The Siege: The Attack on the Taj Mumbai

by Cathy Scott-Clark

  Stuck in southbound traffic from Bandra, Karambir Kang was frantic. It was 10.15 p.m. and he wondered how long it was going to take him to reach the Taj. His mobile phone rang constantly. His family was still up on the sixth floor, the hotel’s CEO was trapped on the second floor of the Tower and Chef Oberoi had shut down all of the restaurants and bars, sealing the guests inside. The Taj’s group head of security was at home. Ratan Tata, the owner, was on his way over. As the public face of the hotel, Karambir needed to get back.

  Neeti got through to him. Should they come outside? Stay where you are, he advised, the shooting is downstairs. ‘It is a huge hotel and you are very remote.’ He was sure the security forces would neutralize the gunmen before they got a chance to come up. ‘You will be safest in your room.’ The hotel was a maze these criminals could not navigate. Karambir sounded so confident that Neeti didn’t doubt him.

  Next, he called his security chief, Kudiyadi, for an update. The figures were chilling. More than 500 staff were on duty, with records showing 1,200 guests and diners trapped inside. ‘No police response,’ Kudiyadi texted. The first priority was to organize Kudiyadi’s Black Suits. They would have to step up and begin a stealthy evacuation, starting in the lobby. ‘Get the switchboard girls back to their desks and call everyone,’ he texted the security chief. ‘Guests must stay in their rooms.’ Kudiyadi’s response sounded panicked. Karambir reassured him: ‘Remember, you know the hotel, they don’t.’

  The Sunrise Suite

  Sabina Saikia was huddled by the door, listening to the sound of gunfire and thinking back to a conversation she had had earlier in the day with her friend Savitri, who had brought her daughters over to sample the Taj’s five-star luxury. While the girls had eaten chocolate cake and watched TV in the lounge, Sabina and Savitri had lain on the vast bed, talking.

  The two women had met each other in the dying years of the eighties, in a dive of a hotel in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges. They had clicked after Sabina found out Savitri was Assamese, like her boyfriend, Shantanu.

  Luxuriating on hand-stitched cotton sheets, they had chatted this afternoon about a recent bombing in Assam that had killed more than seventy people. ‘A friend of mine almost died when the bomb blasted right in front of him,’ said Savitri. Sabina nodded: ‘Assam is a real basket case.’ Then she checked herself. ‘Here we are lying in the lap of luxury in the most exclusive place in Mumbai being so smug about it.’

  Now, six hours later, she wished she had taken up Savitri’s invitation to stay at her place tonight.

  Sabina’s phone rang. ‘Hey, it’s Nikhil, are you OK?’ It was her younger brother, calling from Delhi. He and the rest of the family were at the pre-wedding dinner and had been nipping in and out to the TV lounge all evening to catch the cricket. In the last few minutes the match had ended and someone had switched channels to find news of the attacks in Mumbai. Nikhil expected to find Sabina still out at the Parsi wedding. ‘No, I was sick, I came back early,’ she whispered. ‘I can hear gunfire but the switchboard just rang and told me to stay here. What should I do?’

  10.20 p.m. – Shamiana

  Down on the ground floor, Amit Peshave stood frozen in the centre of his restaurant, having just spotted a gunman hovering outside. The man looked no older than him and was wearing a grey long-sleeved T-shirt over a black polo neck, with a bulky blue cricket bag thrown over one shoulder. Amit could see writing on it: ‘Changing the Tide’. The manager knew that if he ran, he would draw the gunman’s attention, but if he stayed put, he would certainly die. Behind him, more than fifty diners sat waiting for him to make the call. He ducked down and scurried towards them, urging them to get underneath the tables. Some ran out via a fire exit, and a quick head count showed that thirty-one remained crouching on the floor. He had an idea. Behind a curtain at the rear of Shamiana were two private salons. Hiding in there might buy them time but some of the guests were very drunk. Could he gather them together?

