26/11-Three years on: Security at sea

“Who are these people?”

“They are guests”,the fishermen told him.

“They looked strange,so I asked,” he said and went back inside .

The story of Kuber

Exactly three years ago,a fishing trawler had set sail from the same coast,the five men on board hoping to return after two weeks with their catch. Instead,days after the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai,a helicopter spotted the boat,MV Kuber,drifting off the Mumbai coast with the beheaded body of Amarsinh Solanki,the captain of the trawler,on board. The bodies of the other four fishermen were not found and they continue to be listed as missing in police records.

It turned out that Ajmal Amir Kasab from Faridkot,Pakistan,and nine others had allegedly captured Kuber,owned by Vinod Masani from Porbandar,and forced Solanki to steer to the Mumbai coast from where they launched the 26/11 attacks. Porbandar,so far known as the birthplace of Gandhi,had had its first brush with terrorism.

Three years later,security agencies have still not been able to piece together the incident on the high seas before Kuber was found with Solanki’s body dumped in the engine hold. The only official version available is the chargesheet the Mumbai police filed,where Kasab allegedly spoke of how he and nine others hijacked Kuber,killed four of the crew members and dumped them on the high seas,threatened Amarsinh Solanki at gunpoint and forced him to steer the boat to Mumbai—a version Kasab later denied.

Premjibhai Modi,a Kharwa (a fishing community) leader from Porbandar who helped the Masanis get their boat back from the Mumbai police in February 2009,says Kuber was captured on November 22,2008. “They killed four crew members and dumped their bodies in the sea. Solanki’s family got Rs 5 lakh as compensation from the Maharashtra government because his body was found; the others got nothing from the government.

Security—on paper?

After 26/11,the 1,600-km Gujarat coastline boasts of a three-layer security (the navy,coastguard and the marine police stations controlled by the district police) that involves nearly 16 different agencies. The customs department is the first point of contact for any vessel arriving at the shore.

On paper,fishing boats are not permitted to go to sea unless they pass through a multi-layered screening process where they have to give details of who built their boat and where,who their employers are,and by when would they return from sea after fishing. Customs and district marine police officers are meant to check every boat that sets sail and ask fishermen to furnish their identity proof. On their return from sea,their boats are checked to see if they have anything that’s not permitted. But as our experience showed,that doesn’t always happen.

According to post 26/11 rules,each boat has to have a minimum crew of five and has to compulsorily return to the shore within 15 days.

Fishermen complain they are forced to go up to Pakistan for a good catch because they don’t get fish closer home,blaming it on the pollution from a lone soda-ash plant near the coast. “Kuber must have similarly strayed into Pakistani waters by mistake,” says Jivanbhai Jungi,ex-president of the fishermen association in Porbandar.

This week,licences of 40 Junagadh boats were suspended because they strayed into Pakistani waters. Superintendent of police,Porbandar,Deepan Bhadran,who presides over marine policing on this coast,says,“Most of the boats caught in Pakistan are from Porbandar. We need stringent laws so that whenever a boat is captured,the boat owner is also arrested and his fishing licence seized.”

Of the 17,000 boats in Gujarat,4,300 belong to Porbandar,which,officials feel,is overstretching the capacity of the 106-km-long Porbandar coast. “We have banned new boats because the fishing industry has stagnated in the last 10 years,” says Superintendent of Fisheries,Porbandar,P C Malli,who is the licencing authority for all fishing boats since September 2009,according to a new rule by the Gujarat government. Till then,the Gujarat Maritime Board (GMB) had been issuing licences to fishing boats. “Today if a fisherman stays at sea for more than 15 days,he cannot enter land until I give him permission,” says Malli.

The maritime board,one of the security agencies on shore,has on contract 30 Gujarat Industrial Security Force (GISF) jawans who monitor the port and seaworthiness of the boats. “Among these are nine gunmen armed with .303 rifles,” says HD Katara,traffic officer at GMB.

The GISF,which guards high security installations in the state,recently went on strike complaining of low wages.

The contract for the only patrolling speed boat that GMB had expired in July and has yet to be renewed,adds Katara.

The coast guard has two interceptor boats that do the surveillance beyond 5 nautical miles,in the international maritime border,after which is covered by the Navy. The five nautical miles from the shore is covered by the district police which has three speedboats. Each boat has six people on board of which three are policemen armed with SLR and Insas rifles. “We also have plans to install light machine guns on these boats,” says superintendent Bhadran.

This district also has a marine police station at Navi Bandar manned by 38 policemen. “Besides,there is a fishermen watch group that functions directly under the anti-terrorist squad and is trained to give intelligence on coastal activity,” says Bhadran.

Every fishing trawler has a global positioning device and a VHF set installed which is connected to coastguard ships to warn of any danger on the seas.

“The coast guard is the nodal agency among all the security agencies working here,” says Commodore Rajesh Singh of the Naval headquarters at Porbandar.

The navy conducts regular drills to check the alertness of these agencies under the ‘Sagar kavach’ programme. “Last November,we let go five fishing boats near the border to test the surveillance system and none of them could reach the shore,which only suggests how alert the agencies are,” says Singh.

There are ambitious plans for electronic surveillance of the entire coast and installing distress signalling systems on all fishing trawlers. In June this year,14 Somali pirates were captured off Una coast in Junagadh and on June 26,21 foreign nationals were captured near Jamnagar. These included 18 Somali pirates and three Yemenis. Commodore Singh says the silver lining is that at least they are getting caught.

With the fisheries department taking charge of the licencing of boats,registration rules were also changed. “Earlier the boats went by local registrations based on the districts but now they will be registered like any other Gujarat vehicle—so all boats from Porbandar and other districts will go by a GJ-25 MM registration number”,says Malli.

However MV Kuber continues to go fishing with its original registration number,PBR 2342 (PBR for Porbandar),after its release. It is the only boat in Porbandar whose registration is not changed yet,say fishermen. “An order of the additional chief metropolitan magistrate at Esplanade court in Mumbai forbids any tampering with this boat which is part of the articles seized in the case,” says Premjibhai Modi.

Damayantiben,wife of Balwantbhai Tandel,one of the four crew members who were killed and dumped on the high seas,works as a daily wager. She lives with her two daughters,aged 18 and 20,and a 22-year-old son. When The Sunday Express contacted her over the phone in Navsari (south Gujarat),she said, “We did all the rituals for my husband presuming he is dead,since we did not get his body. But I have not got any compensation from the government,except for the Rs 75,000 that Kuber owner Vinodbhai gave me and Rs 50,000 that I got from the MLA’s grant.” She signed an affidavit saying her husband died in an accident between November 23,2008 and November 26,2008,but his body was not found. The widows of the three other crew members—two from Navsari,one from Diu—filed similar affidavits.