshave who continues to help survivors even after being injured and traumatised. I am awed by all these characters.
I salute every staff member of the hotel who risked their lives to save their guests. Right from the hotel's manager Karambir Kang who lost his entire family in the attack but still led the evacuation and rescue mission from the front lines to the 'Kitchen Brigade' who risked their lives to enter the hotel, after escaping the horror once, to save more guests, and laid down their lives as human shields for the guests.
The conclusion is just as chilling as the rest of the book. Chef Oberoi, after watching his colleagues die, volunteers after the battle to clean up the kitchen. Amit Peshave who continues to help survivors even after being injured and traumatised. I am awed by all these characters.
September 24, 2021
This was a very good read. The Terrorist attack on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai was scary enough just watching the news on TV but this book really gets inside the plot from the beginning stages when the boys were recruited, how it was planned, executed, what went wrong for the Terrorists, The Police, the guests.
It gives the accounts from staff perspective, the guest perspective, and the terrorist and police perspective and shows the bravery of both the staff, the guests, and the security forces inside. The courage of all of those people who were doing the best they could to try to protect themselves and to get the guests to safety. They were under the impression from news reports that there were attacks all over the city so they thought they were being attacked by a much larger force, but in reality it was about 10 teams of two.
It's an amazing story. It was a fascinating read and I highly recommend it!
It gives the accounts from staff perspective, the guest perspective, and the terrorist and police perspective and shows the bravery of both the staff, the guests, and the security forces inside. The courage of all of those people who were doing the best they could to try to protect themselves and to get the guests to safety. They were under the impression from news reports that there were attacks all over the city so they thought they were being attacked by a much larger force, but in reality it was about 10 teams of two.
It's an amazing story. It was a fascinating read and I highly recommend it!
November 26, 2021
How can I even rate something like this!
What do I review about?!
The chaos.
The loss.
The endurance.
The courage.
The sacrifices.
The competency and efficiency of a private terror network aided by government agencies.
The incompetency and the inefficiency of most of the Indian govt. agencies (I said most and not all, because of the role that NSG had undertaken in this and because of most of the govt. folks who did their best despite the system's inefficiency).
The humanity shown by the Taj employees.
The humaneness and the empathy and the compassion displayed by strangers towards people who are strangers to them.
It was a difficult book. It was unputdownable. But for what reasons.
Grateful towards Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark for all the hard work they put into this.
What do I review about?!
The chaos.
The loss.
The endurance.
The courage.
The sacrifices.
The competency and efficiency of a private terror network aided by government agencies.
The incompetency and the inefficiency of most of the Indian govt. agencies (I said most and not all, because of the role that NSG had undertaken in this and because of most of the govt. folks who did their best despite the system's inefficiency).
The humanity shown by the Taj employees.
The humaneness and the empathy and the compassion displayed by strangers towards people who are strangers to them.
It was a difficult book. It was unputdownable. But for what reasons.
Grateful towards Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark for all the hard work they put into this.
April 26, 2016
The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel is an unusually compelling non-fictional account of the notorious 2008 attacks in Mumbai, which captured the world's attention. I can corroborate the word of other commentators who praise the depth of research by authors Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrien Levy; the level of detail they have compiled is incredible. Moreover, you can count me as one of crowd who found this book to be an absolutely absorbing pageturner; it was more compelling than many well-written thrillers for which I have a voracious literary appetite. This is a reading experience that will definitely entertain as it informs -- and excites, frightens, and above all, engrosses you.
The rich detail The Siege conveys while maintaining a seamlessly fast paced narrative of the events in question distinguish it as a unique achievement of its authors as much as a find for its readers. However, the genre here is of course not thriller fiction; this is non-fiction, investigative journalism about real happenings that impacted real people. Certainly, the measure of the quality of such a work must be greater than its ability to absorb and entertain its readers; it must be a fitting representation of some important truth.
I find that the authors take too many literary liberties in presenting the facts to be true to the heart of the factual material. Principally, details are fictionalized or at least stylized for the explicit purpose of imitating novelistic techniques used to hook readers' interest in the given author's designed plot.
The opening lines of The Siege's "Prologue" provide a strong example of this phenomenon: "A sliver of moon hung over the Arabian sea as the dinghy powered towards 'The Queen's Necklace'...The ten-man crew of Pakistani fighters rode the black waves in silence, listening to the thrum of the outboard motor...[their supplies] barely seemed enough to take on the world's fourth-largest city..." (p. 1).
