India is not “soft on terrorism,” its prime minister stated firmly in September, two months before the country’s financial capital was ravaged by an attack of shocking scope and brutality.

Premier Manmohan Singh has his critics, but whatever the opinion on how soft or hard his government is, the fact that India appears unable to protect itself from major acts of extremist violence has now become a matter of grim record.

While the country is no stranger to attacks, the 60-hour assault on Mumbai by a dozen Islamist militants that claimed nearly 200 lives took an old problem to a horrifyingly new level.

“If we do not wake up now then we should hang our heads in shame,” commented security strategist Uday Bhaskar, a former head of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses.

Past attacks have triggered familiar rounds of recrimination — but little action.

Singh’s statement back in September came after a series of synchronized bomb blasts in New Delhi killed 22 people, and the prime minister at the time acknowledged “vast gaps” in intelligence gathering and vowed that steps would be taken.

Barely a month later, serial blasts across the northeastern state of Assam killed 80 people.

And then came Mumbai, with its deliberate targeting of two luxury hotels and its foreign guests, as well as a Jewish cultural center’s where Israeli nationals were held hostage and then killed.

“The sheer scale and planning involved was markedly different from previous attacks — it’s a watershed attack,” said Singapore-based security analyst Rohan Gunaratna, author of the book “Inside Al-Qaeda.”

The challenge that faces the Indian authorities in preventing such assaults in the future is immense, not least because of the country’s size and social complexity.

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