Echoes From Delhi Terror Bombings

Aftershocks continue to last week's terror bombings in India's capital city Delhi. The five bombs took the lives of almost 30 individuals, some of whose stories we blogged about here. The grisly handiwork of the savages belonging to the Indian Mujahedeen have left almost a hundred others injured, as the islamists' devil's brew of ammonium nitrate, gun powder, ball bearings and nails has shattered lives irrespective of economic, religious or ethnic backgrounds.

This week the Indian press has been introducing its readers to some of the tragic stories of the targeted citizens of Delhi. "For some survivors of Saturday's blasts, perhaps the last sound they clearly heard was that of the bomb going off":

Take 27-year-old Avdesh Sahaney, a parking attendant on Barakhamba Road, who has lost most of the hearing in his left ear. Sahaney's eardrum was perforated as a result of the blasts.

"I had gone to drink water at one of the pavement stalls when the blast occurred. I remember a loud sound, after which I lost consciousness. I came back to my senses in the hospital," he says.

Doctors treating Sahaney are keeping him under observation, hoping his ear heals on its own. "If not, we will have to operate," said Dr Sidhu, head of ENT and additional MS at RML hospital. "This is a common condition in most blast cases. The velocity with which the air hits the eardrum can cause serious - sometimes irreversible - damage," he adds.

Another victim, 26-year-old Renu also suffered blast-induced hearing loss but the doctors are optimistic about her recovery. Hearing loss is one of the most common ailments to afflict blast victims. As the condition of patients at RML stabilizes, the ENT department screens them in the audio room for possible hearing disorders, informs Dr Sidhu.

The Indian government has pledged compensation up to 500,000 rupees [$21,000 Cdn dollars..?] for the terror attack's many victims, but the likelyhood of people actually getting the money is another story:

Most people would treat it as another mundane affair. Yet, it's a simple bank account which has emerged as a major stumbling block for the hapless residents of Gali number 42 in Beadonpura.

They have already lost 11 people in Saturday's bomb blasts and as the realisation seeps in that life must go on, their efforts to get the Rs 5 lakh compensation money, which was announced within hours of the blasts, are hit by the lack of a bank account. ...
There is more to the problem. Even to open a new bank account these people — most of them daily wage earners — would need to furnish a number of documents like residence proof etc, which again nearly all of them do not possess.
...
The handful of families who have some valid documents have been handed account payee checks. Says Ram Singh, a relative of Ganga Prasad who died, "I have no clue what to do with this piece of paper now. We do not have a bank account. Can you help us encash this?"

Unfortunately, Delhi residents are still waiting for the compensation they were promised by Indian politicians from the last terror bombing that struck Delhi back on August 29, 2005; the two explosions that day murdered 62 people and injured a further 210 others. Some of the victims of the 2005 islamist bombs were witnesses to the second attack last weekend:

Reliving the horror of 2005 Diwali blasts and the subsequent tale of government insensitivity to his pains, Vinod Poddar, who lost his right leg, said: "A compensation of Rs 1 lakh doesn't come anywhere near what I need. Those who survive need more assistance as we have to live with the disability forever." He had tears in his eyes when he saw pictures of victims being taken to hospitals on Saturday. Poddar's daughter Diksha, who is in Class IX, was also seriously injured and has to undergo more surgery. ...

Many 29/10 victims say they are yet to fully come to terms with the tragedy. "I still feel scared even sitting at home. I couldn't sleep for days after returning from Safdarjung hospital. Blast victims need counselling," says George Mathew, a businessman.

The preening politicians are being criticized for using the slaughter as a backdrop for photo ops:

...[A]ngry residents blocked traffic on the road. Said an angry Banwari Devi: "It's been for three days that we have been waiting for some relief from the government. Yet, the administration has no qualms to make profits from the same parking lot that on Saturday altered our lives."

Added Kanhaiya, another protester: "We have complained innumerable times about the lack of security in the market and unaccounted vehicles being parked here. Yet, even today, no extra security has been put in place."

Meanwhile, the victims refused to entertain the stream of political leaders who visited the street. "They are here only to play divisive politics. They are not really concerned about our well-being. If they really cared, they would have brought food and other relief," said Prakash, Simran's maternal uncle.
...

At the local level, Delhi law enforcement has had to wrestle with deciding on the lesser of evils in a city that produces over 5,000 tons of garbage a day:

Delhi police have solved the problem of how to prevent terror attacks. They have turned all the public garbage bins upside down and tied them together in pairs so that they are completely unusable, even by terrorists.

Which means Delhi’s streets are now a stinking mess, with polythene bags, stale food, wrappers and plastic bottles scattered all across them.