Here, the authors flesh out the characters of the perpetrators by fictionalizing their experience prior to the attacks, and they highlight Mumbai's glamour and importance in order to highlight the importance of the action to come for the primarily Western/Western-oriented audience of the book. Make of it what you will; it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I conclude that these techniques fall flat at best, and at worst, they strike this reader as downright unseemly when used to frame life-and-death deciding moments in the lives of real human beings such as form the basis of the nonfictional story at hand. Despite the fine journalistic detail and exceptionally compelling presentation, I must give this account of the terrorism in Mumbai a deeply ambivalent review.
Please be advised I received my copy of this book through a Goodreads book giveaway.
The rich detail The Siege conveys while maintaining a seamlessly fast paced narrative of the events in question distinguish it as a unique achievement of its authors as much as a find for its readers. However, the genre here is of course not thriller fiction; this is non-fiction, investigative journalism about real happenings that impacted real people. Certainly, the measure of the quality of such a work must be greater than its ability to absorb and entertain its readers; it must be a fitting representation of some important truth.
I find that the authors take too many literary liberties in presenting the facts to be true to the heart of the factual material. Principally, details are fictionalized or at least stylized for the explicit purpose of imitating novelistic techniques used to hook readers' interest in the given author's designed plot.
The opening lines of The Siege's "Prologue" provide a strong example of this phenomenon: "A sliver of moon hung over the Arabian sea as the dinghy powered towards 'The Queen's Necklace'...The ten-man crew of Pakistani fighters rode the black waves in silence, listening to the thrum of the outboard motor...[their supplies] barely seemed enough to take on the world's fourth-largest city..." (p. 1).
Here, the authors flesh out the characters of the perpetrators by fictionalizing their experience prior to the attacks, and they highlight Mumbai's glamour and importance in order to highlight the importance of the action to come for the primarily Western/Western-oriented audience of the book. Make of it what you will; it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I conclude that these techniques fall flat at best, and at worst, they strike this reader as downright unseemly when used to frame life-and-death deciding moments in the lives of real human beings such as form the basis of the nonfictional story at hand. Despite the fine journalistic detail and exceptionally compelling presentation, I must give this account of the terrorism in Mumbai a deeply ambivalent review.
Please be advised I received my copy of this book through a Goodreads book giveaway.
September 3, 2018
Written by Cathy Scott Clark and Adrian Levy, 'The Siege' is a non-fictionalized account of the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, planned and engineered by the Lashkar e Taiba.
In this meticulously researched book, filled with first-hand accounts of heroism and heart break, you experience dread, triumph, relief and at times utter frustration (at the inadequacy and the pace of response from the city, state and national authorities). The story is mostly chronological, seamlessly tying together narratives/experiences of various characters and eyewitnesses. It's evident that the research that went into writing this book was staggering and yet the reportage reads like a thriller.
This one's an unstoppable, heart-pounding read.
In this meticulously researched book, filled with first-hand accounts of heroism and heart break, you experience dread, triumph, relief and at times utter frustration (at the inadequacy and the pace of response from the city, state and national authorities). The story is mostly chronological, seamlessly tying together narratives/experiences of various characters and eyewitnesses. It's evident that the research that went into writing this book was staggering and yet the reportage reads like a thriller.
This one's an unstoppable, heart-pounding read.
August 5, 2016
The terrible attack on the evergreen Mumbai, an economic hub of the country. The ghastly flame from the iconic Taj Hotel, CST railway station filled with the blood of passenger, family crying for their loved ones. I think all these images are still fresh in the mind of Indians. 26/11 was one of the most dreading attacks in the world. It not only shook the entire world but it also shows how much terrorism has spread its roots. This book is an honest retelling of the siege of Taj Hotel on 26 November 2008.
Read the full book review on my blog http://www.haloofbooks.com/siege-atta...
Regards,
Sheetal
http://www.haloofbooks.com/
Read the full book review on my blog http://www.haloofbooks.com/siege-atta...
