An extra Ten Commandments
Layman's Ten . . . . . . .
Someone has written these beautiful words.
Must read and try to understand the deep meaning of it.
They are like the ten commandments to follow in life all the time.
1. Prayer is not a "spare wheel" that you pull out when in trouble,
but it is a "steering wheel" that directs the right path throughout.
2. So why is a car's windshield so large and the rear view mirror so
small? Because our past is not as important as our future.
So, look ahead and move on.
3. Friendship is like a book. It takes few seconds to burn, but it
takes years to write.
4. All things in life are temporary. If it's going well, enjoy it,
that won't last long. If it's going badly, don't worry, that won't
last long either.
5. Old friends are gold! New friends are diamonds! If you get a
diamond, don't forget the gold! Because to hold a diamond, you always
need a base of gold!
6. Often when we lose hope and think this is the end,
God smiles from above and says, "Relax, sweetheart, it's just a bend,
not the end!"
7. When God solves your problems, you have faith in His abilities;
when God doesn't solve your problems, He has faith in your abilities.
8. A blind person asked St. Anthony, "Can there be anything worse than
losing eye sight?" He replied, "Yes, losing your vision!"
9. When you pray fo others, God listens to you and blesses them;
sometimes, when you are safe and happy, remember that someone has
prayed for you.
10. Worrying does not take away tomorrow's troubles, it takes away
today's peace.
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Saturday, March 30, 2013
[LST] Hobbled by inertia - Hindustan Times
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/1034403.aspx
March 29, 2013
First Published: 22:29 IST(29/3/2013)
Last Updated: 22:37 IST(29/3/2013) Print
Hobbled by inertia
It was Shakespeare's soothsayer who first immortalised the warning against impending political upheaval. "Beware the Ides of March," he told Julius Caesar, prophesying the day of his violent death at the hands of a group of Roman senators. The otherwise distinctly literary Kalaignar may or may not have consulted his copy of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, so one can only call it an odd coincidence that it was on the exact same day in March (the 15th) that the DMK leader first announced the "pointlessness" of remaining with the UPA. The season of political termination had announced its arrival.
But unlike the abrupt and relatively painless end delivered by an assassination, this was to be slow death. Like a gravely ill patient forced to confront her own diminishing strength, her mortality both a curse and deliverance, the UPA has been left stranded in the nether world that lies between life and death. Its end is imminent and its present is paralysed. In other words, it now needs the definitive mercy of euthanasia, and not the tantalising promise of closure from allies who would be very happy to dance on its grave just as soon as they have a fix on what the swansong should be.
In the meantime, the Darwinian games for political survival have been declared open. Here stealth is strategy and fitness levels are an elaborate mindsport. Nothing, then, is as it seems. Nitish Kumar won't say a yes to Narendra Modi as the NDA's prime ministerial candidate, but won't settle for pre-election ambiguity either. His insistence that the BJP declare a name is clearly in anticipation of a rupture that has already become inevitable. Mulayam Singh Yadav's contradictory statements that alternate between support and criticism combined with his unlikely praise for LK Advani - while putting down his own son - are tactical wedges driven between the various factions of the Sangh parivar. As the main charioteer of the Ayodhya movement, Advani was till recently a political untouchable for Mulayam's party; today the UP stalwart's praise for him is designed to counter the rise of Modi and add chaos to the general confusion. Further, the same Bengal chief minister who stalled the Teesta water-sharing accord suddenly sounded a platitudinous note on how the foreign policy of a country must always be shaped by the Centre. Now her party has demanded the resignation of the Manmohan Singh government. Meanwhile the cash-strapped government is suddenly willing to open its coffers for special packages to Bihar and Bengal, while expressing flustered dismay at CBI raids it says it didn't order on MK Stalin. Is there a dangerous ad-hocism in the air or is there a method to anyone's madness? Probably neither or a bit of both; red-herrings in election season are designed to test waters, confound the opponent and camouflage actual battle-plans.
So, when the PM cryptically says that Mulayam may withdraw, but the UPA can still survive, he is visualising a Parliament floor test which forces players to declare their hand. If you speak only mathematically, the Congress may well have calculated that there are still enough parties who aren't ready for earlier elections. It's the reason no one has yet thrust a no-confidence motion on the government. Politicians of all parties will tell you privately that given the costs of campaigning and the trauma of possible defeat, no MP ever wants to give up a single day of power. That conspiracy of covert consensus may be what has kept the UPA from falling over a precipice; one that it precariously continues to stare down.
