Mumbai Bombing Bits & Pieces
Post
Globe, July 17, Doug Saunders, India's voice proves feeble for war-on-terror rallying cry, (Source).
Globe, July 15, Doug Saunders, Mumbai diamond sellers fearful, (Source).
Globe, July 15, Doug Saunders, Deliverance in Mumbai, (Source).
Spiegel, July 14, Hasnain Kazim, Mumbai Returns to Normal amid Fears, (Source).
Monday July 17 2006, Globe and Mail, India's voice proves feeble for war-on-terror rallying cry, (Back).
Investigation into 7/11 blasts hampered by lack of resources and alleged police corruption, DOUG SAUNDERS reports from Mumbai.
For the residents of the Mumbai shantytown slum of Brihanmumbai, last week's terrorist bombings were a source of relief.
The police were planning to tear down the cardboard shacks and tarpaulin shops that had been squeezed against public buildings on a patch of dirt and filth. As with many of the slums that house as many as six million people in Mumbai, it had been built on municipal land by a criminal gang.
Police were going to enter with bulldozers and evict the residents last Tuesday -- such evictions have become a big part of their job -- but when bombs exploded on seven commuter trains, killing almost 200 people and injuring hundreds more, all of Mumbai's 36,000 officers were shifted to anti-terrorism and security work.
That wasn't good news for the city's female commuters, who learned that the police would no longer be able to guard the women-only carriages on the crammed trains. City officials acknowledged that most usual police functions would be disappearing.
While Tuesday's bombings may have resembled recent al-Qaeda attacks in London and Madrid -- both in the methodology and the response of the residents -- in recent days a major difference has become apparent: In a poor country such as India, there simply aren't the resources to declare total war on the terrorists.
In the developing world, basic policing is an almost unattainable public expense, and the added burden of anti-terrorism work can prove overwhelming.
While India has seen dozens of terrorist attacks in the past decade, many of them carried out by Muslim groups with ties to Pakistan, the country's authorities still have to deal with more prosaic and pressing concerns: profound levels of street crime, extreme deprivation, corruption, bribery and a police system based on family ties rather than professionalism.
Saturday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the bombing investigation is being hampered by corruption and cronyism in Mumbai, capital of the state of Maharashtra.
"Once, the Maharashtra police was known for its efficiency and outstanding performance," Mr. Singh said during a meeting of top officials, "but now . . ."
He left the sentence unfinished.
Lacking any direction, the Mumbai police continued to arrest hundreds of Muslims in poor neighbourhoods over the weekend and detain them for questioning, apparently at random. Saturday night, 250 young men were rounded up in the shantytown of Naya Nagar. The next morning, they released all but eight, who were wanted on theft charges. Similar raids took place in several other slums.
But other avenues of investigation were ignored. Saturday, a reporter from the Times of India visited a local quarry and bought sticks of gelatin explosive, complete with detonators, for the equivalent of $1 each -- investigators believe the attacks were carried out using explosives of this type.
The quarry workers, who said they routinely sell the explosives to criminal gangs and fishermen, said they would drop the price to 50 cents if more sticks were bought.
The seeming lack of follow-through may be due to the fact that the investigation work has been pointed outside the country, to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Although hundreds of people have been killed in Indian terrorist attacks in recent years, the country's leaders often boast that no international Islamic terrorist has ever come from India -- even though it has a larger Muslim population than Pakistan does.
Investigators believe the attacks were carried out by groups based in Pakistan, aiming to help give Islamabad control of the northern region of Kashmir, which is subject to status talks between the two countries. Mr. Singh postponed those talks last week.
But investigators have produced little evidence toward that end, and senior officials have conceded that they have few leads.
There are also few signs that the Mumbai police are likely to become more modern or professional soon. Over the weekend, it was announced that the next-of-kin of those killed in the bombings would be compensated with government work -- including jobs with the police force.
Saturday July 15 2006, Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders, Mumbai diamond sellers fearful - Was the lucrative industry targeted in Tuesday's attacks? Workers think so, and are on strike, (Back).
MUMBAI -- The narrow lanes and crowded buildings around Mumbai's historic opera house are usually jammed with shouting, gesticulating diamond merchants, small traders whose daily labour of buying, cutting, polishing and selling the gems make India the world's largest exporter of cut diamonds.
Yesterday, the district was nearly silent. At a loss of $73-million a day, Mumbai's diamond industry has shut its doors, out of fear and anger.
Its traders, cutters and diamond couriers, most of them immigrants from India's famous diamond-producing province of Gujarat, take the crowded trains of Mumbai's Western Railway home each night, at around 6 p.m., to their neighbourhoods in the northern suburbs.
The trains form a central part of the diamond industry, transporting many of its 100,000 employees -- as well as $50-million worth of diamonds every day, which are carried by nervous-looking couriers by rail to polishing centres in northern India. India exports more than $17-billion in diamonds a year, most of them out of Mumbai.
Tuesday night's blasts, the workers believe, were aimed directly at their industry. Of the 200 people killed, 42 have been identified as diamond traders from Mumbai or Gujarat, and industry representatives believe that number will increase as relatives in Gujarat identify more of the dead. The industry employs an estimated 100,000 people in Mumbai.
On Thursday, the few traders who showed up to work agreed to declare a bandh, a Hindu general strike, beginning yesterday against attacks on their industry. It isn't clear if trading will resume on Monday.
A senior Indian police official said yesterday that the targeting of the blasts at the diamond industry is one of the reasons Pakistan-based organizations, possibly including al-Qaeda, are suspected of being the instigators. India-based Muslim extremists have targeted people by religion, throwing bombs into Hindu gatherings, but they have not previously targeted specific classes or industries, a trademark al-Qaeda strategy.
It isn't the first time the diamond trade has been a target of terrorism. In August of 2003, bombs attributed to a local Muslim organization killed 53 people in the Zaveri Bazaar, the traditional centre of the diamond trade. The wave of Muslim bomb attacks in 1993 also included blasts in the area.
Several of the diamond workers were reportedly Muslims.
Yesterday, several hundred diamond workers held a prayer service, in a lavish movie theatre in the middle of their trading district, that quickly turned into an angry protest. Many of the traders said that the Mumbai government has done nothing to protect the lucrative industry from attacks.
