Ex-Union home secretary Ram Pradhan, who chaired 26/11 Mumbai attacks probe panel, dies at 92

Ram D Pradhan, who served as the Union home secretary in the Rajiv Gandhi government, passed away in Mumbai on Friday morning, owing to age-related ailments. He

Ram D Pradhan, who served as the Union home secretary in the Rajiv Gandhi government, passed away in Mumbai on Friday morning, owing to age-related ailments. He was 92 and is survived by his wife and three children.

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Pradhan had also served as the former chief secretary of Maharashtra and the Governor of Arunachal Pradesh. Pradhan was also instrumental in signing the Assam Accord and the Mizoram Peace Accord.

After 36 years of service with the Government of India, Pradhan had also led a two-member inquiry team into the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks after his retirement, at the behest of the state government, and tabled a probe report on the incident within four months.

Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari and several political leaders, including Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar, state public works department minister and former chief minister (CM) Ashok Chavan, expressed grief over Pradhan’s demise.

Koshyari, in an official note from Raj Bhavan, called Pradhan “the most experienced statesmen, brilliant thinker and an eloquent commentator on national and international issues”.

Pradhan had also served as the private secretary to Maharashtra’s first CM Yashwantrao Chavan and shared good relations with another former CM, Shankarrao Chavan. He could have headed for a possible political career as a parliamentarian from Rajya Sabha (RS) but the trajectory did not take off.

In 1998, Pradhan, a seasoned administrator, had been handpicked by Congress president Sonia Gandhi to contest the RS polls as the party candidate from Maharashtra, but he lost the election after 13 legislators violated the party whip.

Many in the political circles said that this defeat was a clear indication of the then strained and fraying relationship between party’s national leadership led by Gandhi and Maratha strongman Sharad Pawar. A year later in 1999, Pawar split the Congress to form the NCP.

Ashok Chavan, who appointed Pradhan to probe the 2008 terror attacks, termed his demise as a personal loss and said he had lost a guide. In a statement, the PWD minister said, “I knew him since the time of Shankarrao Chavan [Ashok Chavan’s father]. I was regularly in touch with him for the past few years. He had contributed immensely during the Mumbai terrorist attack [probe]. He had a big role in several important national-level and state-related decisions.”

For the 26/11 probe report, the Pradhan committee had interviewed 50 police officers and bureaucrats, scanned police control room data and intelligence inputs before finalising the report. In its report, the committee had praised the police’s response but had pointed to lack of overt leadership, apart from lapses in intelligence gathering, briefing, threat perception, crisis management etc. It had made several recommendations to modernise the state police force, set-up CCTV cameras for better surveillance in city and improve co-ordination with centre to tackle such attacks in the future.

In one of his interviews to HT on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the 2008 terror attacks in 2018, at his Colaba residence, Pradhan had candidly admitted that the 26/11 attack was largely an intelligence failure on the part of central agencies. However, at the same time, he had cautioned that similar attacks on Mumbai were possible and stressed on the need for an elite marine force to protect our coastlines.