  ‘Move, move,’ he hissed, herding them inside. Turning round, he saw Rehmatullah, the head waiter, emerge from the kitchen, carrying a plate of biryani. Amit waved his arms wildly. ‘Rehmatullah!’ The gunman had spotted him too and squeezed off a burst, catching the old man in the chest, throwing him on to his back, the tray clattering to the floor, rice flying around the room. For good measure, he then bowled a grenade towards the buffet counter, just as Amit’s assistant manager emerged to see what the noise was about. ‘Run,’ Amit screamed, as the grenade detonated, shattering the crystal chandeliers, throwing the room into a jagged and choking darkness as his assistant rolled out of the way. Stunned by the sheer noise of the blast, Amit lay motionless for a moment. What about his chef, the ‘Indefatigable Rego’? Desperate for a way out, Amit scanned the restaurant and his eyes came to rest on the ‘dead door’. Normally a live band played in front, but he remembered it led into the gardens beside the pool terrace. Hidden in the shrubbery was the hotel’s transformer room from where another door opened out into Merry Weather Road: a secret door to the street. It was a long shot but their only chance. Amit ran to the door, tugging and charging it. He kicked and kicked, tumbling out into the night air. He was out. For a few seconds he lay there, looking up at the stars. ‘Amit, save yourself. Run for your life.’ Could he live with that decision? He thought of his parents in Pune, philanthropic GPs who often worked for nothing. He could not. Amit got up and went back inside. ‘Into the bushes,’ he whispered, counting thirty-one diners out of Shamiana and into the undergrowth, hushing the drunks who giggled and growled.

  Staring out towards the pool terrace, Amit spotted the gunman strolling towards the poolside café Aquarius, where the old Canadian couple he had served earlier were still at their table. ‘What the hell?’ He could not believe it. Was it stiff upper lip, resignation or insanity? Amit wanted to yell: ‘Get out of there.’ But that would have exposed his position. They were just two people.

  The gunman could not yet see the diners, or they him. When he crossed the last pillar they’d be in his sight line. Amit willed them to get up but they kept on with their tête-à-tête. Now the gunman was at the pillar. In one stride, he was round it. He spotted them, pulled himself up and raised his assault rifle, shooting the elderly man in the back. As the injured tourist rose, bewildered, the gunman put a second round through his head. He swung the barrel over to the woman, and as she lifted her hands in horror he shot her in the chest. Amit felt his stomach flip as both guests crumpled dead to the floor.

  Inside the locked Crystal Room, above the pool, wedding reception guests sat in silence, drinks untouched, candles flickering, listening to the gunfire that hammered down below, as the piped music continued to play. The hotel smelled like a burning ghat, the journalist Bhisham thought, wondering where the newlyweds, Amit and Varsha Thadani, had got to. ‘How can this happen in the Taj?’ he asked under his breath. He hoped it was some kind of drug war. ‘They’ll kill each other and that’ll be it.’ But for now no one knew anything. And they couldn’t see anything either since the only view from the windowless Crystal Room was through a couple of portholes in the service doors at either end.

  Suddenly, a screeching bullet pierced a partition wall, shattering a huge glass panel above the bar. ‘My God,’ Bhisham gulped to a financier friend beside him, as they all ducked under the tables. ‘How can they be inside the hotel? People are saying there’s a gang inside?’ Ack, ack, ack. More bullets sliced through the walls. ‘They are inside,’ someone cried out from beneath a table. Bhisham was dismissive. ‘This is stupid,’ he said. He texted a friend at the Press Club: ‘Siy, you check the news, heard gunfire. Bullets in banquet hall.’ More rounds bored into the Crystal Room, ripping up swagged curtains. One woman was calling her husband’s name. ‘Shut up!’ someone hissed.

  Bhisham texted his friend again: ‘I am at Taj, wedding. They’re saying gang war.’ Who was shooting? Muslim mob, Hindu zealots, drug gang? ‘Al fucking Qaeda?’ Siy sent word back. There was also shooting at CST and ou
tside the Metro cinema. ‘Multiple attacks,’ Bhisham whispered to his neighbour.

  Crack, crack. The Crystal Room doors shook. Was it another guest trying to get inside? Should they open up and help them out? Crack, crack. The doors shook. It was a gun butt smashing down on the handle. Bhisham stared at the doors. He could hear kicking and grunting. A gunman was trying to get in. The doors rattled, but held firm. He heard footsteps pattering along the service corridor and a snatch of foreign voices. Was it Urdu? Or Pashto? Were these Afghanis? The city had once lived in fear of an Afghan godfather, the city’s don, Karim Lala, although nowadays it was the Taliban that easy-living Mumbaikers associated with terror.