"This is time for action and not words. We have had enough of empty talk. Let us now ensure the industry's well-being," said Sanjay Kothari, a veteran diamond trader and leader of the community. He called for an industry-run security force as an alternative to Mumbai's deficient police services and weak local government.
Across Mumbai, anger is mounting over the lack of municipal leadership. The Times of India, in a front-page editorial, yesterday denounced the city for "weak leadership, an inept bureaucracy, an ill-equipped police force and a political system interested only in milking a rich megacity dry."
While the diamond traders include some very wealthy merchants who live sheltered lives and travel in private cars, the vast majority of the employees are small traders, earning between $600 and $5,000 a month; brokers who earn between $200 and $60,000; and polishers, who can earn as little as $50 a month.
Some believe that the blasts could have had an even worse effect on the diamond trade.
"Had the blasts occurred half an hour later, at least 500 people from the diamond trade alone would have been killed," the head of a major Mumbai diamond export firm told The Economic Times of Mumbai.
Saturday July 15 2006, Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders, Deliverance in Mumbai - Like its famous lunch couriers, this city operates almost as if by magic, DOUG SAUNDERS reports. But the metropolis is plagued by hatred, and no one knows how long it can keep bouncing back, (Back).
MUMBAI -- The 10:47 train is barely visible beneath the thick encrustation of people hanging out its doors, clinging from its exterior by their fingertips. I am determined to join them, even though the train is already chugging out of the suburban station. This betel-stained platform is packed shoulder to shoulder, six bodies deep, and they're all getting on. The next train, in four or five minutes, will be just as full.
There is no time to think: I run, half-trip, reach out, and feel a hand grabbing my shoulder from above. The hand pulls me up, and the dense thicket of men hanging out the door parts just enough to add my body to its bulk. Our sweaty torsos are so tightly pressed together that I have to stand on tiptoe and raise my hands above my head.
Deeper inside the carriage, there is room enough to move, a bit. The throngs clinging to the outside are not there just because of crowding; some people prefer to be out in the breeze, and to have easy access to the exit. Inside, where the dingy train's ceiling fans do little to cool us, men in neatly pressed shirts are smiling, chatting on cellphones, trading business tips. These, despite appearances, are not the wretched of the earth; the people who take Mumbai's Western Line are among the world's winners.
"This is not as bad as it might look to you," says Rupesh Medke, 34, a thin-boned man with a neat mustache and a self-conscious smile, gesturing around the compartment. It's a useful saying, and it could well summarize everything here: The train itself; the mad panic of the Western Line, which is widely understood to be the most crowded stretch of railway in the world; the whole insanity of Mumbai, traditionally known as Bombay, a city of 18 million that may be the most densely populated place on earth.
All three came under attack Tuesday night, when seven of these train carriages were struck by al-Qaeda-style bombs, killing 175 people and mutilating hundreds more.
Mr. Medke is crouching in the back of the car with a tall stack of metal cylinders -- tiffins, or Indian lunch boxes. He has 39 of them, in three carefully assembled racks of 13, and beside him are two other men carrying similar stacks. Their white caps identify them as dabbawallahs, or lunch-delivery men, one of Mumbai's great institutions. Each day, these guys carry tens of thousands of home-cooked lunches from the suburbs into the mad frolic of the central city, where each reaches the customer's desk, hot, at precisely lunch time.
"The Western Line is the main artery of Bombay's circulation system," says Mouzzam Khan, the Muslim editor of a Hindi-language newspaper based in the suburbs, "and the dabbawallahs, they are the pulse that keeps it all going."
The dabbawallah system, like the Western Line or the city itself, looks like utter chaos, a frenzy of disorganization, yet an invisible set of precise rules and social relations holds it together in perfect synchronization. It is a high-precision relay race that is often described as one of the more efficient industries in the world. Each lunch will be handled by half a dozen men, and none is ever lost. The contents say a lot about Mumbai -- and about the tensions within it that threaten to explode into violence.
Some tiffins contain vegetarian meals, for the Hindu majority; others have meat curries, for the large Muslim minority and smaller Christian and Sikh communities. They are delivered by illiterate men who live in squalid hovels, yet hold one of the more stable, and thus desired, jobs in the city, regulated by an exclusive union.
And the whole system, like all the minor and major economic miracles that have made this one of the world's great urban magnets, relies on the suburban railway system, and in particular its Western Line. There is really nothing else quite like it: Each day, its six tracks carry 2.6 million people, or one-quarter of India's entire train traffic, over a 60-kilometre stretch between 28 stations. A nine-car train often holds 4,700 people, more than twice its official capacity. At rush hour, the trains carry 14 to 16 people per square metre -- this in a city whose heat and humidity levels are always near the physical limits and whose air, on a good day, has the feel and smell of a garbage fire in a steam room.
Whoever set off Tuesday's bombs knew exactly what they were hitting. India's huge spurt of economic and social growth, which has propelled it from being a recipient of foreign aid into an aid donor, is in large part driven by the huge middle class that has emerged along the Western Line -- a middle class that has shifted from the old fabric industries that made Bombay famous to the information-age economies of the new Mumbai.
The bombs were aimed at the first-class carriages, of which there is usually only one per train. The first-class cars are almost as crowded as the others, but cost 10 times as much (typically $1 a journey) because they carry a different sort of people. The bombs were set off precisely when those carriages are carrying a specific class of people from a specific industry: the Gujarati business elite, and especially the stockbrokers and diamond traders. It was a surgical blow to the very heart of the Indian economic miracle.
It may well have failed, in the immediate sense -- business was up and running the next day, with barely a hiccup -- but the tension it created can be felt up and down the Western Line.
"It is the people in first-class who got killed, and I pray for their families, but it is we in these carriages who are suffering if things go wrong," says Mr. Medke, as he and his partners sort their tiffins.
"We need each day's money for each day's food -- when I lost half my business on Wednesday, I had nothing to feed my wife or my children. We did not get to have dinner that night."
When these guys get to the city's central Churchgate Station, a huge train barn with a Communist-era utopian mural on the front and far too many people inside, they will join thousands of other dabbawallahs in what looks like a major riot. It is how they dispatch their tiffins to the right destinations. There are no rules, just long-standing customs and human relationships -- like everything else here.
Yesterday, something new had appeared beside the throng of dabbawallahs: a desk, with three men in tan, starched short-sleeved dress shirts. They are Mumbai policemen, and they are checking the bags of people -- some people -- who enter the station. After searching, they check I.D., and painstakingly enter the names and addresses in a ledger book. While they are doing this, people stream past, carrying all manner of bags.
"It's ridiculous -- this is the most the police here can manage; it's supposed to make people more secure, but it's frightening to watch them," says Amandeep Shukla, a young writer visiting from New Delhi, as he watches, fascinated.
"Look at who they're stopping to search: It's only people who look like Muslims." This isn't an easy distinction to make: A slight difference in skin tone, sometimes, perhaps a more Muslim style of facial hair.
Such distinctions were once irrelevant in Mumbai. Muslims and Hindus worked and lived together, and enjoyed a begrudging co-operation. In the diamond industry, the buying and selling is done by Hindus, the polishing by Muslims. A great many of the diamond people killed on Tuesday were Muslim -- perhaps one-third of the dead when the population is only one-fifth Muslim.
Now, the Muslims are treated as outsiders in their own city. The Hindu-nationalist extremists who took control for many years in the 1990s (and renamed the city Mumbai, a term that had been used only by Hindi speakers) invented the completely fictional notion that Indian Muslims are actually Pakistanis who ought to return north. In fact, post-partition India has more Muslims than Pakistan does -- the world's second-highest Muslim population -- but even some of them seem to have taken this view to heart: When George W. Bush visited India last week, to offer it aid with its nuclear ambitions, Mumbai Muslims held a large, angry demonstration, decrying India as if it were a foreign country.
As we enter Santacruz station, up near Mumbai's international airport (which happens to be in the middle of a putrid shantytown), an even longer, bright blue train rolls to a stop, two tracks over. Tiny figures fall from it like flies from a waking cow, and scatter.
This is a train from Gandhinagar, in the rural northern province of Gujarat, and the tiny figures make up entire families, mothers clutching tiny children, dressed in dirty cloth. They are escapees from the Indian countryside, where poverty is far worse and much more deadly than in the most squalid urban slum. Thousands of them arrive in Mumbai, increasing its population at a pace that will soon make it the world's largest city.
Even now, it simply can't handle its 18 million people.
Mr. Medke will return home to Andheri, a suburb far north of anything that appears on a tourist map. The million people packed into this small area mostly occupy what we would call a terrible slum.
To reach his house, you ride endlessly along a meandering, potholed dirt road jammed with people and motor-rickshaws, its air filled with powerful smells that are either wonderful (amazing curries cooked at roadside) or unspeakable (vast quantities of raw human sewage, also at roadside). Then you turn on a much narrower dirt lane, most of its surface a thick mud of filth and excrement.
The houses here are tiny squares of dirty brick, with corrugated fibreglass sheets slapped on top as roofs. Most don't have doors. His home occupies two rooms, and has sheets of plywood for a floor. Water is gathered from a communal tap once a day. He, his wife and three of his five children live in these two tight squares.
Visitors would call this the worst sort of slum, a malarial shantytown. In Mumbai, however, it's considered a middle-class neighbourhood. A proper slum has no corrugated sheet, just a cheap blue plastic tarp for a roof, held up with sticks and bricks. It has mud floors, reeking of human excrement. It is usually tucked in a field, against a building, and is torn down by the government at irregular intervals (although the Mumbai government tends not to build housing).
One-third of the city lives in these very real slums, essentially sleeping outdoors in an open sewer, at densities of up to a million people per square kilometre. They keep coming, and keep staying, because these pits of stench are better than the countryside: Now their children may have to beg, sometimes, but they're more likely to stay alive. People don't die of hunger here, although there are plenty of other ways to go -- the suburban trains, for example, kill more than 3,000 people a year, often slum-dwellers using the tracks as toilets.
"This is a good life for us, it took me my whole life to get to this, and I don't want to lose it," Mr. Medke says of his middle-class slum, showing off his Hindu icons.
His parents came from the Indian countryside. He hauled himself out of the mud, got a job among the dabbawallah fraternity, thanks to a cousin, and now is proud to see some of his children going to school, something he could never have considered. His house feels like a home, not like a desperate panic. The family eats very well. They, like most slum-dwellers in Mumbai, have cable TV (though not running water). But the loss of a half-day's work would destroy it all.
When he lived with his parents around here, Mr. Medke's neighbours were Muslim. He remembers the smell of the chickens they kept, and his parents grumbling about it (the most visible difference between Muslims and Hindus is the former's consumption of meat). Since 1993, Muslims and Hindus have lived in separate neighbourhoods. That year, Hindu mobs, their anger fanned by claims that a Hindu shrine in northern India had been displaced by a mosque, had rioted, burning hundreds of Muslims alive, killing more than 1,700 and driving them out of their homes. In retaliation, Muslim gangs bombed buildings and killed 257 people.
Things here have never been quite the same. It remains a deeply cosmopolitan city, especially among its educated elite. The halal meat and the vegetarian curry will never be far apart, and people of every faith will constantly jostle -- and be killed by bombs -- on the Western Line. But the economic and cultural success the city is now enjoying are built on a wall of enormous tension and distrust.
Nobody was ever arrested for the 1993 events, either the riots or the bombings. People here believe that this week's attacks may produce a similar result. There have been loud calls for tougher policing, for a tougher Indian stance on Pakistan, for tough policing against Muslims.
But for every Mumbai resident who wants to see a crackdown, there is another who would rather the police step lightly, for fear that the ghosts of '93 will return and upset the city's rise to prosperity. "Even the Israelis, despite their methods, are still suffering attacks," former senior Mumbai official J. B. D'Souza said on Wednesday. "The government needs to address the basic cause, which is resentment."
There are deep wells of resentment. Muslims resent the police, as well as the still-potent Hindu nationalists, for making them less equal. Those without water -- and this week, it was announced that water shortages were plaguing huge swaths of the city -- resent those who can afford to wash. And everyone resents the city authorities, for making this the world's largest experiment in pure, state-of-nature laissez-faire capitalism -- not out of ideology, but simply because the city is too corrupt and too incompetent to provide a small city's worth of resources to a large nation's worth of people packed on a tiny island.
"We are frightened on this train, there is no question," Mr. Medke says. "We are frightened of each other, but we are frightened of the police as well. They won't do anything for us, we know it. We will have to do things for ourselves, even if it does not work very well. It's just the way things work here."
Friday July 14 2006, Spiegel, Hasnain Kazim, Mumbai Returns to Normal amid Fears, (Back).
People in the Indian city of Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, are struggling to return to normality after bomb attacks killed hundreds on Tuesday evening. Fears remain that that terror network al-Qaida may be behind the attacks, which could threaten India's economy as well as lead to further violence.
Ruhma crouches on the ground and weaves flowers into a wreath. "It's for the men coming home from work who want to bring something for their wives," the 17-year-old says. Hundreds of people stream past her. She's sitting right in the middle of a concrete bridge above the train station in Mahim, a Mumbai neighborhood. One of the seven bombs that exploded here on Tuesday was placed about 30 meters below her, at a slight angle from where she's sitting. Ruhma saw everything -- the way the wrecked train kept sliding along the tracks for several hundred meters, the bleeding people, corpses, limbs, the many helpers that came rushing from nearby. Ruhma doesn't cry. She smiles sadly -- but she still smiles. "Life has to go on," she says. "That's why I'm sitting here and selling these wreaths. I have to feed myself somehow."
Traces of soot on the train tracks are all that can still be seen of the attack besides some seat cushions that lie to one side, left from the destroyed train cars. Completely overcrowded trains operated by the Western Railway Company roll by.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, the chairwoman of the ruling Congress Party, visited Mahim train station on Tuesday evening, shortly after the bombing. They promised 500,000 rupees -- about €10,000 ($12,675) -- to the families of the victims. Each family was also promised one job at Western Railway. The people of Mumbai feel that's a wonderful gesture.
A history of religiously motivated violence
This time everything is different from the way it was in December of 1992, when Hindus and Muslims massacred each other in the metropolis, which has over 18 million inhabitants. Back then, militant Hindus had torn down a mosque in Ayodhya, several hundred kilometers north of Mumbai, because they were convinced the building stood in the birthplace of their god Rama. Muslims in Mumbai reacted violently to the news from the distant city. The clashes lasted for weeks. In January of 1993 Hindus led by the nationalist and Hinduist Shiv Sena Party retaliated, killing Muslims randomly in Mumbai. Then, in March, Muslims detonated ten bombs, one of them at the Mumbai Stock Exchange. When the conflict was over, thousands had died.
Ruhma's aunt Manjula remembers those grim times in detail. Her family is Hindu. "Now people are already accusing the Muslims again, claiming they planted the bombs," she says as she helps her niece sort through the flowers strewn on the floor. "They arrested almost 200 men, and today the newspaper says that two of them are still being held and that they are being suspected of being the perpetrators." People from the province of Punjab, apparently. Four witnesses claim to have identified them. But Manjula says she doesn't feel any hatred. "It would just be senseless for people to start killing each other again," she remarks. "Didn't Muslims and Hindus sit side by side in the train?" Not only does she feel no hatred, but she's not scared either -- neither of new attacks nor of clashes between Muslims and Hindus. She's just concerned she won't be able to sell enough flower wreaths. But then, she says, her motto has always been: "Easy, Mumbai, easy." Just take it easy.
Staying strong to survive in Mumbai
Thirty-eight-year-old Santush Parab is the station manager at Mahim. He's not afraid he might be a victim of such an attack himself one day. "People in Mumbai are strong. They're not afraid." What's more, he adds, there are far too many reasons to be afraid in Mumbai. "Anything can happen here: thefts, robberies -- and bomb explosions." He sits in a shack by the railroad track, counting money -- the money is still coming in after the attacks -- and ordering security forces around. Bombay's police has been accused of overlooking hints about the imminent attacks and responding slowly when the explosions occurred; the police is reacting to these accusations with a strong presence now. Some say an incarcerated member of the terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Toiba already stated in January that activists from his group were preparing attacks on trains in Mumbai. Now uniformed policemen can be seen everywhere -- at the train stations, at street crossings and even in the hospitals.
The hospital halls are overcrowded and Dr. B. Sundeep has dark rings under his eyes. "I don't know how long it's been since I've slept. I've been working without interruption since Tuesday night," the doctor says and asks: "What day is it, anyway?" Most victims of the attacks are being treated at Sion Hospital near the Mahim station. Mahim is the neighborhood that was hit the hardest, Sundeep says. At least 200 people died overall, 62 of them are here in this hospital. "Forty-seven people were already dead when they arrived here. The other 15 died in the hospital. Those that are still alive now are in stable condition," he says, and there is a note of joy in his voice. "We've made it."
Three panels stand outside the hospital. On one is the list of patients. The second lists the 62 deceased in this hospital. The third panel reads: "Thank you very much, we have enough blood donations. Those who would like to make a donation are asked to please leave their contact details." The willingness to help is enormous.
Some children with bandaged arms and legs crouch in their beds and quietly tell each other stories. A woman whose crushed arm had to be amputated looks apathetically at the ceiling. She's lying in one hospital hall along with 10 or 15 other terror victims. The heavy monsoon rains leave a mugginess that spreads through the hospital as well. One visitor talks about a young man who is said to have offered a woman his seat on the train. "The man died, the woman survived, the newspaper says," the visitor reports. When another visitor talks about a different newspaper story, according to which the Indian intelligence service is examining the contacts of the suspects to Pakistan and Afghanistan, some patients simply shake their heads.
Worried about the economy
"Dear God, don't let that be true," mumbles one man with a bandaged head. "Otherwise the quarrels between Muslims and Hindus will begin again." He curses loudly. "Then things will head downhill for the Indian economy."
But the mood at the Mumbai Stock Exchange is relaxed. You can tell the brokers in Dalal Street are relieved when they hear that the attacks may have been organized by the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, rather than by al-Qaida. Bombay's stock market index Sensex didn't crash; most stock prices actually went up.
"If it turns out to have been al-Qaida, then what the world will remember is that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network is now active in India. Then international investors will say: Bye, bye, India," fears Deepak Nair. "Al-Qaida would be the worst thing that could happen to us."
The stock traders listen thankfully to the words of Prime Minister Singh: "Bombs can't stop the stock market." Financial Minister Chidambaram appears on Indian TV and says the bombs won't stop India's economic growth. He urges investors to continue having faith in India. Deepak Nair is glad when he hears those words. "Right he is," he says -- and disappears in the turmoil of the stock market.
