More lives lost in vain

The recent bomb blasts in Mumbai have stirred up uncomfortable memories in the city. In 1993 I was one of the few television reporters covering the first Mumbai serial bomb blasts. The shock of 13 co-ordinated explosions going off simultaneously in the city was unimaginable. The scale of the operation and the audacity with which it had been executed was appalling.
Those attacks took place just after riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The deadly twisted wreckage spread through the city, and the enormous death toll revealed the malevolent design to hit India where it would hurt most. All the symbols of the city were carefully chosen: the stock market, Zaveri Bazaar, the Air India building and so on.
Hospitals were full and overflowing, with Mumbaikars as well as migrants, all of whom still throng the city seeking their daily bread, or rozi roti. I still cannot forget the terrified eyes of the child labourer whose body was imbedded with shards of glass. Or the mother who wept for her dead child. Or the family that had lost their brother, father and husband. The government then, as now, spoke of intelligence failures. To cover up its mistakes, largesse was distributed to the families of the victims. A stunned city wrapped a bandage around its bleeding wounds, masked its grief and limped on. This was the first time we spoke about the “spirit of Mumbai”. A cliche used every time the city is attacked. And each time the Mumbaikar realises, too late, that buried under this false praise he has been cheated of a secure life yet again. Looking at these attacks, one wonders if anything has changed. It certainly doesn’t seem as if the authorities are any better prepared. And that is fuelling the Mumbaikars’ anger.
Eighteen years of paying for failures of policy, of intelligence, and of governance, has led to a loss of life which was preventable. There has been a shocking admission by the present chief minister, Prithviraj Chavan, that even the purchase of 5,000 CCTV cameras for Mumbai is still pending with the central government.

WORRYING FACTOR
Chavan also confessed that he could not get in touch with his own police chiefs for 15 minutes after the blasts because all the phone networks were clogged.
If this is how rapidly the government responds to an attack, is it any surprise that Mumbaikars are furious with ministers who surround themselves with high security and bodyguards, but have no money to spend on the common man?
The other worrying factor is that even after days since the incident, the government said it had no clue about the criminal mastermind behind it - although a top Mumbai police official did claim to have secured ‘solid leads’. This, some feel, could be a deliberate move since the Uttar Pradesh elections are around the corner, and it does not want to antagonise its Muslim vote through the old policy of arresting the usual suspects.
In the past there have been embarrassing revelations about other blasts which had been blamed on Muslim ‘perpetrators’ but are now said to have been committed by Hindu fundamentalists. However, the slow pace of investigations will also send out the wrong signal to the frustrated citizen.
The Mumbai mood is one of impatience, but it is unlikely that anything will really change. One strong indication of the status quo is that the day after this horrific attack, the former chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who is also a minister in the Union government, was actually standing for elections for president of the cash-rich Maharashtra Cricket Association. This got almost the same coverage in the media as the bomb blast story.