  The footsteps ran behind them in the service corridor. They were circling, trying to figure out how to get in. A face flashed past one of the porthole windows. One of the guests tried to snatch a picture with her phone, and a dazzling white light bounced off the walls as her flash flared. ‘You are going to get us all killed,’ someone whispered. The face reappeared, pressed up against the porthole glass, boring into the darkened hall.

  Wednesday, 26 November 2008, 9.45 p.m. – Malabar Hill, Mumbai

  Joint Commissioner Rakesh Maria, the head of Mumbai’s Crime Branch, was in the shower at his residence off Nepean Sea Road. For once he had got out of work early, special dispensation as his son was going away that night. But the JC was distracted. A capable officer, one of the city’s most famed, a cop who was practised at managing his own legend, Maria felt events were slipping out of his control. For several months, intelligence about a terrorist attack on Mumbai had been massing and no one in the force seemed overly concerned. In two days’ time, the PM was also making an important visit, which meant an extra security headache.

  This was familiar territory for Maria, the son of a Bollywood producer, who grew up sharing his father’s passion for the enthralling power of a good story. He rose spectacularly in the police, from heading traffic to leading Crime Branch, after unravelling the bloody conspiracy behind a series of bomb blasts that killed 257 residents in 1993. Back then, Mumbai was still Bombay and gripped by D-Company, a Muslim syndicate headed by an exiled godfather, Dawood Ibrahim, who fixed things from Dubai, served by a Hindu henchman Chhota (little) Rajan. Maria had quickly spotted linkages, defining the blasts as one interconnected attempt to kickstart a religious war.

  Life became more complicated when the Hindu Rajan – repulsed by the Muslim Dawood’s crime – split with him, factionalizing the city. The thugs gunned for each other, even hitting enemies in the witness box, as well as targeting the authorities, leading Maria to deploy hard tactics to save Mumbai from becoming a Naples on the Arabian Sea. He formed a squad of unconventionals who squeezed the families of wanted men to get them in for questioning. There were allegations of sleep deprivation, near-drownings, mock executions, and electrocutions in secret holding pens. Maria’s team were also accused of indulging in a series of staged encounters in which anywhere between 400 and 700 criminals were allegedly eliminated in ambushes that the police framed as legitimate shootouts.

  D-Company was emasculated, and the Mumbai cops rose anew. The writer Jeet Thayil described them as ‘Brown Crows’, conjuring up the image of birds renowned for their adaptive intelligence, the consumers of information who ate anything, everything they came across.

  Now, the sound of four phones ringing simultaneously drove Maria out of the shower, bringing him news of multiple attacks. Getting dressed, he sensed the red mist creeping over the city once more. He called up an inspector: ‘Start at the Leopold. Find out what’s happening.’ Maria also called police headquarters. Had the Standard Operating Procedure been implemented, clarifying who was supposed to be where in an emergency? Where was the anti-terrorism chief? He called the Joint Commissioner for Law and Order, who, according to SOP, was to run the Control Room in the advent of an outrage. Finding him still at home on Malabar Hill, Maria offered to pick him up.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ he told his wife as he slicked back his hair. We will come in all guns blazing, and they will run.’

  Three and a half miles south-east of Nepean Sea Road, Mumbai’s neo-gothic police headquarters was frantic. Maria and his colleague arrived shortly after 10 p.m. and charged up the main wooden staircase, passing a gallery of former commissioners. The present office holder, Hasan Gafoor, only the second Muslim to lead the force in a city with a vast Islamic constituency, was nowhere to be seen. The two Joint Commissioners entered the first-floor Control Room, where civilian staff and anxious-looking police officers were milling around and phones rang off the hook.

  More than thirty police units, patrols, mobiles and striking forces had already been deployed to the Taj, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Chabad House and the Trident–Oberoi, but the best-equipped police – the Quick Response Teams, stationed seven miles north – were stuck in traffic. ‘What about the State Reserve Police Force?’ Maria asked. They relied heavily on this 16, 000-strong detail, but in recent days Commissioner Gafoor had dispatched many units on riot duty elsewhere in Maharashtra. The force available tonight was severely depleted. Maria raised his heavily lidded eyes to the ceiling, resisting the urge to make his feelings public. ‘How about the anti-terrorist chief?’ he asked. ‘Sir, he is still in transit.’

