The bombs went off today just as most of Mumbai was ending work. At 6:45pm, Janardhan Bedkar, 35, an office helper at a diamond showroom in Opera House district, went on an errand for his boss, picking up a packet from a nearby paan shop. As he stood at a roadside paan shop, the area around him was buzzing with activity, as is usual for the business district at that time of evening, when offices are beginning to close for the day and people are heading home. Nearby, at a cart selling grilled sandwiches, he was watching a pregnant woman sharing a bite with a friend. Suddenly, he heard a deafening noise and saw carts around him flying. “Next thing I knew, I was lying prone some meters away from where I had been. The paan shop and everything else was wrecked, their remains lying scattered all over. As I took to my feet and ran desperately to get away, I saw the pregnant woman crushed under dozens of feet as people tried to run away. I don’t think she would’ve survived. There was a stampede as people ran helter-skelter, not sure where to go.”
Mumbai has been hit by three serial blasts, during rush hour in heavily populated areas. The Home Ministry has confirmed only the obvious — that this was a terrorist attack — a coordinated serial bomb blast but there was no word yet on who might be responsible and whether the blasts bears the imprint of local or foreign sources. Terror attack is a loosely defined term in India, encompassing everything from the Mumbai underworld to an as-yet-undefined grouping called “Indian Mujahideen” to the much more organised. In separate statements, both US President Barack Obama and Indian Congress Party chairman Sonia Gandhi condemned the attacks; Obama indicated that the US would cooperate with India’s search for the perpetrators.
On its face, the incident looks much more like the serial blasts that hit Mumbai in 2006 and in 1993 than the infamous three-day-long terror attacks of 2008. As in those earlier incidents, the bombs were planted and detonated surreptitiously — one television channel showed images of a forensic investigator picking through the remains of a tiffin box, the ubiquitous stainless steel lunch container that might have been used as a container for an IED.
In 2006, the explosives were packed into pressure-cookers. This time, Chidambaram said one of the bombs was planted inside a car, the other on a motorcycle. Other unconfirmed reports said one of the bombs was planted on top of an electric meter. The Mumbai siege of 2008, on the other hand, was conducted by a team of heavily armed commandos on a suicide mission, a very different kind of attack requiring a much greater level of training, planning and logistical sophistication.
In the current incident, the Opera House bomb was believed to be the worst of the three. But the other two were destructive as well. The bomb in Dadar was set off in an area known as Kabutar Khana, named for its central landmark, a pigeon house established by Mumbai’s Jain community, who are known for their strict vegetarianism. The bomb exploded inside a Maruti Esteem sedan, which was parked near a bus stop, one of the new all metal structures that have come up in India’s cities as they improve their infrastructure. The bus stop was bent into pieces with the force of the blast, and the impact caused at least three injuries. Metal, glass and some lemons from a vendor’s cart were scattered all over, in an area that is so crowded in the evenings that it’s hard to move through the sea of life.
An eyewitness to the blast in Dadar, a retired man named Jayantilal Shah, 68, says he was in his one-room flat in one of Mumbai’s chawls, or traditional tenement houses, waiting for a phone call when he heard the explosion. The doors opened, the ceiling cracked and all the ground floor windows in his building were broken with the force of it. He went out to look and saw injured people crying, and the remains of the grey Maruti.
Dadar and Zaveri Bazaar, a bustling jewellery market that was the site of the third explosion, were also targeted during the 1993 Mumbai blasts. What ties all these spots together is that they are packed with people, ordinary Mumbaikars. Zaveri Bazaar and Kabutar Khana in particular are also associated with the powerful local Gujarati and Marwari business communities. That is very different from the 2008 attack, which singled out places popular with foreign tourists and the wealthy elite. Similar targets, though, don’t necessarily imply a similar source. The 1993 blasts were all allegedly linked to Dawood Ibrahim. However, Ibrahim has never targeted Mumbai’s merchants, and he has been outside of Mumbai for years. The Indian Mujahideen, a group that has never been clearly defined, have typically sent email messages claiming responsibility for attacks. That was their modus operandi in 2007 and 2008, after serial bomb blasts in several cities, including Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Jaipur. There was no email known to have been sent on Wednesday.
There have been other attacks since the vicious Nov 26, 2008 attack on Mumbai. Last year witnessed three such incidents: in Pune, Delhi and Varanasi. Responsibility for those attacks has not been clearly established, but their targets are similar to those in Mumbai 2008: the German Bakery in Pune, a popular hangout for foreigners visiting a nearby ashram; a tourist bus visiting the historic Jama Masjid in Old Delhi; and in India’s holiest city, a bathing ghat popular with foreign tourists. Indian authorities also filed charges against 24 people recently, charging them with trying to recruit people from the large Muslim communities of south India, particularly Kerala and Hyderabad.
It isn’t just coincidence, then, that a team from the National Investigation Agency was already in Mumbai investigating another case when news of the serial blasts broke. The NIA was created in response to India’s widely criticised intelligence failures in the Nov 26 attack. Chidambaram said NIA officials have started their investigation of attacks. The National Security Guard, meanwhile, were the commandos who arrived belatedly but did eventually put down the Mumbai rampage. That group established a hub in Mumbai so they could respond more rapidly to an attack (a big criticism of their performance in 2008), and that’s exactly what they did when the latest blasts hit, moving in immediately. This may not be a repeat of Mumbai 2008, but it’s clear that some of those lessons have been learned. –TIME
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