[Reader-list] Ruchir Joshi on Mumbai terror attack

[V Ramaswamy]

The thin edge

WHERE JOURNEYS BEGIN

The day Mumbai became Bombay again

Ruchir Joshi

The Telegraph, 14 Dec 2008

Terminus: a place where something terminates — usually journeys, but also,
in railway terms, the place where sometimes long journeys begin.

Dateline: November 24, 2018, Bombay: As the tenth anniversary of the '08
Massacre pulls up, I sit writing this column in Bombay, from a bar-café in
B.R. Ambedkar Terminus, known in its previous avatars as VT, (as in Victoria
Terminus, after the erstwhile Queen of Britain and Empress of India) and
CST, (after Shivaji, Chhatrapati Shivaji, the warrior-hero of the Marathas
from a few hundred years earlier). Given the speeded up tectonic shift in
current politics, I can't help wondering whom this grand station will be
named after next.

I wish I could light up a cigarette, but the smoke I really miss is the
proper, sooty smoke from the great, horned mammoths of my childhood, the
steam-engines that dragged me from the maelstrom of Howrah Station in
Calcutta to the very differing cyclones of VT and Bombay Central. I also
gladly miss, as I did on that day when I was very far away, the smoke, or
the absence of it, from the AK-47 sub-machineguns as they opened up. TV
channels are replaying old CCTV footage from the attack on the Station,
stuff that younger people today find extraordinary: waiters behind fast-food
counters holding hands to their ears, walking around ramrod straight as the
shooting begins. "My god, duck down! Don't they know it's a
bullet-multiplier?", "Machine-gun, we called it then, sweetie.", "Whatever!
Don't they know??", "No, they thought it was firecrackers." Till the bullets
started to tear into them.

There is a memorial an artist made on the fifth anniversary. A slab of
concrete into which she fired 200 AK rounds with the names of each of the
identifiable Bombay dead inscribed, one next to each bullet-hole, and it
stands not far from the platform where the super-fast trains from Karachi
now terminate. It's one of the many tiny ironies that the trains plying the
Pakistan routes are the design-descendants of the legendary Japanese
'Bullet' Trains of the 1960s — the eastern and Deccan lines, as we know,
having been captured by the spin-offs from the defunct French and Swiss TGV
combines. The Pak-side trains are all called 'Bullet', as in "Karachi ka
Bullet time pey aayela kya?" (Did the Bullet from Karachi reach on time?),
"Idhar ka Bullet chalaa gaya?" (Did the Bullet leave from here already?).
Yes, it did, my friend, straight through to Ahmedabad and Bhuj and then
Karachi , where it will ricochet on northwards to terminate at Lahore
Central. Total journey time: ten hours,
 including stops. Next year, they say, they will shave it to eight and a
half, though that's even worse for the environment, all that fast metal
shooting through the fields.

All this was unimaginable on the day they opened fire on the massed, waiting
passengers at VT/CST, but the today we have is possible in no small part
precisely because of those four days, which we now call by various names,
including The Great Bombay Massacre.

It was not strictly 'Great', given that only 200 people seemed to have
actually died; but, looking back, it was a watershed made of blood. The
rivers of red flowed away in several different directions, hooking different
tributaries, flooding, and at times almost drying up, but unmistakably
changing colour as they dropped from the crags of the high, seemingly
immutable rock of fixed positions. To many, it then seemed one of the worst
moments, one of the worst human-made tragedies of post-Babri sub-continental
history. Indeed, as we know, in terms of human cost, numbers of dead and
wounded and damaged, a lot worse was still to come. But today we can say:
That was when the tide turned. That was the moment the b******s lost the
game. Not because of the Taj Hotel, not because of the Trident Hotel or
Nariman House, but when they opened fire on the waiting crowd at the station
and on the patients in Cama Hospital. That was the game, and they didn't
quite understand it. That was whe
n they finally became nangaa to everyone, to the public-at-large, to the
fast-moving glacier of large-janata, poor and not so poor. People on all
sides of all sorts of divides then understood that this was intolerable for
all, that if this was in any way accepted, then life would not be worth
living, prayers not worth praying. We can also, thankfully, say that they,
these trendily-dressed gunmen, tore the fig-leafs off a whole host of others
as they went down.

It's now worth remembering that, in the weeks immediately after the attack,
the plaint from many of the so-called intellectuals of the day consisted of
lovelorn paeans to the other faux-Gothic building, the Taj Mahal Hotel.
which was badly damaged, and the now defunct Trident Hotel. Yes, many were
brutally killed in these places as well, but it's worth remembering that the
media, both Indian and international, concentrated only on the sites where
Western visitors were caught. That was the 'drama', the 'eyeball-factory' of
the event. But, even in the immediate aftermath, the signs were on the
screen. The final disintegration of the already atomized Shiv Sena factions
took a while, but Bal Thackeray was still there to witness his
Maratha-machismo being finally revealed for the braying bravado of cheap
theatre it really was, suddenly stripped naked — 'Maratha Manoos' completely
missing in action during the fight to stop the gunmen, no cadres of the Shiv
Sena rushing forward to
fight and die before the machine-guns when the city they claimed as their
own was under attack. The other Hindu Right factions lost crucial states to
a bleeding, limping Congress in the state elections immediately after the
attacks — their attempt to create electoral maal out of the death toll
coming to very little. The Congress, too, was centrally damaged, though like
a swift and subtle knife-wound, the blood only spurted out much later.

On the multi-hued Left, too, there was damage, fallout from the four-day
Party-busting party in South Bombay. Maoists in central India were forced to
give a 'gun salute' for the dead in Bombay, a hilariously desperate attempt
to put clear blue water between themselves and the jihadis. Unfortunately
for themselves, the neo-Naxals were in an ideological position that was as
land-locked as Madhya Pradesh. It was not that easy to get away from their
cousins, the 'superbly trained' jihadis. It was suddenly becoming clear to
people at large that, for both the Comrades and the bhais, there actually
was No God but Kalashni-god. When their ancestors had begun their struggle
in '66, the Maoists had airs, but also graces and erudition, a morality of a
certain kind that had evaporated a long time ago. Along with the
all-singing, all-dancing troupe of Mullahinettes, these people now stood
revealed and naked, envious stage-hands forced to support the upstart
rockstars. Along with the tren
dy guy in the Versace T-shirt and the AK-accessory, the New Model Naxals,
too, stood in the dock of public perception.

It seems quite minor now, but I feel obliged to remind readers that it's a
very good thing they didn't make it, neither Salafist nor Zedongist, that
they didn't actually make their targets, that both groups failed. In those
four Mumbai-to-Bombay days, the Allah-Ho-Versace guys didn't make their aim,
not completely, not by a long chalk. At the time, many of us thought they'd
scored big-time, but sitting in the bumpy train of time we can see that they
were the losers that fell off. We can see now, now that the old blood has
dried and evaporated, that both jihadis and Naxals were victims of rape, of
mental rape, of social conditions that were extremely unfriendly to a
reasonable exchange of generally perceived realities. This may sound like
being very kind to them, but now, with the passage of time, surely we can
afford to be human?

Maybe not, because it's not been that long; time hasn't had the time to
cauterize their actions; but the basic message that comes through time,
through innovative engineering, through the shifting loyalties of steel,
aluminium and money, is that targeted, political violence has had its day,
whether it comes from the government or its unsubcribers.