On April 21 last week, a series of coordinated blasts ripped through a peaceful Easter Sunday morning in Sri Lanka . Three churches and three prestigious hotels were attacked. The official death toll is 253, including many foreigners and 13 Indians, with hundreds more wounded. It was the biggest terror attack South Asia has seen.The Islamic State (IS) – also known by its Arabic acronym as Daesh – has claimed responsibility for the attack. Its culpability was clear from the scale of the blasts, the amount of explosives used, the level of coordination, the detonators deployed, and the training given to the perpetrators. IS, a brutal Salafi Jihadist militant group, is a self-proclaimed caliphate claiming religious, political and military authority over all Muslims worldwide.IS needs no specific motivation to carry out such an attack. All other religions, and all those not subscribing to IS’s perverted vision of puritanical Islamic supremacy, are enemies. Sri Lankan authorities have said that the blasts were a revenge for the attack against Muslims in Christchurch last month. Two local organisations, National Thawheed Jamaat and Jammiyathul Millathu Ibrahim, are under the scanner.The significant fact is that the terrorists struck in spite of specific intelligence warning. On April 11, now fired Sri Lankan police chief, Pujith Jayasundara, had alerted his officers that suicide bombers planned to blow up prominent churches and the Indian high commission. India too had passed on specific intelligence to Sri Lanka that a terrorist attack was imminent. In fact, in January this year, Sri Lankan police had seized a large cache of explosives and detonators hidden near a wildlife sanctuary.In spite of such alerts, why did the country’s intelligence apparatus fail to pre-empt terrorism ? Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena has publicly acknowledged that the intelligence report was not shared with him. If there was lack of intelligence coordination in Sri Lanka, what are the lessons for us?We are directly on the radar of organisations like IS. A secular India is anathema for IS ideologues. That we are a democracy is also a red rag because the IS believes that ‘all religions that agree with democracy have to die’. It is not a coincidence that our high commission in Colombo was possibly on the terrorist list.Thus, what happened in neighbouring Sri Lanka must act as a wake-up call for us. But our intel apparatus appears to be worryingly scattered, overrun by a multiplicity of agencies, competing turfs, and lack of coordination that seriously inhibit our abilities to anticipate and respond to a terrorist attack. There are just too many sleuths in our intelligence kitchen walking all over each other’s clues.Consider the facts. The Intelligence Bureau (IB), the designated premier agency, is hamstrung by inadequate manpower and equipment. The National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) set up in 2004, is meant to provide intelligence support, but is hardly acting at optimal levels. The National Investigative Agency (NIA) established in 2008 to exclusively investigate terror cases, lacks muscle, and receives little cooperation from state police forces which resent its intrusion.The efficiency of state intelligence units is much below par, with personnel deployed more for routine law and order and VIP security duties. Following the Kargil intrusion in 1999, a Multi-agency Centre (MAC) was created to coordinate overall intelligence sharing, but it is barely kept posted by other intelligence agencies, and by state units. The NatGrid, a national, computerised information sharing network, which was first mooted in 2001 but did not see the light of day till 2008, is still struggling to become fully operational.The Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) was set up in 2002, but is underutilised in the absence of a chief of defence staff, and duplicates the external intelligence work being done by the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW). The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), as the Kargil report bluntly stated, stands thoroughly devalued. The National Security Council (NSC), comprising the members of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) and the National Security Adviser (NSA), rarely meets. And, the mandate of the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) has been watered down unacceptably because of states’ objections to its pan-Indian scope.The real problem, however, is that all these agencies operate largely in their own silos. The NSA is supposed to be the key coordinator, but his plate is too full with other work to effectively play this role. No wonder that the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs, in its report of April 2017 said that “there is no single unified authority to coordinate the operation of these agencies and ensure a quick response in times of crisis like the 26/11 attack”.IS, although militarily now on the backfoot, is still – as the Sri Lankan attacks show – very much alive, with branches in 18 countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan , and new forays into Bangladesh. It also has large funds at its disposal. In fact, there is an arc of new IS activity across Southeast Asia , including the Maldives, Indonesia and the Philippines. In any case, thanks to Pakistan, terrorism will always remain a threat to India. What happened in Sri Lanka is too close for comfort. Is our intelligence apparatus up to the challenge?The writer is an author and member of JD(U). Views are personal