(Back)
Globe, July 15, Doug Saunders, Mumbai diamond sellers fearful, (Source).
Globe, July 15, Doug Saunders, Deliverance in Mumbai, (Source).
Spiegel, July 14, Hasnain Kazim, Mumbai Returns to Normal amid Fears, (Source).
Monday July 17 2006, Globe and Mail, India's voice proves feeble for war-on-terror rallying cry, (Back).
Investigation into 7/11 blasts hampered by lack of resources and alleged police corruption, DOUG SAUNDERS reports from Mumbai.
For the residents of the Mumbai shantytown slum of Brihanmumbai, last week's terrorist bombings were a source of relief.
The police were planning to tear down the cardboard shacks and tarpaulin shops that had been squeezed against public buildings on a patch of dirt and filth. As with many of the slums that house as many as six million people in Mumbai, it had been built on municipal land by a criminal gang.
Police were going to enter with bulldozers and evict the residents last Tuesday -- such evictions have become a big part of their job -- but when bombs exploded on seven commuter trains, killing almost 200 people and injuring hundreds more, all of Mumbai's 36,000 officers were shifted to anti-terrorism and security work.
That wasn't good news for the city's female commuters, who learned that the police would no longer be able to guard the women-only carriages on the crammed trains. City officials acknowledged that most usual police functions would be disappearing.
While Tuesday's bombings may have resembled recent al-Qaeda attacks in London and Madrid -- both in the methodology and the response of the residents -- in recent days a major difference has become apparent: In a poor country such as India, there simply aren't the resources to declare total war on the terrorists.
In the developing world, basic policing is an almost unattainable public expense, and the added burden of anti-terrorism work can prove overwhelming.
While India has seen dozens of terrorist attacks in the past decade, many of them carried out by Muslim groups with ties to Pakistan, the country's authorities still have to deal with more prosaic and pressing concerns: profound levels of street crime, extreme deprivation, corruption, bribery and a police system based on family ties rather than professionalism.
Saturday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the bombing investigation is being hampered by corruption and cronyism in Mumbai, capital of the state of Maharashtra.
"Once, the Maharashtra police was known for its efficiency and outstanding performance," Mr. Singh said during a meeting of top officials, "but now . . ."
He left the sentence unfinished.
Lacking any direction, the Mumbai police continued to arrest hundreds of Muslims in poor neighbourhoods over the weekend and detain them for questioning, apparently at random. Saturday night, 250 young men were rounded up in the shantytown of Naya Nagar. The next morning, they released all but eight, who were wanted on theft charges. Similar raids took place in several other slums.
But other avenues of investigation were ignored. Saturday, a reporter from the Times of India visited a local quarry and bought sticks of gelatin explosive, complete with detonators, for the equivalent of $1 each -- investigators believe the attacks were carried out using explosives of this type.
The quarry workers, who said they routinely sell the explosives to criminal gangs and fishermen, said they would drop the price to 50 cents if more sticks were bought.
The seeming lack of follow-through may be due to the fact that the investigation work has been pointed outside the country, to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Although hundreds of people have been killed in Indian terrorist attacks in recent years, the country's leaders often boast that no international Islamic terrorist has ever come from India -- even though it has a larger Muslim population than Pakistan does.
Investigators believe the attacks were carried out by groups based in Pakistan, aiming to help give Islamabad control of the northern region of Kashmir, which is subject to status talks between the two countries. Mr. Singh postponed those talks last week.
But investigators have produced little evidence toward that end, and senior officials have conceded that they have few leads.
There are also few signs that the Mumbai police are likely to become more modern or professional soon. Over the weekend, it was announced that the next-of-kin of those killed in the bombings would be compensated with government work -- including jobs with the police force.
Saturday July 15 2006, Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders, Mumbai diamond sellers fearful - Was the lucrative industry targeted in Tuesday's attacks? Workers think so, and are on strike, (Back).
MUMBAI -- The narrow lanes and crowded buildings around Mumbai's historic opera house are usually jammed with shouting, gesticulating diamond merchants, small traders whose daily labour of buying, cutting, polishing and selling the gems make India the world's largest exporter of cut diamonds.
Yesterday, the district was nearly silent. At a loss of $73-million a day, Mumbai's diamond industry has shut its doors, out of fear and anger.
Its traders, cutters and diamond couriers, most of them immigrants from India's famous diamond-producing province of Gujarat, take the crowded trains of Mumbai's Western Railway home each night, at around 6 p.m., to their neighbourhoods in the northern suburbs.
The trains form a central part of the diamond industry, transporting many of its 100,000 employees -- as well as $50-million worth of diamonds every day, which are carried by nervous-looking couriers by rail to polishing centres in northern India. India exports more than $17-billion in diamonds a year, most of them out of Mumbai.
Tuesday night's blasts, the workers believe, were aimed directly at their industry. Of the 200 people killed, 42 have been identified as diamond traders from Mumbai or Gujarat, and industry representatives believe that number will increase as relatives in Gujarat identify more of the dead. The industry employs an estimated 100,000 people in Mumbai.
On Thursday, the few traders who showed up to work agreed to declare a bandh, a Hindu general strike, beginning yesterday against attacks on their industry. It isn't clear if trading will resume on Monday.
A senior Indian police official said yesterday that the targeting of the blasts at the diamond industry is one of the reasons Pakistan-based organizations, possibly including al-Qaeda, are suspected of being the instigators. India-based Muslim extremists have targeted people by religion, throwing bombs into Hindu gatherings, but they have not previously targeted specific classes or industries, a trademark al-Qaeda strategy.
It isn't the first time the diamond trade has been a target of terrorism. In August of 2003, bombs attributed to a local Muslim organization killed 53 people in the Zaveri Bazaar, the traditional centre of the diamond trade. The wave of Muslim bomb attacks in 1993 also included blasts in the area.
Several of the diamond workers were reportedly Muslims.
Yesterday, several hundred diamond workers held a prayer service, in a lavish movie theatre in the middle of their trading district, that quickly turned into an angry protest. Many of the traders said that the Mumbai government has done nothing to protect the lucrative industry from attacks.
"This is time for action and not words. We have had enough of empty talk. Let us now ensure the industry's well-being," said Sanjay Kothari, a veteran diamond trader and leader of the community. He called for an industry-run security force as an alternative to Mumbai's deficient police services and weak local government.
Across Mumbai, anger is mounting over the lack of municipal leadership. The Times of India, in a front-page editorial, yesterday denounced the city for "weak leadership, an inept bureaucracy, an ill-equipped police force and a political system interested only in milking a rich megacity dry."
While the diamond traders include some very wealthy merchants who live sheltered lives and travel in private cars, the vast majority of the employees are small traders, earning between $600 and $5,000 a month; brokers who earn between $200 and $60,000; and polishers, who can earn as little as $50 a month.
Some believe that the blasts could have had an even worse effect on the diamond trade.
"Had the blasts occurred half an hour later, at least 500 people from the diamond trade alone would have been killed," the head of a major Mumbai diamond export firm told The Economic Times of Mumbai.
Saturday July 15 2006, Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders, Deliverance in Mumbai - Like its famous lunch couriers, this city operates almost as if by magic, DOUG SAUNDERS reports. But the metropolis is plagued by hatred, and no one knows how long it can keep bouncing back, (Back).
MUMBAI -- The 10:47 train is barely visible beneath the thick encrustation of people hanging out its doors, clinging from its exterior by their fingertips. I am determined to join them, even though the train is already chugging out of the suburban station. This betel-stained platform is packed shoulder to shoulder, six bodies deep, and they're all getting on. The next train, in four or five minutes, will be just as full.
There is no time to think: I run, half-trip, reach out, and feel a hand grabbing my shoulder from above. The hand pulls me up, and the dense thicket of men hanging out the door parts just enough to add my body to its bulk. Our sweaty torsos are so tightly pressed together that I have to stand on tiptoe and raise my hands above my head.
Deeper inside the carriage, there is room enough to move, a bit. The throngs clinging to the outside are not there just because of crowding; some people prefer to be out in the breeze, and to have easy access to the exit. Inside, where the dingy train's ceiling fans do little to cool us, men in neatly pressed shirts are smiling, chatting on cellphones, trading business tips. These, despite appearances, are not the wretched of the earth; the people who take Mumbai's Western Line are among the world's winners.
"This is not as bad as it might look to you," says Rupesh Medke, 34, a thin-boned man with a neat mustache and a self-conscious smile, gesturing around the compartment. It's a useful saying, and it could well summarize everything here: The train itself; the mad panic of the Western Line, which is widely understood to be the most crowded stretch of railway in the world; the whole insanity of Mumbai, traditionally known as Bombay, a city of 18 million that may be the most densely populated place on earth.
All three came under attack Tuesday night, when seven of these train carriages were struck by al-Qaeda-style bombs, killing 175 people and mutilating hundreds more.
Mr. Medke is crouching in the back of the car with a tall stack of metal cylinders -- tiffins, or Indian lunch boxes. He has 39 of them, in three carefully assembled racks of 13, and beside him are two other men carrying similar stacks. Their white caps identify them as dabbawallahs, or lunch-delivery men, one of Mumbai's great institutions. Each day, these guys carry tens of thousands of home-cooked lunches from the suburbs into the mad frolic of the central city, where each reaches the customer's desk, hot, at precisely lunch time.
"The Western Line is the main artery of Bombay's circulation system," says Mouzzam Khan, the Muslim editor of a Hindi-language newspaper based in the suburbs, "and the dabbawallahs, they are the pulse that keeps it all going."
The dabbawallah system, like the Western Line or the city itself, looks like utter chaos, a frenzy of disorganization, yet an invisible set of precise rules and social relations holds it together in perfect synchronization. It is a high-precision relay race that is often described as one of the more efficient industries in the world. Each lunch will be handled by half a dozen men, and none is ever lost. The contents say a lot about Mumbai -- and about the tensions within it that threaten to explode into violence.
Some tiffins contain vegetarian meals, for the Hindu majority; others have meat curries, for the large Muslim minority and smaller Christian and Sikh communities. They are delivered by illiterate men who live in squalid hovels, yet hold one of the more stable, and thus desired, jobs in the city, regulated by an exclusive union.
And the whole system, like all the minor and major economic miracles that have made this one of the world's great urban magnets, relies on the suburban railway system, and in particular its Western Line. There is really nothing else quite like it: Each day, its six tracks carry 2.6 million people, or one-quarter of India's entire train traffic, over a 60-kilometre stretch between 28 stations. A nine-car train often holds 4,700 people, more than twice its official capacity. At rush hour, the trains carry 14 to 16 people per square metre -- this in a city whose heat and humidity levels are always near the physical limits and whose air, on a good day, has the feel and smell of a garbage fire in a steam room.
Whoever set off Tuesday's bombs knew exactly what they were hitting. India's huge spurt of economic and social growth, which has propelled it from being a recipient of foreign aid into an aid donor, is in large part driven by the huge middle class that has emerged along the Western Line -- a middle class that has shifted from the old fabric industries that made Bombay famous to the information-age economies of the new Mumbai.
The bombs were aimed at the first-class carriages, of which there is usually only one per train. The first-class cars are almost as crowded as the others, but cost 10 times as much (typically $1 a journey) because they carry a different sort of people. The bombs were set off precisely when those carriages are carrying a specific class of people from a specific industry: the Gujarati business elite, and especially the stockbrokers and diamond traders. It was a surgical blow to the very heart of the Indian economic miracle.
It may well have failed, in the immediate sense -- business was up and running the next day, with barely a hiccup -- but the tension it created can be felt up and down the Western Line.
"It is the people in first-class who got killed, and I pray for their families, but it is we in these carriages who are suffering if things go wrong," says Mr. Medke, as he and his partners sort their tiffins.
"We need each day's money for each day's food -- when I lost half my business on Wednesday, I had nothing to feed my wife or my children. We did not get to have dinner that night."
When these guys get to the city's central Churchgate Station, a huge train barn with a Communist-era utopian mural on the front and far too many people inside, they will join thousands of other dabbawallahs in what looks like a major riot. It is how they dispatch their tiffins to the right destinations. There are no rules, just long-standing customs and human relationships -- like everything else here.
Yesterday, something new had appeared beside the throng of dabbawallahs: a desk, with three men in tan, starched short-sleeved dress shirts. They are Mumbai policemen, and they are checking the bags of people -- some people -- who enter the station. After searching, they check I.D., and painstakingly enter the names and addresses in a ledger book. While they are doing this, people stream past, carrying all manner of bags.
