National

Strengthen coastal security: SP

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.

He accused the BJP 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.

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu