Its gates, guards and guns for the Mumbai police at present. After schoolchildren sighted "heavily armed men in free-flowing pathan suits" at Uran, 50 kms off Mumbai, on Thursday, the police are rattled and leaving nothing to chance.
With myriad security agencies and the Navy working in tandem with the police in order to "work out leads", the massive manhunt launched since Thursday morning has not yielded any "positive result" yet. Special screening operations are being improvised and carried out at selected areas of the city.
Parallel efforts are ongoing in Navi Mumbai, Mumbai's sister city, which houses the BARC and the Jawaharlal Nehru Port. Nakabandis are being effected in Thane, too, another sister city of Mumbai. NSG commandos, from Mumbai's local commando hub, too are on maximum alert as part of a larger defensive counter-measure.
Security efforts in Mumbai almost chime with India's aggressive posture at the UN on Thursday, where Pakistan was branded as the Ivy league of terrorism and the global epicenter of terror. And, with nothing yet on the identities or likely whereabouts of the "men who had sneaked in" security agencies are working on hard assumptions nonetheless.
"Information leads are worked out in all seriousness and we can't afford to give up on this till we bump into positive dopes of sorts," a top Mumbai police officer told THE WEEK on Friday.
THE WEEK was told that security around several vital and sensitive installations across the city and in certain peripheral pockets is being "hardened". Particularly safeguarded are critical and complex engineering installations and places of religious worship, along with semi-open public places like railway stations and airports.
Counter-measures to minimize risks to critical installations are being worked out against a "more general" input, routed to the state sometime back, about a possible infiltration from the sea side. In fact, threat levels went several notches higher following the most recent Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) attack on the Army camp in Uri.