But speaking politically, the Congress must ask itself why it wants to continue to be this straggling entity that can now neither administrate effectively nor govern with any self-respect intact. Yes, the party's political managers, led by a shrewd and effective parliamentary affairs minister in Kamal Nath may yet manage to negotiate key legislations. But when passing any major Bill becomes the equivalent of fighting a forest fire, why not accept that in this situation, there can be no magical rise from the ashes?
The real crisis for the Congress is stagnancy. Its challenge now is not just to enthuse voters; but also its own cadres. Complex electoral arithmetic means that neither national party - the BJP or the Congress - is likely to get more than between 120-140 seats. But whether Narendra Modi is eventually the BJP's prime ministerial face or not (my wager is that no candidate will be announced), he has succeeded in creating an energy among the party workers. By contrast, the momentum that could have been built on after Rahul Gandhi's Jaipur speech has quickly dissipated into inertia because of the complacent vagueness that continues to vex the party's leadership questions. Forget voters, even Congress workers have a right to know who they should draw direction from. So far, they have no idea.
The UPA may well have a scheme up its sleeve to keep itself in power for a few more months. The question is, should it? Limping along till 2014, either hobbling its way through the law-making process or plotting its way through the next crisis is in fact poor politics not just for the Congress, but for the country. Whether Mulayam Singh Yadav blinks or not and whether Nitish Kumar can yet offer salvation should be immaterial. The environment is politically toxic; the body politic needs fresh blood. For as Shakespeare would remind the government, "The fault, dear Brutus is not our stars, But in ourselves."
A November election may not yet be absolutely inevitable, but it's certainly desirable.
Barkha Dutt is Group Editor, NDTV and currently a Visiting Fellow at Brown University's India Initiative
The views expressed by the author are personal
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/1034403.aspx
© Copyright © 2013 HT Media Limited. All Rights Reserved.
--
"To those who believe in resistance, who live between hope and impatience and have learned the perils of being unreasonable. To those who understand enough
to be afraid and yet retain their fury."
Sent on my BlackBerry® from Vodafone
--
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March 29, 2013
First Published: 22:29 IST(29/3/2013)
Last Updated: 22:37 IST(29/3/2013) Print
Hobbled by inertia
It was Shakespeare's soothsayer who first immortalised the warning against impending political upheaval. "Beware the Ides of March," he told Julius Caesar, prophesying the day of his violent death at the hands of a group of Roman senators. The otherwise distinctly literary Kalaignar may or may not have consulted his copy of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, so one can only call it an odd coincidence that it was on the exact same day in March (the 15th) that the DMK leader first announced the "pointlessness" of remaining with the UPA. The season of political termination had announced its arrival.
But unlike the abrupt and relatively painless end delivered by an assassination, this was to be slow death. Like a gravely ill patient forced to confront her own diminishing strength, her mortality both a curse and deliverance, the UPA has been left stranded in the nether world that lies between life and death. Its end is imminent and its present is paralysed. In other words, it now needs the definitive mercy of euthanasia, and not the tantalising promise of closure from allies who would be very happy to dance on its grave just as soon as they have a fix on what the swansong should be.
In the meantime, the Darwinian games for political survival have been declared open. Here stealth is strategy and fitness levels are an elaborate mindsport. Nothing, then, is as it seems. Nitish Kumar won't say a yes to Narendra Modi as the NDA's prime ministerial candidate, but won't settle for pre-election ambiguity either. His insistence that the BJP declare a name is clearly in anticipation of a rupture that has already become inevitable. Mulayam Singh Yadav's contradictory statements that alternate between support and criticism combined with his unlikely praise for LK Advani - while putting down his own son - are tactical wedges driven between the various factions of the Sangh parivar. As the main charioteer of the Ayodhya movement, Advani was till recently a political untouchable for Mulayam's party; today the UP stalwart's praise for him is designed to counter the rise of Modi and add chaos to the general confusion. Further, the same Bengal chief minister who stalled the Teesta water-sharing accord suddenly sounded a platitudinous note on how the foreign policy of a country must always be shaped by the Centre. Now her party has demanded the resignation of the Manmohan Singh government. Meanwhile the cash-strapped government is suddenly willing to open its coffers for special packages to Bihar and Bengal, while expressing flustered dismay at CBI raids it says it didn't order on MK Stalin. Is there a dangerous ad-hocism in the air or is there a method to anyone's madness? Probably neither or a bit of both; red-herrings in election season are designed to test waters, confound the opponent and camouflage actual battle-plans.
So, when the PM cryptically says that Mulayam may withdraw, but the UPA can still survive, he is visualising a Parliament floor test which forces players to declare their hand. If you speak only mathematically, the Congress may well have calculated that there are still enough parties who aren't ready for earlier elections. It's the reason no one has yet thrust a no-confidence motion on the government. Politicians of all parties will tell you privately that given the costs of campaigning and the trauma of possible defeat, no MP ever wants to give up a single day of power. That conspiracy of covert consensus may be what has kept the UPA from falling over a precipice; one that it precariously continues to stare down.
But speaking politically, the Congress must ask itself why it wants to continue to be this straggling entity that can now neither administrate effectively nor govern with any self-respect intact. Yes, the party's political managers, led by a shrewd and effective parliamentary affairs minister in Kamal Nath may yet manage to negotiate key legislations. But when passing any major Bill becomes the equivalent of fighting a forest fire, why not accept that in this situation, there can be no magical rise from the ashes?
The real crisis for the Congress is stagnancy. Its challenge now is not just to enthuse voters; but also its own cadres. Complex electoral arithmetic means that neither national party - the BJP or the Congress - is likely to get more than between 120-140 seats. But whether Narendra Modi is eventually the BJP's prime ministerial face or not (my wager is that no candidate will be announced), he has succeeded in creating an energy among the party workers. By contrast, the momentum that could have been built on after Rahul Gandhi's Jaipur speech has quickly dissipated into inertia because of the complacent vagueness that continues to vex the party's leadership questions. Forget voters, even Congress workers have a right to know who they should draw direction from. So far, they have no idea.
The UPA may well have a scheme up its sleeve to keep itself in power for a few more months. The question is, should it? Limping along till 2014, either hobbling its way through the law-making process or plotting its way through the next crisis is in fact poor politics not just for the Congress, but for the country. Whether Mulayam Singh Yadav blinks or not and whether Nitish Kumar can yet offer salvation should be immaterial. The environment is politically toxic; the body politic needs fresh blood. For as Shakespeare would remind the government, "The fault, dear Brutus is not our stars, But in ourselves."
A November election may not yet be absolutely inevitable, but it's certainly desirable.
Barkha Dutt is Group Editor, NDTV and currently a Visiting Fellow at Brown University's India Initiative
The views expressed by the author are personal
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/1034403.aspx
© Copyright © 2013 HT Media Limited. All Rights Reserved.
--
"To those who believe in resistance, who live between hope and impatience and have learned the perils of being unreasonable. To those who understand enough
to be afraid and yet retain their fury."
Sent on my BlackBerry® from Vodafone
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LST-LAW SCHOOL TUTORIALS" group.
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Friday, March 29, 2013
[LST] National Interest: Because we forget - Indian Express Mobile
http://m.indianexpress.com/news/national-interest-because-we-forget/1095140/
National Interest: Because we forget
Shekhar-gupta : Mar 16, 2013
A A
On one issue there is no doubt: the firearms given to Sanjay Dutt in the middle of January 1993 were indeed for self-defence. So what is anybody complaining about? Self-defence is as good a defence morally as in a court of law.
The problem, as usual, lies in the detail. Which must be stated once again now because we live in times of such attention deficit disorder. Also, when the presumption seems to be that there was no history before Google. Or when you merely speed-read history through Hindi cinema as, in this case, in Black Friday, the stark Anurag Kashyap-directed film based on the serial bombings of March 1993. What's important is to understand what happened before and after. Only then can you get a fuller picture of what India, and not merely Bombay, had been confronted with in those bloody months. And I speak here partly with the benefit of hindsight, but mostly as somebody who covered the aftermath of the blasts for India Today, in the company of some of the finest reporters in the magazine's bureau then, its Bombay bureau chief Maseeh Rahman, and Rahul Pathak, who subsequently had a stint with us here, heading our Express News Service.
The most important fact is that while the serial bombing seemed like a flawless operation, it was a disaster strategically. Because the objective of its planners was not merely to kill a few hundred people. It was to orchestrate communal riots of an unthinkable intensity nobody would be able to control. It was the first ISI operation of this scale anywhere in India. In fact, it was then the first significant ISI foray outside of Punjab and Kashmir. And remember, this is when militancy in Punjab was being rapidly crushed by K.P.S. Gill's police, and the Kashmiri insurgency was still in its early days.
The key to understanding that plot lies in separating, analysing and sequencing three different sets of events. The first riots broke out on December 6, just as Babri fell. Angry Muslims hit the streets first, and then they faced the full fury of the Shiv Sainiks and the rest, and an openly partisan Bombay police. These riots settled by the third week of December. The second round began in the first week of January. But a few significant things had happened in the interim.
First, a large consignment of arms, ammunition and RDX landed at a place called Dighi on the Konkan coast in the first week of January. Second, and most significant to me, coming from Delhi to investigate the story and thereby having been saved the horrors of the riots, was the fact that, in the run-up to the second round of riots, the police had discovered an intriguing pattern. Several key officers I met then told me that bodies of poor Hindu mathadi (head-load) workers from the Maharashtra hinterland were being found early mornings on streets where they often slept, slit at the throat with a small knife as if in some ritualistic style. That was, however, an analytical afterthought as the investigators pieced the story together. These bodies were mostly found around Dongri, a communally sensitive area. The conjecture was that someone was trying to provoke a second round of riots. That there was a plan to this.
The armaments were being landed at the same time and were to be distributed, again, in "sensitive" areas. Sanjay got his consignment, for example, on January 16, when the second round of riots was ebbing. So the lots of weapons distributed around this time were for "self-defence", but not for self-defence during those riots. The riots had, by now, ended. The second consignment landed at Shekhadi in the first week of February. There were no riots then. In fact, there was total, if uneasy, peace in Bombay until the bombings on March 12, five weeks later.
Focus on these dates and events and the picture becomes clearer. The mathadis, who are a large, poor but well-knit population, were killed ritually in sensitive areas to provoke fresh riots. Since the Sainiks were now well organised and helped along by a partisan police, this created greater justification for bombings in retaliation and also inspired, for the masterminds, what the Supreme Court just described as the foot-soldiers within the furious and insecure local Muslim population. The second round of riots was much more one-sided (against the Muslims) than the first. It is after this that the weapons were pre-stocked in sensitive localities and the bombings were planned. The plot was simple: the bombings will again unleash angry Hindu hordes, escorted by a partisan police. And they will be greeted by AKs and grenades, leading to mayhem of the kind never imagined. And then the fires will spread all over India.
All memories are selective, and sometimes convenient, particularly as they go back two full decades, exactly to date. And we reporters are no exception. So, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court order last week, I not only read up our April 1993 stories in India Today's archives, but also spoke again to some of the key figures in that giant investigation. Some shall still remain anonymous, particularly those continuing in service, or concerned about underworld reprisals. But M.N. Singh, who led the investigation as joint commissioner (crime) then, and whom you often see now as a sensible TV talking head, recalls what a horror Bombay had saved itself from simply by not coming up to the masterminds' expectations of how the city was to respond, reviving the cycle of reprisals. I do remember meeting him in his police housing cooperative apartment on Worli Sea Face, and first hearing the story of the mathadis with throats slit. One of my key colleagues was sceptical of this and so I checked again with Singh's then boss and Maharashtra DGP S. Ramamurthy, whom I had known as an IB veteran. He was more familiar with the methods of organisations like the ISI and vouched for the story his officers were putting together.
And how did his police crack the case within two days? Alongside the blasts, one band of gangsters had been driving to the BMC headquarters at Victoria Terminus in a car loaded with AKs and grenades. It just so happened that the Century Bazar bomb, the biggest of all, went off while they were thereabouts, still crossing Worli. They fled in panic, abandoning the car. This car was found, along with 7 AK rifles and grenades, and was registered in the name of the Memon (Tiger and Yakub) family and the case was cracked. And why was the car headed for the BMC headquarters? M.N. Singh tells me now the gangsters were headed there to break in and fire indiscriminately to kill as many corporators (many of them from the Sena) as possible (this, 15 years before 26/11). The blasts, the massacre of corporators, and then the largescale killings of Hindu reprisal-seekers and policemen with AKs and grenades already positioned. You get the picture? M.N. Singh has one regret even today. "Arms were delivered to Sanjay Dutt on January 16. Instead of concealing them, if he had only told his father, who in turn would have surely informed the police, we would have been able to prevent the bombings and save so many lives."
You also understand now why M.N. Singh and his many colleagues see the bombings of 1993 as an essentially failed operation. It killed many people, but failed in its strategic objective. Singh tells me in 1993, Bombay Police did not have even one AK rifle, had never seen grenades blow up, and even he did not know something called RDX. In the aftermath, his police recovered 71 AK rifles and 500 grenades, dispersed strategically. We knew what mayhem just 9 AKs caused in 26/11. What would 71 have done in 1993? In addition, there were 3.5 tonnes of RDX and 1,200 detonators. I also called Ramamurthy again, now. He lives in the same modest (for a state police chief) personal apartment in the narrow Sohrab Bharucha Road (off Colaba Causeway) where I had met him in late March, 1993 and he only said: "See, this Bombay Police, good, bad, ugly, whatever you call it, it has cracked every single case of terror attacks so fast. Something works for it."
Not only was it the ISI's first major operation in mainland India, it was also the most audacious to date. Much more ambitious than even 26/11. So ambitious and so audacious, in fact, that they risked their most important asset in India, Dawood Ibrahim, and his underworld army. They would have known that irrespective of how this ended, they would have to evacuate the whole lot, and find them safe harbour in their own country. Now you know why they pamper and protect Dawood and the Memons the way they do. They were key to their most sinister and brutal conspiracy in India to date. Also, they know simply too much. In the many rounds of bombings since then, and even 26/11, you cannot miss the common pattern: multiple bombings or attacks, but hit one key point in South Bombay first, get the government distracted there, and then have trouble radiate outwards. Even in 26/11, a bomb was left in a taxi timed to go off after a while to cause confusion in an entirely different area. What does this tell you, except that instruments and methods may have changed in two decades, but the "masterminds" continue to work on the same formula.
I had had one long, and partly on-record conversation on the phone with Dawood Ibrahim before the blasts, set up through my colleague Sheela Bhatt, who edited the Gujarati edition of India Today and was a veteran on the underworld beat in Bombay. This was in 1992, just after Dr Manmohan Singh, as finance minister, was freeing up the economy and opening up imports, even of gold. I called Dawood (in Dubai) and asked if this had not harmed his smuggling business. He said what we called smuggling in India was a legitimate business activity in Dubai, so he was breaking no law. He also said he welcomed what "Manmohan ji" had done, except that somebody should have done that much earlier. He did not regret losing some business, he said, as "my country benefited from such reform." He was at pains to underline his patriotism. Even in cricket, he said, he always supported and betted on India and was so distraught (he spoke in language more colourful than this, but unpublishable) that India had lost to the West Indies in the World Cup that morning — that is why we know that the conversation took place on March 10, 1992, when the West Indies walloped India by five wickets at Wellington.
He said any time I wanted a more proper interview, I only had to let him know. He spoke to Sheela Bhatt again after the bombings (published alongside my story in India Today, April 15, 1993) and said he was being victimised by Bombay Police. He fulminated over how badly Muslims were targeted in the Bombay riots, how their women had been humiliated and children burnt, but denied any role in the serial bombings whatsoever. If the government set up an inquiry consisting of RAW and the CBI in Delhi, but excluding Bombay Police, he would even present himself before it. Of course, no such thing was to happen as his gang's role in the conspiracy became clearer by the day.
I decided now to take him up on his earlier offer of a more "proper" interview, and called him. He said he couldn't promise that "right now". But after some cajoling, he agreed to see me if I came to Dubai, though only if I agreed to keep the meeting off the record unless he agreed to come on record. I did visit Dubai in the first week of April, 1993 and presented myself at his "workplace", the 17-storey Pearl Building housing many airline offices in the buzzing Al Fahidi Street, a kind of subcontinental shopping paradise then.
Dawood and his brother Anees were at their 12th floor office, decorated with gold-inlaid paintings of Ajmer Sharif and Quranic verses. It was just around noon, but I was struck by the fact that the morning's Times of India (Bombay edition) lay on his table — the don stayed in touch with the latest! He was in the news then and, of course, all references to him and Dubai in a front-page story had been blackened out by Dubai censors.
Dawood was not willing to give an interview now. Not even to acknowledge that he was in Dubai. "When we do the interview, bhai," he said, "you won't come to Dubai just like this." He would call me back again, he said, and then "my car will go and receive you at the tarmac and bring you to me... you will be my guest... and my people will also take you shopping" etc, etc. But for now, he said, please do not even mention that you met me here, "as it creates problems for my hosts". I persisted, nagged and talked around him as reporters usually do, and all he would concede was that I mention I visited his office, without quoting any conversations.
And then, as I turned around to leave, making no secret of my dismay and even reluctance, he sensed something.
"Ai bhai," he said, as I turned around, hoping somehow that he had changed his mind.
"Dekhna bhai, likhna nahin maine jo kaha (see, brother, do not report what I said)", "dekho na, achcha nahin hoga (see, it won't be nice)".
It felt as if the temperature had suddenly dropped 30 degrees below zero, and yet I was sweating on the forehead. That memory isn't selective, nor is it convenient. And it hasn't faded even a bit after two full decades.
--
"To those who believe in resistance, who live between hope and impatience and have learned the perils of being unreasonable. To those who understand enough
to be afraid and yet retain their fury."
Sent on my BlackBerry® from Vodafone
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LST-LAW SCHOOL TUTORIALS" group.
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National Interest: Because we forget
Shekhar-gupta : Mar 16, 2013
A A
On one issue there is no doubt: the firearms given to Sanjay Dutt in the middle of January 1993 were indeed for self-defence. So what is anybody complaining about? Self-defence is as good a defence morally as in a court of law.
The problem, as usual, lies in the detail. Which must be stated once again now because we live in times of such attention deficit disorder. Also, when the presumption seems to be that there was no history before Google. Or when you merely speed-read history through Hindi cinema as, in this case, in Black Friday, the stark Anurag Kashyap-directed film based on the serial bombings of March 1993. What's important is to understand what happened before and after. Only then can you get a fuller picture of what India, and not merely Bombay, had been confronted with in those bloody months. And I speak here partly with the benefit of hindsight, but mostly as somebody who covered the aftermath of the blasts for India Today, in the company of some of the finest reporters in the magazine's bureau then, its Bombay bureau chief Maseeh Rahman, and Rahul Pathak, who subsequently had a stint with us here, heading our Express News Service.
The most important fact is that while the serial bombing seemed like a flawless operation, it was a disaster strategically. Because the objective of its planners was not merely to kill a few hundred people. It was to orchestrate communal riots of an unthinkable intensity nobody would be able to control. It was the first ISI operation of this scale anywhere in India. In fact, it was then the first significant ISI foray outside of Punjab and Kashmir. And remember, this is when militancy in Punjab was being rapidly crushed by K.P.S. Gill's police, and the Kashmiri insurgency was still in its early days.
The key to understanding that plot lies in separating, analysing and sequencing three different sets of events. The first riots broke out on December 6, just as Babri fell. Angry Muslims hit the streets first, and then they faced the full fury of the Shiv Sainiks and the rest, and an openly partisan Bombay police. These riots settled by the third week of December. The second round began in the first week of January. But a few significant things had happened in the interim.
First, a large consignment of arms, ammunition and RDX landed at a place called Dighi on the Konkan coast in the first week of January. Second, and most significant to me, coming from Delhi to investigate the story and thereby having been saved the horrors of the riots, was the fact that, in the run-up to the second round of riots, the police had discovered an intriguing pattern. Several key officers I met then told me that bodies of poor Hindu mathadi (head-load) workers from the Maharashtra hinterland were being found early mornings on streets where they often slept, slit at the throat with a small knife as if in some ritualistic style. That was, however, an analytical afterthought as the investigators pieced the story together. These bodies were mostly found around Dongri, a communally sensitive area. The conjecture was that someone was trying to provoke a second round of riots. That there was a plan to this.
