Mumbai Train Bombings 2016: How Mumbai's Lifeline Came To A Standstill In 11 Minutes | Book Excerpt

Excerpts from ‘Bombay After Ayodhya: A City In Flux’, by Jitendra Dixit

July 11, 2006, was a Tuesday and I had taken a compensatory day off from work because on the previous Sunday, I was on duty. Some miscreants had desecrated the statue of Meenatai, Bal Thackeray’s wife, at Shivaji Park. This enraged the Shiv Sainiks, and they went on a rampage. A private bus was set on fire and the police had to fire tear gas shells to disperse frenzied Shiv Sainiks. On Monday, I was busy doing a follow-up story of the violence. It was only on Tuesday that my editor allowed a day off. I planned for a relaxed evening at South Mumbai’s New Excelsior Cinema where the Hrithik Roshan starred movie Krrish was being screened.

Just as the movie began, my mobile phone rang.

'JEETU BHAI!!! A BOMB HAS EXPLODED IN A TRAIN OUTSIDE MY BUILDING! THERE IS CHAOS ALL AROUND. MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN KILLED. SEND A CAMERA UNIT FAST.'

Odysteven Gomes, the Operations Manager at my news channel, screamed on the phone.

Gomes stayed at Khar in a building next to the railway tracks. Being an employee of a news organisation, his immediate response to the event was to alert me. Back then, all mobile phones didn’t have cameras and a camera team had to be instantly sent to the location for the incident’s coverage. I hastily left the cinema hall and rang the cops to get more details. Six more bomb blasts had taken in first-class compartments of different local trains. After informing my office and directing camera teams to reach the spots, I rushed to the Matunga Road, one of the nearest blast locations.

It started raining midway, and I reached the station entirely drenched. My cameraman was already there. The metal body of the train was completely mangled and its pieces minced with bone, blood, and flesh. Local people gathered to speed up the relief work, but the intensified rains hindered the rescue operation.

Since all the affected trains ran on the Western Railway line, I could apprehend that the conspiracy was another attempt by the terrorist organisations to avenge the Gujarat riots. The Western Railway connects suburbs like Khar, Santacruz, Vile Parle, Goregaon, Malad, Kandivali, Borivali, Meera Road and Bhayendar, which are densely populated by Gujaratis. The bombs exploded after 6 pm when the Bombay Stock Exchange shuts down and the stockbrokers, mostly Gujaratis, head to their suburban homes. A look at blasts’ chronology showed that everything happened within eleven minutes. The first blast took place at 6:24 pm on the train heading towards Borivali near Khar station. It was the blast that Odysteven Gomes had witnessed and alerted me about. This was followed by six other blasts in trains near or within the premises of Matunga Road, Mahim, Bandra, Jogeshwari and Khar stations. The last bomb went off was at 6:35 pm on a Virar bound local train near Borivali. It took over a week to ascertain the total number of casualties, which turned out to be 209. Over 700 passengers were injured. Among the killed was my favourite Hindi poet, Shyam Jwalamukhi. He was famous for his humorous and satirical poems. Jwalamukhi was not a regular local train traveller, but boarded one that evening to return from Thane after some work.

With the bombings at multiple locations, the Western Railway became totally dysfunctional. The impact of the train shutdown affected the road traffic. All arterial roads from South Mumbai to the North-Western suburbs were choked. People pushed themselves into overcrowded BEST buses and taxis to reach home. Many clung to trucks and pickup vans. Several people stayed back at their offices or other known residences in South Mumbai that night.

The investigations that followed ignited a controversy with different investigating agencies coming up with different suspects of the bombings. A week after the bombings, a Hindi TV channel received an email from an obscure never-heard-before organisation named Lashkar-e-Qahhar. The organisation owned up to the blasts and threatened more in the future.

The Mumbai train blasts were a close replication of the blasts that occurred in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. On March 11, 2004, four bombs exploded on different local trains in Madrid within ten minutes, killing 191 people and injuring 1800. The mass transit system of the capital city of Spain was attacked in the early morning rush hours when people left home to commute to their place of work. Next year on July 7, 2005, three bombs exploded in London’s underground trains and a fourth one exploded in a double-decker bus. Like Madrid, the mass transport system in London was also bombed during the morning rush. The blasts claimed 52 lives.

The Maharashtra ATS claimed to have unearthed the conspiracy a few weeks later and charged 12 people. Reportedly, the conspiracy of the train blasts was engineered at the behest of the Pakistani agency ISI and was executed by Lashkar-e-Taiba with the help of SIMI. The bombs were put in pressure cookers at slums in Govandi and then planted in the trains. However, there was a twist in the story when, in 2008, the Mumbai Crime Branch arrested Sadiq Shaikh, an alleged member of the terror outfit, Indian Mujahideen. As per the Crime Branch, Indian Mujahideen executed the conspiracy and Sadiq, along with others, planted the bombs. Contradicting the ATS, the Crime Branch claimed the bombs were assembled in a flat at Sewri. It led to a scepticism over which set of the accused were the actual perpetrators. Did the ATS arrest the wrong people under the political pressure to show results? The ATS stood by its story. In 2015, five alleged planters of the bombs arrested by the ATS were awarded the death penalty, seven were imprisoned for life and one accused named Abdul Wahid was acquitted.