Regards,
Sheetal
http://www.haloofbooks.com/
December 1, 2013
Reading this book while staying in the Taj Palace just after the 5yr anniversary of the 26/11 attack is cool but scary. This is to Mumbai what 9/11 is to New Yorkers. I saw a man this morning bristling at the tight security- but halfway through the book I now understand why Indian five star hotels look under cars with mirrors, x-ray bags, and send people through metal detectors to get in the lobby. Actually what is scary is how haphazard a lot of the security is, unarmed hotel guards waving people through as the metal detector beeps nonstop or people sidestepping it altogether.
August 30, 2024
***1/2 With a strong start in establishing the participants in the Tai massacre as living, breathing people. Guests, staff, police. The terrorists [compared to Hotel Mumbai ] get a surprising flesh-out also, one of the best chapters of the book IMO. The events are as well puzzled together as possible out of an inherently chaotic, diversly remembered situation, but CHAOS remains the word.
November 27, 2013
Thank you to Catherine at Penguin for tracking down a copy of this book for me.
So, recently I decided to expand my reading yet again by starting to read some more non-fiction - something I've only dipped a toe into every now and again, much preferring fiction and all the adventures you can find there...
I started with Jamie Baywoods often hilarious account of how she settled into a new home- Getting Rooted in New Zealand - and then moved onto a "self help" book for those suffering a loss "You can Heal Your Heart" both of which gave me very different but equally rewarding reading experiences. I then put out a plea amongst friends as to what I should try next - The Siege, by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott Clark, telling the story of the 2008 takeover of the Taj in Mumbai by Islamic terrorists seemed to be a popular choice - Read it they told me. Its fascinating, horrifying and compelling. So I did..and here is what I thought.
Synopsis
The Siege by Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott-Clark - a searing account of the 2005 terrorist attacks at Mumbai's famous Taj Hotel.
On 26th November 2008 the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai is besieged by Pakistani Islamists, armed with explosives and machine guns.
For three days, guests and staff of the hotel are trapped as the terrorists run amok.
On 29th November commandos launch Operation Black Tornado. The world holds its breath.
The first thing that struck me was how well researched this book was. Starting with the "Dramatis personae" giving an overview of the people involved and a brief background, including guests, staff and the terrorists themselves, I was immediately right at the heart of the matter - I wanted to find out what happened to all of them. Leading on with a bit of background of the events leading up to the terror attacks, and some information on the hotel, you were left feeling slightly off kilter while you waited for what you knew was coming..
The second thing that struck me was how much this book read as if it was a Thriller - a fast paced one at that - I often had to stop for a moment and remind myself, especially in the more violent moments, that these people were REAL. Everything I was reading actually happened - it was a sobering thought and one that compelled me to read ever onwards. I read this in two days, such was my inability to leave it before I knew the outcome. I had zero knowledge of these events before opening this account - such is the beauty of the writing I now feel almost as if I were there - or at the very least had friends who were.
This is a soundbite in a way - a little of my own research tells me that there was a lot more to the terror attacks on Mumbai in 2008 quite apart from the events at the Taj - I feel that I absolutely want to know more. If anyone knows of any other books that tackle this subject well, I would be very interested to hear about them.
I'm not sure what else I can say really - I can't speak to characterisation because these are not characters they are human beings who suffered at the hands of other human beings - that very fact makes this a must read. I would highly recommend that you give it a go.
At the end, I read every name in the "RIP" section and shed a tear for those people I had never known, and never WOULD have known even had they lived.
Highly Recommended.
So, recently I decided to expand my reading yet again by starting to read some more non-fiction - something I've only dipped a toe into every now and again, much preferring fiction and all the adventures you can find there...
I started with Jamie Baywoods often hilarious account of how she settled into a new home- Getting Rooted in New Zealand - and then moved onto a "self help" book for those suffering a loss "You can Heal Your Heart" both of which gave me very different but equally rewarding reading experiences. I then put out a plea amongst friends as to what I should try next - The Siege, by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott Clark, telling the story of the 2008 takeover of the Taj in Mumbai by Islamic terrorists seemed to be a popular choice - Read it they told me. Its fascinating, horrifying and compelling. So I did..and here is what I thought.
Synopsis
The Siege by Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott-Clark - a searing account of the 2005 terrorist attacks at Mumbai's famous Taj Hotel.
On 26th November 2008 the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai is besieged by Pakistani Islamists, armed with explosives and machine guns.