The armaments were being landed at the same time and were to be distributed, again, in "sensitive" areas. Sanjay got his consignment, for example, on January 16, when the second round of riots was ebbing. So the lots of weapons distributed around this time were for "self-defence", but not for self-defence during those riots. The riots had, by now, ended. The second consignment landed at Shekhadi in the first week of February. There were no riots then. In fact, there was total, if uneasy, peace in Bombay until the bombings on March 12, five weeks later.
Focus on these dates and events and the picture becomes clearer. The mathadis, who are a large, poor but well-knit population, were killed ritually in sensitive areas to provoke fresh riots. Since the Sainiks were now well organised and helped along by a partisan police, this created greater justification for bombings in retaliation and also inspired, for the masterminds, what the Supreme Court just described as the foot-soldiers within the furious and insecure local Muslim population. The second round of riots was much more one-sided (against the Muslims) than the first. It is after this that the weapons were pre-stocked in sensitive localities and the bombings were planned. The plot was simple: the bombings will again unleash angry Hindu hordes, escorted by a partisan police. And they will be greeted by AKs and grenades, leading to mayhem of the kind never imagined. And then the fires will spread all over India.
All memories are selective, and sometimes convenient, particularly as they go back two full decades, exactly to date. And we reporters are no exception. So, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court order last week, I not only read up our April 1993 stories in India Today's archives, but also spoke again to some of the key figures in that giant investigation. Some shall still remain anonymous, particularly those continuing in service, or concerned about underworld reprisals. But M.N. Singh, who led the investigation as joint commissioner (crime) then, and whom you often see now as a sensible TV talking head, recalls what a horror Bombay had saved itself from simply by not coming up to the masterminds' expectations of how the city was to respond, reviving the cycle of reprisals. I do remember meeting him in his police housing cooperative apartment on Worli Sea Face, and first hearing the story of the mathadis with throats slit. One of my key colleagues was sceptical of this and so I checked again with Singh's then boss and Maharashtra DGP S. Ramamurthy, whom I had known as an IB veteran. He was more familiar with the methods of organisations like the ISI and vouched for the story his officers were putting together.
And how did his police crack the case within two days? Alongside the blasts, one band of gangsters had been driving to the BMC headquarters at Victoria Terminus in a car loaded with AKs and grenades. It just so happened that the Century Bazar bomb, the biggest of all, went off while they were thereabouts, still crossing Worli. They fled in panic, abandoning the car. This car was found, along with 7 AK rifles and grenades, and was registered in the name of the Memon (Tiger and Yakub) family and the case was cracked. And why was the car headed for the BMC headquarters? M.N. Singh tells me now the gangsters were headed there to break in and fire indiscriminately to kill as many corporators (many of them from the Sena) as possible (this, 15 years before 26/11). The blasts, the massacre of corporators, and then the largescale killings of Hindu reprisal-seekers and policemen with AKs and grenades already positioned. You get the picture? M.N. Singh has one regret even today. "Arms were delivered to Sanjay Dutt on January 16. Instead of concealing them, if he had only told his father, who in turn would have surely informed the police, we would have been able to prevent the bombings and save so many lives."
You also understand now why M.N. Singh and his many colleagues see the bombings of 1993 as an essentially failed operation. It killed many people, but failed in its strategic objective. Singh tells me in 1993, Bombay Police did not have even one AK rifle, had never seen grenades blow up, and even he did not know something called RDX. In the aftermath, his police recovered 71 AK rifles and 500 grenades, dispersed strategically. We knew what mayhem just 9 AKs caused in 26/11. What would 71 have done in 1993? In addition, there were 3.5 tonnes of RDX and 1,200 detonators. I also called Ramamurthy again, now. He lives in the same modest (for a state police chief) personal apartment in the narrow Sohrab Bharucha Road (off Colaba Causeway) where I had met him in late March, 1993 and he only said: "See, this Bombay Police, good, bad, ugly, whatever you call it, it has cracked every single case of terror attacks so fast. Something works for it."
