India and U.S. Law Enforcement to Cooperate Against Terror

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India’s Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde sought enhanced cooperation between the U.S. and India to “secure our cities and our people”. This comes as the two countries have been the leading targets of transnational terror groups, with attacks launched mostly from across sovereign borders.

Addressing the India-U.S. police chiefs’ conference – the first ever mega-city policing cooperation between the Americans and another country – Shinde recalled the 9/11 attacks in New York as well as the 26/11 Mumbai strikes to emphasise how terrorists typically target large and densely populated urban areas to inflict maximum damage.

“An effective megacity policing system must serve as an effective deterrent against terrorists and their masters, who launch targeted attacks on the nerve centres of a country… our objective must be to make our cities safe, and therefore our countries, safe by reducing our vulnerability to such challenges,” Shinde told the gathering of police chiefs from various cities across the U.S. and from all over India.

According to the Times of India, the two-day police chiefs conference is being organized by the Union home ministry as part of the India-U.S. Homeland Security Dialogue, an outcome of U.S. President Barack Obama’s discussions with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during the former’s visit in November 2010.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

The dialogue has seen four ministerial level meetings and more than a 100 bilateral engagements between representatives of the U.S. department of homeland security and Indian security establishment covering training, briefings, exchanges and visits.

While Shinde and home secretary Anil Goswami are leading the Indian side, the assistant secretary for policy, U.S. department of homeland security, David Heyman, is at the head of the U.S. delegation of police chiefs. Also present at the inaugural session on Tuesday was U.S. ambassador Nancy Powell, who described the Indo-U.S. homeland security dialogue as the most robust pillars of bilateral cooperation between the two countries.

The American side comprises representatives of leading U.S. companies offering technological solutions for policing, who will explore business opportunities in India.