"It's ridiculous -- this is the most the police here can manage; it's supposed to make people more secure, but it's frightening to watch them," says Amandeep Shukla, a young writer visiting from New Delhi, as he watches, fascinated.
"Look at who they're stopping to search: It's only people who look like Muslims." This isn't an easy distinction to make: A slight difference in skin tone, sometimes, perhaps a more Muslim style of facial hair.
Such distinctions were once irrelevant in Mumbai. Muslims and Hindus worked and lived together, and enjoyed a begrudging co-operation. In the diamond industry, the buying and selling is done by Hindus, the polishing by Muslims. A great many of the diamond people killed on Tuesday were Muslim -- perhaps one-third of the dead when the population is only one-fifth Muslim.
Now, the Muslims are treated as outsiders in their own city. The Hindu-nationalist extremists who took control for many years in the 1990s (and renamed the city Mumbai, a term that had been used only by Hindi speakers) invented the completely fictional notion that Indian Muslims are actually Pakistanis who ought to return north. In fact, post-partition India has more Muslims than Pakistan does -- the world's second-highest Muslim population -- but even some of them seem to have taken this view to heart: When George W. Bush visited India last week, to offer it aid with its nuclear ambitions, Mumbai Muslims held a large, angry demonstration, decrying India as if it were a foreign country.
As we enter Santacruz station, up near Mumbai's international airport (which happens to be in the middle of a putrid shantytown), an even longer, bright blue train rolls to a stop, two tracks over. Tiny figures fall from it like flies from a waking cow, and scatter.
This is a train from Gandhinagar, in the rural northern province of Gujarat, and the tiny figures make up entire families, mothers clutching tiny children, dressed in dirty cloth. They are escapees from the Indian countryside, where poverty is far worse and much more deadly than in the most squalid urban slum. Thousands of them arrive in Mumbai, increasing its population at a pace that will soon make it the world's largest city.
Even now, it simply can't handle its 18 million people.
Mr. Medke will return home to Andheri, a suburb far north of anything that appears on a tourist map. The million people packed into this small area mostly occupy what we would call a terrible slum.
To reach his house, you ride endlessly along a meandering, potholed dirt road jammed with people and motor-rickshaws, its air filled with powerful smells that are either wonderful (amazing curries cooked at roadside) or unspeakable (vast quantities of raw human sewage, also at roadside). Then you turn on a much narrower dirt lane, most of its surface a thick mud of filth and excrement.
The houses here are tiny squares of dirty brick, with corrugated fibreglass sheets slapped on top as roofs. Most don't have doors. His home occupies two rooms, and has sheets of plywood for a floor. Water is gathered from a communal tap once a day. He, his wife and three of his five children live in these two tight squares.
Visitors would call this the worst sort of slum, a malarial shantytown. In Mumbai, however, it's considered a middle-class neighbourhood. A proper slum has no corrugated sheet, just a cheap blue plastic tarp for a roof, held up with sticks and bricks. It has mud floors, reeking of human excrement. It is usually tucked in a field, against a building, and is torn down by the government at irregular intervals (although the Mumbai government tends not to build housing).
One-third of the city lives in these very real slums, essentially sleeping outdoors in an open sewer, at densities of up to a million people per square kilometre. They keep coming, and keep staying, because these pits of stench are better than the countryside: Now their children may have to beg, sometimes, but they're more likely to stay alive. People don't die of hunger here, although there are plenty of other ways to go -- the suburban trains, for example, kill more than 3,000 people a year, often slum-dwellers using the tracks as toilets.
"This is a good life for us, it took me my whole life to get to this, and I don't want to lose it," Mr. Medke says of his middle-class slum, showing off his Hindu icons.
His parents came from the Indian countryside. He hauled himself out of the mud, got a job among the dabbawallah fraternity, thanks to a cousin, and now is proud to see some of his children going to school, something he could never have considered. His house feels like a home, not like a desperate panic. The family eats very well. They, like most slum-dwellers in Mumbai, have cable TV (though not running water). But the loss of a half-day's work would destroy it all.
When he lived with his parents around here, Mr. Medke's neighbours were Muslim. He remembers the smell of the chickens they kept, and his parents grumbling about it (the most visible difference between Muslims and Hindus is the former's consumption of meat). Since 1993, Muslims and Hindus have lived in separate neighbourhoods. That year, Hindu mobs, their anger fanned by claims that a Hindu shrine in northern India had been displaced by a mosque, had rioted, burning hundreds of Muslims alive, killing more than 1,700 and driving them out of their homes. In retaliation, Muslim gangs bombed buildings and killed 257 people.
Things here have never been quite the same. It remains a deeply cosmopolitan city, especially among its educated elite. The halal meat and the vegetarian curry will never be far apart, and people of every faith will constantly jostle -- and be killed by bombs -- on the Western Line. But the economic and cultural success the city is now enjoying are built on a wall of enormous tension and distrust.
Nobody was ever arrested for the 1993 events, either the riots or the bombings. People here believe that this week's attacks may produce a similar result. There have been loud calls for tougher policing, for a tougher Indian stance on Pakistan, for tough policing against Muslims.
But for every Mumbai resident who wants to see a crackdown, there is another who would rather the police step lightly, for fear that the ghosts of '93 will return and upset the city's rise to prosperity. "Even the Israelis, despite their methods, are still suffering attacks," former senior Mumbai official J. B. D'Souza said on Wednesday. "The government needs to address the basic cause, which is resentment."
There are deep wells of resentment. Muslims resent the police, as well as the still-potent Hindu nationalists, for making them less equal. Those without water -- and this week, it was announced that water shortages were plaguing huge swaths of the city -- resent those who can afford to wash. And everyone resents the city authorities, for making this the world's largest experiment in pure, state-of-nature laissez-faire capitalism -- not out of ideology, but simply because the city is too corrupt and too incompetent to provide a small city's worth of resources to a large nation's worth of people packed on a tiny island.
"We are frightened on this train, there is no question," Mr. Medke says. "We are frightened of each other, but we are frightened of the police as well. They won't do anything for us, we know it. We will have to do things for ourselves, even if it does not work very well. It's just the way things work here."