Not only was it the ISI's first major operation in mainland India, it was also the most audacious to date. Much more ambitious than even 26/11. So ambitious and so audacious, in fact, that they risked their most important asset in India, Dawood Ibrahim, and his underworld army. They would have known that irrespective of how this ended, they would have to evacuate the whole lot, and find them safe harbour in their own country. Now you know why they pamper and protect Dawood and the Memons the way they do. They were key to their most sinister and brutal conspiracy in India to date. Also, they know simply too much. In the many rounds of bombings since then, and even 26/11, you cannot miss the common pattern: multiple bombings or attacks, but hit one key point in South Bombay first, get the government distracted there, and then have trouble radiate outwards. Even in 26/11, a bomb was left in a taxi timed to go off after a while to cause confusion in an entirely different area. What does this tell you, except that instruments and methods may have changed in two decades, but the "masterminds" continue to work on the same formula.
I had had one long, and partly on-record conversation on the phone with Dawood Ibrahim before the blasts, set up through my colleague Sheela Bhatt, who edited the Gujarati edition of India Today and was a veteran on the underworld beat in Bombay. This was in 1992, just after Dr Manmohan Singh, as finance minister, was freeing up the economy and opening up imports, even of gold. I called Dawood (in Dubai) and asked if this had not harmed his smuggling business. He said what we called smuggling in India was a legitimate business activity in Dubai, so he was breaking no law. He also said he welcomed what "Manmohan ji" had done, except that somebody should have done that much earlier. He did not regret losing some business, he said, as "my country benefited from such reform." He was at pains to underline his patriotism. Even in cricket, he said, he always supported and betted on India and was so distraught (he spoke in language more colourful than this, but unpublishable) that India had lost to the West Indies in the World Cup that morning — that is why we know that the conversation took place on March 10, 1992, when the West Indies walloped India by five wickets at Wellington.
He said any time I wanted a more proper interview, I only had to let him know. He spoke to Sheela Bhatt again after the bombings (published alongside my story in India Today, April 15, 1993) and said he was being victimised by Bombay Police. He fulminated over how badly Muslims were targeted in the Bombay riots, how their women had been humiliated and children burnt, but denied any role in the serial bombings whatsoever. If the government set up an inquiry consisting of RAW and the CBI in Delhi, but excluding Bombay Police, he would even present himself before it. Of course, no such thing was to happen as his gang's role in the conspiracy became clearer by the day.
I decided now to take him up on his earlier offer of a more "proper" interview, and called him. He said he couldn't promise that "right now". But after some cajoling, he agreed to see me if I came to Dubai, though only if I agreed to keep the meeting off the record unless he agreed to come on record. I did visit Dubai in the first week of April, 1993 and presented myself at his "workplace", the 17-storey Pearl Building housing many airline offices in the buzzing Al Fahidi Street, a kind of subcontinental shopping paradise then.
Dawood and his brother Anees were at their 12th floor office, decorated with gold-inlaid paintings of Ajmer Sharif and Quranic verses. It was just around noon, but I was struck by the fact that the morning's Times of India (Bombay edition) lay on his table — the don stayed in touch with the latest! He was in the news then and, of course, all references to him and Dubai in a front-page story had been blackened out by Dubai censors.
Dawood was not willing to give an interview now. Not even to acknowledge that he was in Dubai. "When we do the interview, bhai," he said, "you won't come to Dubai just like this." He would call me back again, he said, and then "my car will go and receive you at the tarmac and bring you to me... you will be my guest... and my people will also take you shopping" etc, etc. But for now, he said, please do not even mention that you met me here, "as it creates problems for my hosts". I persisted, nagged and talked around him as reporters usually do, and all he would concede was that I mention I visited his office, without quoting any conversations.
And then, as I turned around to leave, making no secret of my dismay and even reluctance, he sensed something.
"Ai bhai," he said, as I turned around, hoping somehow that he had changed his mind.
"Dekhna bhai, likhna nahin maine jo kaha (see, brother, do not report what I said)", "dekho na, achcha nahin hoga (see, it won't be nice)".
It felt as if the temperature had suddenly dropped 30 degrees below zero, and yet I was sweating on the forehead. That memory isn't selective, nor is it convenient. And it hasn't faded even a bit after two full decades.
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"To those who believe in resistance, who live between hope and impatience and have learned the perils of being unreasonable. To those who understand enough
to be afraid and yet retain their fury."
Sent on my BlackBerry® from Vodafone
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