Indian Home Minister resigns over Mumbai attack

With corpses still being pulled from a once-besieged hotel, India's top security official resigned Sunday as the government struggled under growing accusations of security failures following terror attacks that killed 174 people.

Home Minister Shivraj Patil, who has become highly unpopular during a long series of terror attacks across India, submitted his resignation to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who accepted it, according to the President's Office.

The Cabinet reshuffle comes as a chorus of criticism about the government's handling of the Mumbai attacks grows louder.

"Our Politicians Fiddle as Innocents Die," read a headline Sunday in the Times of India newspaper.

Calls for the resignation of the country's top security minister mounted earlier this year when Indian newspapers photographed him in three different outfits within the space of a few hours after a bomb attack killed 23 people in the capital.

Other newspaper reports said the 73-year-old carried five combs with him on a business trip. He stayed in office then, but the attacks in Mumbai, in which nearly 200 people were killed in a three-day rampage by Islamist gunmen, led to widespread public anger.

"Shivraj Patil has tendered his resignation," Veerappa Moily, a senior leader of the ruling Congress party, told Reuters.

"He has taken moral responsibility for the attack, which is a sign that Congress party men are never scared to own up."

Patil, who studied law as a student, has served as defence and commerce minister during a political career that started in the late 1960s. His resignation comes barely months before general elections and reflects fears within Congress that poor functioning of the home ministry could cost them dearly.

"There has been talk of his resignation for awhile, but now the people are angry which we cannot ignore any more," said a senior Congress leader present at a party meeting to decide Patil's fate.

Even before the Mumbai attacks, over 200 people had been killed in militant attacks this year, mainly from bomb blasts.

But public anger has mounted with the latest violence.

"He should have resigned a long time ago, this is the least the Congress party can do now," Kuldip Nayar, a political analyst, told Reuters.

Prime Minister Singh called a rare meeting of leaders from the country's main political parties to discuss the situation Sunday.

As officials pointed the finger at "elements in Pakistan," public ire over the government's actions widened.

"People are worried, but the key difference is anger," said Rajesh Jain, chief executive officer at a brokerage firm, Pranav Securities. "Does the government have the will, the ability to tackle the dangers we face?"

But J.K. Dutt, director general of India's elite commandos, brushed off criticism that his unit, which had to fly from New Delhi to Mumbai, was slow to respond to the attacks.

"There was no delay," he told reporters Sunday.

But Patil, the former home minister, succumbed to the mounting criticism of the government's inability to prevent repeated terrorist attacks. To replace him, Singh tapped Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, a Harvard-educated lawyer who has been one of the most prominent faces in the administration.

Chidambaram, 63, served as Minister of Internal Security in the 1980s under slain Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Authorities say the gunmen may have arrived in Mumbai on a trawler that was found abandoned and drifting off the coast with a bound corpse aboard a day after the attacks started.

The government suspects they then transferred to a dinghy and docked at a fishermen's colony near the two hotels and Jewish centre targeted in the assaults.

Local fishermen were suspicious of the group of young men, police inspector Dattatray Rajbhog said.

"The fishermen shouted at them and asked who they were and where they had come from. But they abused them and fled," he said.

Suspicions in Indian media quickly settled on the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, long seen as a creation of the Pakistani intelligence service to help wage its clandestine war against India in disputed Kashmir.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said some "signatures of the attack" were consistent with Lashkar and Jaish-e-Mohammed, another group that has operated in Kashmir. Both are reported to be linked to al-Qaida.

President George W. Bush pledged full U.S. support for the investigation, saying the killers "will not have the final word." FBI agents were sent to India to help with the probe.

It was the country's deadliest terrorist act since 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai killed 257 people.