India ready for terrorists

Oct 01, 2010

DELHI awoke to a heavenly blue sky yesterday.The grey smear on the city’s ceiling had been wiped away and the English archers came out to play. A dozen of them, with their ancient weapons and stiff upper lips, practised at the Yamuna Sports Complex.

DELHI awoke to a heavenly blue sky yesterday.The grey smear on the city’s ceiling had been wiped away and the English archers came out to play. A dozen of them, with their ancient weapons and stiff upper lips, practised at the Yamuna Sports Complex.

It was a civilised, competitive reminder of what the Commonwealth Games should be all about. Yet the 19th edition of this festival is still besieged on every side.

It is not now a question of whether the Games will go ahead on Sunday, but whether they will be ambushed by a security or safety disaster.

It must be said in defence of the Indian organisers that there are a multitude of guards - 80,000 police and 20,000 paramilitaries - protecting the venues and the immediate city.

Atheltes are repeatedly stopped: the taxi at every hotel gate, every guest at the lobby entrance, each official and journalist on the Games site, every underground passenger. Soldiers are on sentry duty, rifles are ready. At the hotel, guards and sniffer dogs roam the corridors.

But as India’s leading counterterrorist expert says, it may not be enough to thwart Islamic fundamentalists.

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