National

Coastal security needs to be strengthened, says Amar Singh

LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party national general secretary Amar Singh said on Saturday that India’s coastal security needed to be strengthened in the wake of the terrorist attack in Mumbai.

Implementation of the long pending police reforms and total coordination among the different agencies tackling terror were the other steps he suggested to curb the menace of terrorism.

The terror attack pointed to the failure of the intelligence agencies, Mr. Singh said. People’s anger was justified, but there should not be attempts to conduct a post mortem of the incident as this was not the opportune time.

The SP national general secretary accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of trying to gain political mileage from the ‘national tragedy.’ It was not an issue of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh or Lal Krishna Advani, or the United Progressive Alliance or the National Democratic Alliance. It was true that nobody appeared to be safe in the wake of the terrorist attack. But using the tragedy for political gains was wrong, Mr. Singh told reporters here.

He criticised Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for his remark about the Prime Minister.

The Mumbai attack had established that terrorists had no religion as around 30 per cent of the victims were poor Muslims.

The Samajwadi leader said he visited Mumbai with the Prime Minister, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil and Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar.

“But we stayed away from the cameras.”

He said all issues related to terrorism were raised with the Prime Minister and Ms. Gandhi at a two-hour meeting held later.

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