Mumbai Police Quotes

As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear. It was a hectic bazaar, like many other public institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu’s death was not a profit-generating enterprise.

Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father.

Saturday evening and instead of roaming around Juhu-Chowpatty with a pretty-pretty girl, here you are, searching for dead people. No life in Mumbai Police, I tell you.

Mumbai Police was trying to revamp its image, make the force sound more public-facing, friendly, but the macho reputation created by decades of Bollywood movies remained.

Suspicious, but none of it will stand up in court. You’re talking about a mafia don, a senior Mumbai police officer, a Bollywood star, a businessman, and now the Home Minister, in the same breath. These families can afford the most expensive lawyers in India.

But as he’d learned in the police station, being damaged was nothing like being dead. One

The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor. Ten young men had terrorized one of the world’s biggest cities for three days—a fact that had something to do with the ingenuity of a multi-pronged plot, but perhaps also to do with government agencies that had been operating as private market-stalls, not as public guardians. The crisis-response units of the Mumbai Police lacked arms. Officers in the train station didn’t know how to use their weapons, and ran and hid as two terrorists killed more than fifty travelers. Other officers called to rescue inhabitants of a besieged maternity hospital stayed put at police headquarters, four blocks away. Ambulances failed to respond to the wounded. Military commandos took eight hours to reach the heart of the financial capital—a journey that involved an inconveniently parked jet, a stop to refuel, and a long bus ride from the Mumbai airport. By the time the commandos arrived in south Mumbai, the killings were all but over.

The SAG was a strange three-legged beast equipped by civilian bureaucrats, administered by the police and staffed by the army.

the Mumbai raiders showed an extraordinary ability to exploit transnational littoral networks and both legitimate and illicit traffic patterns, inserting themselves into a coastal fishing fleet to cover their approach to the target. Their actions blurred the distinction between crime and war: both the Indian ship captain and local inhabitants initially mistook them for smugglers, and their opponents for much of the raid were police, not soldiers.

that he knew of the Mumbai police’s reputation

The joint commissioner of the Mumbai police, Rakesh Maria, said of the captured terrorist Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, the only surviving perpetrator of the 2008 mass murder in Mumbai, India, “He was led to believe that he was doing something holy.