The fatal delay that allowed terrorists to besiege a city

India really is a democratic country. Hence the home minister in charge of security and law-enforcement, Shivraj Patil, promptly resigned because of the Mumbai attacks in which a grand total of 10 terrorists killed at least 170 people, wounded hundreds more and inflicted vast damage.

In his statement, Patil declared that he was assuming "ministerial responsibility" - that is formal and not substantive, responsibility. He should have said nothing at all: since he became home minister in 2004 some 7,000 people have been killed by terrorists in India, without generating any known response by his ministry.

The Indian reality is that ordinary local police cannot be expected to react usefully to a terrorist attack, or indeed any form of armed attack, as ordinary police might do in many other countries - for example, by at least sealing off the area and calling for more help.

Local Indian police hardly ever try to stop inter-religious or inter-caste violence and are very reluctant to engage anyone with a firearm: they are semi-illiterate constables who deal only with petty crime as they make their rounds, drinking free tea in cafes and accepting small gifts from shopkeepers for chasing away intrusive beggars.

The forces available to fight in Mumbai were inadequate in quantity and quality

Accordingly, in Mumbai there was no police cordon around either the huge Taj hotel or the quite small Nariman house of the Chabad Jews, so that terrorists could have been reinforced - or to the contrary could have dropped their weapons to escape - during the two-day-plus sieges.

The death of 7,000 people in terrorist incidents in India since 2004 - mostly but not exclusively inflicted by Muslim extremists - obviously called for the