Friday July 14 2006, Spiegel, Hasnain Kazim, Mumbai Returns to Normal amid Fears, (Back).
People in the Indian city of Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, are struggling to return to normality after bomb attacks killed hundreds on Tuesday evening. Fears remain that that terror network al-Qaida may be behind the attacks, which could threaten India's economy as well as lead to further violence.
Ruhma crouches on the ground and weaves flowers into a wreath. "It's for the men coming home from work who want to bring something for their wives," the 17-year-old says. Hundreds of people stream past her. She's sitting right in the middle of a concrete bridge above the train station in Mahim, a Mumbai neighborhood. One of the seven bombs that exploded here on Tuesday was placed about 30 meters below her, at a slight angle from where she's sitting. Ruhma saw everything -- the way the wrecked train kept sliding along the tracks for several hundred meters, the bleeding people, corpses, limbs, the many helpers that came rushing from nearby. Ruhma doesn't cry. She smiles sadly -- but she still smiles. "Life has to go on," she says. "That's why I'm sitting here and selling these wreaths. I have to feed myself somehow."
Traces of soot on the train tracks are all that can still be seen of the attack besides some seat cushions that lie to one side, left from the destroyed train cars. Completely overcrowded trains operated by the Western Railway Company roll by.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, the chairwoman of the ruling Congress Party, visited Mahim train station on Tuesday evening, shortly after the bombing. They promised 500,000 rupees -- about €10,000 ($12,675) -- to the families of the victims. Each family was also promised one job at Western Railway. The people of Mumbai feel that's a wonderful gesture.
A history of religiously motivated violence
This time everything is different from the way it was in December of 1992, when Hindus and Muslims massacred each other in the metropolis, which has over 18 million inhabitants. Back then, militant Hindus had torn down a mosque in Ayodhya, several hundred kilometers north of Mumbai, because they were convinced the building stood in the birthplace of their god Rama. Muslims in Mumbai reacted violently to the news from the distant city. The clashes lasted for weeks. In January of 1993 Hindus led by the nationalist and Hinduist Shiv Sena Party retaliated, killing Muslims randomly in Mumbai. Then, in March, Muslims detonated ten bombs, one of them at the Mumbai Stock Exchange. When the conflict was over, thousands had died.
Ruhma's aunt Manjula remembers those grim times in detail. Her family is Hindu. "Now people are already accusing the Muslims again, claiming they planted the bombs," she says as she helps her niece sort through the flowers strewn on the floor. "They arrested almost 200 men, and today the newspaper says that two of them are still being held and that they are being suspected of being the perpetrators." People from the province of Punjab, apparently. Four witnesses claim to have identified them. But Manjula says she doesn't feel any hatred. "It would just be senseless for people to start killing each other again," she remarks. "Didn't Muslims and Hindus sit side by side in the train?" Not only does she feel no hatred, but she's not scared either -- neither of new attacks nor of clashes between Muslims and Hindus. She's just concerned she won't be able to sell enough flower wreaths. But then, she says, her motto has always been: "Easy, Mumbai, easy." Just take it easy.
Staying strong to survive in Mumbai
Thirty-eight-year-old Santush Parab is the station manager at Mahim. He's not afraid he might be a victim of such an attack himself one day. "People in Mumbai are strong. They're not afraid." What's more, he adds, there are far too many reasons to be afraid in Mumbai. "Anything can happen here: thefts, robberies -- and bomb explosions." He sits in a shack by the railroad track, counting money -- the money is still coming in after the attacks -- and ordering security forces around. Bombay's police has been accused of overlooking hints about the imminent attacks and responding slowly when the explosions occurred; the police is reacting to these accusations with a strong presence now. Some say an incarcerated member of the terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Toiba already stated in January that activists from his group were preparing attacks on trains in Mumbai. Now uniformed policemen can be seen everywhere -- at the train stations, at street crossings and even in the hospitals.
The hospital halls are overcrowded and Dr. B. Sundeep has dark rings under his eyes. "I don't know how long it's been since I've slept. I've been working without interruption since Tuesday night," the doctor says and asks: "What day is it, anyway?" Most victims of the attacks are being treated at Sion Hospital near the Mahim station. Mahim is the neighborhood that was hit the hardest, Sundeep says. At least 200 people died overall, 62 of them are here in this hospital. "Forty-seven people were already dead when they arrived here. The other 15 died in the hospital. Those that are still alive now are in stable condition," he says, and there is a note of joy in his voice. "We've made it."
Three panels stand outside the hospital. On one is the list of patients. The second lists the 62 deceased in this hospital. The third panel reads: "Thank you very much, we have enough blood donations. Those who would like to make a donation are asked to please leave their contact details." The willingness to help is enormous.
Some children with bandaged arms and legs crouch in their beds and quietly tell each other stories. A woman whose crushed arm had to be amputated looks apathetically at the ceiling. She's lying in one hospital hall along with 10 or 15 other terror victims. The heavy monsoon rains leave a mugginess that spreads through the hospital as well. One visitor talks about a young man who is said to have offered a woman his seat on the train. "The man died, the woman survived, the newspaper says," the visitor reports. When another visitor talks about a different newspaper story, according to which the Indian intelligence service is examining the contacts of the suspects to Pakistan and Afghanistan, some patients simply shake their heads.
Worried about the economy
"Dear God, don't let that be true," mumbles one man with a bandaged head. "Otherwise the quarrels between Muslims and Hindus will begin again." He curses loudly. "Then things will head downhill for the Indian economy."
But the mood at the Mumbai Stock Exchange is relaxed. You can tell the brokers in Dalal Street are relieved when they hear that the attacks may have been organized by the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, rather than by al-Qaida. Bombay's stock market index Sensex didn't crash; most stock prices actually went up.
"If it turns out to have been al-Qaida, then what the world will remember is that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network is now active in India. Then international investors will say: Bye, bye, India," fears Deepak Nair. "Al-Qaida would be the worst thing that could happen to us."
The stock traders listen thankfully to the words of Prime Minister Singh: "Bombs can't stop the stock market." Financial Minister Chidambaram appears on Indian TV and says the bombs won't stop India's economic growth. He urges investors to continue having faith in India. Deepak Nair is glad when he hears those words. "Right he is," he says -- and disappears in the turmoil of the stock market.
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