  Maria’s mobile rang. It was ‘King’, the call sign for Commissioner Gafoor. ‘Where are you?’ barked the boss. ‘Sir, I am in Head Office collecting weapons,’ Maria replied, chaffing. ‘We are heading for the Taj.’ That was what the SOP dictated. ‘No, stay in the Control Room,’ Gafoor ordered. Maria asked if the Commissioner was sure, reminding him that emergency regulations stipulated the Law and Order Commissioner should assume the Crisis Management Command. Everyone knew Gafoor had had a long run-in with this officer and now it seemed to be getting in the way of crucial operational. decisions. ‘Law and Order JC will go to the Taj. Maria is to take police Command.’

  Maria, the whip hand, was grounded. Furious, he stared at three banks of horseshoe-shaped desks around which the police radio operators were gathered. On either side responders were answering a cascade of emergency ‘100’ calls from the public. At the front, television screens were running live feeds, showing excitable reporters standing in front of various targets, feeding the news machine with half-stories and conjecture, as Maria saw it. He had been ready for a dogfight and was now stuck in the bunker. He took his place at the Command desk, his heart sinking as a pile of papers thumped on his desk.

  The first call from Leopold had come in at 21.48 hours: foreigners killed and injured. At 21.54 hours firing at the Taj attack was reported and at the Oberoi two minutes later. The attack on CST was called in at 21.59 hours and reports arrived at 22.02 hours of the raid on Chabad House, the Jewish centre in Colaba. A few minutes earlier a taxi had blown up in Mazgaon, three miles north of the Taj, killing its driver and one passenger and injuring nineteen passers-by.

  Maria focused on the nature of the attacks, scouring eyewitness accounts from Leopold that described two young, clean-shaven men dressed in sweatshirts and combat pants, carrying large ruck-sacks. It was the same story at the Taj and at CST, where almost sixty were believed to be dead. Two attackers had entered the station just after rush hour, pulling AK-47s out of their rucksacks. One, a six-footer, had thrown a grenade, while the other, barely five foot tall, had fired indiscriminately. And, Maria asked, how had India’s finest responded? Several policemen had been caught on CCTV running away, while another had resorted to throwing a plastic chair after his thirty-year-old bolt-action rifle jammed. Right now station coolies were dragging bodies away on luggage carts, leaving the concourse criss-crossed with bloody skid-marks.

  Reports of a second explosion started coming in, another taxi, this time on the western expressway at Vile Parle, in the north-west of the city, the force of the blast decapitating a passenger whose head had been flung into the basement of Golden Swan City Club. The old criminal order of fade-attack-fade was over, Maria muttered. Fidayeen rules were in
play, while the police were wrapping themselves up in red tape, and the state and centre appeared inflexible. ‘They learn and adapt. We stagnate, squabble and steal from one another.’ Maria wondered if this force of 40,000, protecting a city of 13 million – well below the UN recommended minimum – was even capable of getting a grip on the crisis.

  He studied a printout of recent police calls and saw that Mumbai’s front-line defences were already in disarray, with police units having been sent helter-skelter in the absence of the Commissioner. Armed units had gone to pick up the wounded while regular patrols had reported to the worst hotspots. So far there had been one moment of clarity: a call from a beat marshal at 22.27, reporting an unusual marine landing at Badhwar Park. Maria dispatched a team to talk to local residents and search the abandoned yellow dinghy.

  The water. How many gunmen had come in? Wild estimates were being bandied about but in truth an army could have arrived from Pakistan for all Maria knew. Just then, his phone rang. It was one of his Crime Branch inspectors: ‘Sir. They’re heading your way.’ The fidayeen from CST appeared to be making their way towards police headquarters. Are they attempting to take out the police communication lines too, leaving the city blind?, Maria worried. He called an armed Striking Mobile unit to take position outside the main gate and turned to his men: ‘They are coming for us.’ He broke out the last arms. He had to inspire them to stand and fight. He gathered everyone. ‘It is down to you.’ He sent men with firearms to reinforce the perimeter cordon, and to choke off the staircase. Then he went back to his desk, anger rising. At 22.40 he made an entry in the Control Room diary: ‘I have spoken to the Chief Secretary. We need the National Security Guard or the army to help us deal with this.’ This was the state’s call and it was still dithering. Then Maria had a 1993 moment. This felt like a nation waging a war against Mumbai and in Maria’s opinion Pakistan was the obvious candidate. But would the Islamic Republic take such a risk? Its foreign minister was presently in Delhi, staying at the Taj hotel, having come to India to participate in long-awaited talks. The newspapers had been full of it this morning.