For three days, guests and staff of the hotel are trapped as the terrorists run amok.
On 29th November commandos launch Operation Black Tornado. The world holds its breath.
The first thing that struck me was how well researched this book was. Starting with the "Dramatis personae" giving an overview of the people involved and a brief background, including guests, staff and the terrorists themselves, I was immediately right at the heart of the matter - I wanted to find out what happened to all of them. Leading on with a bit of background of the events leading up to the terror attacks, and some information on the hotel, you were left feeling slightly off kilter while you waited for what you knew was coming..
The second thing that struck me was how much this book read as if it was a Thriller - a fast paced one at that - I often had to stop for a moment and remind myself, especially in the more violent moments, that these people were REAL. Everything I was reading actually happened - it was a sobering thought and one that compelled me to read ever onwards. I read this in two days, such was my inability to leave it before I knew the outcome. I had zero knowledge of these events before opening this account - such is the beauty of the writing I now feel almost as if I were there - or at the very least had friends who were.
This is a soundbite in a way - a little of my own research tells me that there was a lot more to the terror attacks on Mumbai in 2008 quite apart from the events at the Taj - I feel that I absolutely want to know more. If anyone knows of any other books that tackle this subject well, I would be very interested to hear about them.
I'm not sure what else I can say really - I can't speak to characterisation because these are not characters they are human beings who suffered at the hands of other human beings - that very fact makes this a must read. I would highly recommend that you give it a go.
At the end, I read every name in the "RIP" section and shed a tear for those people I had never known, and never WOULD have known even had they lived.
Highly Recommended.
January 7, 2015
Tears threatened to fill my eyes. My throat constricted. More than once.
I had just finished reading the book.
Shangrila hotel in Pudong, China is where I had switched on the TV on the evening of November 26, 2008 and watched the attack on the Taj in horror. All other thoughts were replaced by sheer incredulity - how could this happen? Crime is not unknown in Mumbai and neither are bombings, but a group of men walking around with guns just shooting down people? In South Bombay? Never.
I had spent the first three years of my life living in that area (not that I remember much!) and visited frequently before returning to work in the city in 1982. The memories of living in Badhwar Park for four years are indelible as was my life in and around South Bombay.
So many memories. Movies at Regal. Shopping on Colaba Causeway. Beer at Gokul, even on dry days when it was served in steel tumblers. Singdana and masala papad. Bade Miyan's kababs. Chicken Malai Tikka at Santoor. I could go on endlessly.
As a young couple, we often visited the Taj Coffee Shop (Shamiana) and strolled around the Gateway of India. Visiting the Sea Lounge was a special treat, as was dining at Golden Dragon. The Oberoi coffee shop was where we discussed Charu's wedding and were surprised to see our photo in the Times of India the next morning!
Having moved away from India for close on 30 years now and not visiting South Bombay often enough had dulled some of my memories, but everything came back as I raced through this book. I could visualize the places described in the book with vivid emotion. The book's focus is on the events that occured at the Taj while touching on (but not detailing) the attacks on Leopold Cafe, Bombay VT, The Oberoi and Chabad House. Thank God they were stopped before they got to Malabar Hill.
To be brief, Levy and Scott-Clerk have written a masterpiece. This is a racy action thriller which is non-fiction. It feels for the people who were involved in this tragedy and made me a part of their stories. It is based on deep research and conversations with many of the people who were affected. It is a story of heroism, tragedy, bravery, tears and stupidity. It also exposes the incompetence of the authorities in dealing with the situation.
I am glad I read this book.
I had just finished reading the book.
Shangrila hotel in Pudong, China is where I had switched on the TV on the evening of November 26, 2008 and watched the attack on the Taj in horror. All other thoughts were replaced by sheer incredulity - how could this happen? Crime is not unknown in Mumbai and neither are bombings, but a group of men walking around with guns just shooting down people? In South Bombay? Never.
I had spent the first three years of my life living in that area (not that I remember much!) and visited frequently before returning to work in the city in 1982. The memories of living in Badhwar Park for four years are indelible as was my life in and around South Bombay.
So many memories. Movies at Regal. Shopping on Colaba Causeway. Beer at Gokul, even on dry days when it was served in steel tumblers. Singdana and masala papad. Bade Miyan's kababs. Chicken Malai Tikka at Santoor. I could go on endlessly.
