MV Alpha
The 'Vindhyagiri' (F42), a Leander class frigate, and helicopters from the Naval Air Station, Kunjali were involved in pursuit of the merchant vessel. The MV Alpha, a Vietnamese registered vessel in route to Panama, was intercepted, boarded and searched. The crew were questioned and the ship's papers checked and the vessel released.
There are elections in the very near future in India, and the BJP is doing media buys using the Mumbai mass-murder suicides to attack Congress for "surrendering to terror and accusing it of being "unable and unwilling to deal with terrorism." Basically, running the RNC playbook from the 2002 mid-term and the 2004 general. For its part Congress is toying with blaming "foreign interests", sacking Home Minister Shivraj V Patil and moving Minister P Chidambaram from Finance to Home. Just as the BJP forced Congress into a "unity" government after the 2001 attack on the Parliment, Congress may force the BJP into some "unity" arrangement to limit the use of the mass-murder suicides in electoral politics.
The Obama/Biden Transition Team have an opportunity, not to make "there's only one president at a time but you have our sympathies" calls, but to detail what went wrong with the US response to mass-murder suicides seven years ago, and what India should not do, which is what Bush/Cheney did do.
Juan Cole thought about this too overnight and has a post worth reading twice, India: Please Don't Go Down the Bush- Cheney Road.
There are really important issues here. What do American voters hope Indian voters will choose at the ballot box? It wasn't a non-issue for non-American voters what American voters did just four short weeks ago. What do American voters hope Pakistani voters chose? Yet another failed intra-dictator period of pathetic "democracy"? What do American voters hope Iranian voters will choose at the ballot box? Do American voters prefer bellicosity or cooperation? It shouldn't be too hard for the next President, the next Vice President, the next Secretary of State, to suggest trust and hope are better choices than anger and fear, and war is a genie that never goes willingly back into the bottle, and a million lives were lost because Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld exercised poor judgement as the elected leaders of a highly armed, temporarily failed, democracy, which we all hope to change.