As a young couple, we often visited the Taj Coffee Shop (Shamiana) and strolled around the Gateway of India. Visiting the Sea Lounge was a special treat, as was dining at Golden Dragon. The Oberoi coffee shop was where we discussed Charu's wedding and were surprised to see our photo in the Times of India the next morning!
Having moved away from India for close on 30 years now and not visiting South Bombay often enough had dulled some of my memories, but everything came back as I raced through this book. I could visualize the places described in the book with vivid emotion. The book's focus is on the events that occured at the Taj while touching on (but not detailing) the attacks on Leopold Cafe, Bombay VT, The Oberoi and Chabad House. Thank God they were stopped before they got to Malabar Hill.
To be brief, Levy and Scott-Clerk have written a masterpiece. This is a racy action thriller which is non-fiction. It feels for the people who were involved in this tragedy and made me a part of their stories. It is based on deep research and conversations with many of the people who were affected. It is a story of heroism, tragedy, bravery, tears and stupidity. It also exposes the incompetence of the authorities in dealing with the situation.
I am glad I read this book.
March 22, 2019
As may be evident from the title and cover, this book is on the Mumbai Terror attacks carried out on 26th November 2008 by Ajmal Kasab & co from the terrorist organisation LeT based in Pakistan. The book focuses on "the siege" (attack) of the Taj Hotel which ironically was carried out by the terrorists holed up inside the hotel (and not surrounding it as in a siege).
Firstly, lets talk of the Mumbai police which is often spoken of proudly. The police shockingly played a game of political correctness and passing the buck. It is true that they lacked the necessary equipment (weapons, protective gear, vehicles etc) to take on the terrorists. But it was as if some of them didnt care enough about the lives of civilians. They didnt even bother to co-ordinate amongst themselves or inform the NSGs or elite units who could have limited the loss of lives and property. This is a story of their repeatedly missed chances.
Secondly, on the Govt - It is a myth that the Indian govt is overstaffed. In its core functions, the govts deliberately seem to understaff departments and deny them resources. This creates a Divide and Rule where the public resents the govt officials inefficiency and the govt officials lack manpower, resources and motivation. I dont think govts have learnt anything from the above attacks and analysed their shortcomings.
Finally, hats-off to the Taj Hotel staff who tried their level-best to protect their guests. However, to be totally fair the Taj management was lax in maintaining security and its surprising how no hotel blueprints were available for the commando teams.
The book is well-researched and could easily have got a 4+ rating. But, the writing style unfortunately left a lot to be desired. Why do I care if one of the guests had bought a yacht and had invited Amitabh on Monday, Aamir on Tuesday and Shahrukh on Friday. Similarly, a lot of the guests came across as detestable snobs. And there were too many of them.
Finally, hoping that a web series comes out based on these incidents as found it tough to keep track of the various threads and get a complete, comprehensive picture of events.
Firstly, lets talk of the Mumbai police which is often spoken of proudly. The police shockingly played a game of political correctness and passing the buck. It is true that they lacked the necessary equipment (weapons, protective gear, vehicles etc) to take on the terrorists. But it was as if some of them didnt care enough about the lives of civilians. They didnt even bother to co-ordinate amongst themselves or inform the NSGs or elite units who could have limited the loss of lives and property. This is a story of their repeatedly missed chances.
Secondly, on the Govt - It is a myth that the Indian govt is overstaffed. In its core functions, the govts deliberately seem to understaff departments and deny them resources. This creates a Divide and Rule where the public resents the govt officials inefficiency and the govt officials lack manpower, resources and motivation. I dont think govts have learnt anything from the above attacks and analysed their shortcomings.
Finally, hats-off to the Taj Hotel staff who tried their level-best to protect their guests. However, to be totally fair the Taj management was lax in maintaining security and its surprising how no hotel blueprints were available for the commando teams.
The book is well-researched and could easily have got a 4+ rating. But, the writing style unfortunately left a lot to be desired. Why do I care if one of the guests had bought a yacht and had invited Amitabh on Monday, Aamir on Tuesday and Shahrukh on Friday. Similarly, a lot of the guests came across as detestable snobs. And there were too many of them.
Finally, hoping that a web series comes out based on these incidents as found it tough to keep track of the various threads and get a complete, comprehensive picture of events.
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