... All the bins had been overturned today at Central Park in Connaught Place and Barakhamba Road, their rotting contents emptied just under them. Fresh waste lay strewn all around, with tourists busy clicking the bins and garbage on their cellphone cameras.

“I went to the Janpath market yesterday. The twin garbage bins in the middle of the market have been turned upside down and the litter is scattered everywhere. The stench is terrible,” student Sanjay Singh said. ...

Frustration with governmental inefficiency in combating the islamist terror threat is mounting. The state of affairs is positively scandalous:

Security measures have failed to deliver. It’s shocking that most closed-circuit cameras installed in sensitive areas do not work. Intelligence gathering is in a mess. Clearly, a focused and coordinated approach to matters of security is missing.

And it sounds like things will have to get much worse before they begin to get better..:

Political scientist Imtiaz Ahmed also feels that while the Indian state is pretty strong, its willingness to take effective measures against terrorism has been weak. "The state's overall attitude towards incidents such as the Saturday Delhi bomb blasts is that it does not seriously affect the country's integrity or security. True, it jeopardizes public security. But then the outlook is: we can live with it. In fact, rather than act against it, the state is simply hoping that terrorism will subside. Management of terrorism is not a very high priority in the state's scheme of things."

Meanwhile life goes on, and from the echoes of suffering an occasional cry of joy rings out with rare good news:

On Friday, she knew her husband had work in Karol Bagh and would not be back till Saturday evening. The blasts followed, and then no word from Mukesh Kumar.

A frantic Rani went from hospital to hospital, searching for her husband and fearing the worst.

What she did not know was that 36-year-old Mukesh, after completing his work, decided to stay back at a friend's place so that he could shop for his daughter's birthday. But then changed plans and went to a relative's house in Nangloi.

Rani's misery ended on Monday night, when Mukesh called to say he was alive and well.

"I had gone to Karol Bagh and from there I left for Nangloi on Saturday morning and stayed over at a relative's house as I wasn't well. My phone fell on the road and stopped working..."

Rani, however, was unapologetic. "He saw his picture in the news channels and papers and got angry with me. But I am just happy that he came back," she said.

Putting Faces On Numbers In Delhi Bombings

The numbers vary from source to source; as the calendar moves along the numbers will change ever more. But some things will not change: the five bombs (out of the nine planted) that tore through busy Delhi markets and parks during weekend religious festivals made no differentiation between men and women, young and old, rich and poor. For many families, loved ones went out to fulfill some mundane chore, or a lark at the park, and then never came home.

It's easy to just think in terms of numbers; how many attacks, how many casualties from the attacks. But these numbers represent lives. These people have names, faces, and stories.

Here are some of the stories of those in the wrong place at the wrong time, suffering at the hands of people who are now said to be putting Mumbai in the crosshairs of their next homicidal attack.
It’s likely that 25-year old Kamlesh will never forget this day of death. The terror bombings claimed no less than 10 members of her family: her husband Ashok, 30, his brothers Harichand, 35, Archant 50, Ganga Kishen, 40, their wives Saroj, 30, Rama, 40, and children Kusum, 2 and Raju, 4.

Sometimes it's the lack of any news at all that causes the most despair. This seems to be the case for the wife and brother of 25-year old Raju:

[He] was standing outside his house in Karol Bagh when the bomb went off. Since then, no one has seen him.
His grief-stricken wife Yashoda has now been hospitalised, Raju's brother Shyam told IANS.
"The police say they have no information about my brother and that we ourselves should visit every hospital to check out."

One young man was blown to bits for having decided to do a favor for his beloved mother:

Subroto Mondal's wish to buy a new mobile phone for his mother proved fatal for the young man, as he perished in the blast at New Delhi's Gaffar Market minutes after he bought it Saturday.
...
"When he came here the last time, his mother told him she had lost her mobile. Then he promised her that he will get her a new set. Yesterday (Saturday) he bought the new instrument to fulfil his promise. But god is indeed cruel," said his brother-in-law Haren Hazra.

Gloom descended at Subroto's residence and the village Sunday as the news of his death came like a bolt from the blue.

"It never crossed our minds that he could be among the victims. Because he did not live in that area. So, when one of his cousins called up from Delhi Sunday morning to give the news we found it difficult to believe,' Hazra said, as Subroto's parents looked inconsolable.

"He was a very good boy, We all loved him," said a neighbour, wiping her tears.

I can't imagine the guilt that the mother must now feel... nor can I easily put myself in the place of young Shishir Jain:

It was a birthday party that 21-year-old Shishir Jain will never forget. While he was busy clicking photographs of friends during his classmate's birthday celebrations at the Central Park here Saturday evening, a bomb explosion left him critically injured.

"We were having fun at the Central Park and Shishir asked for a final group photo before we leave for the hostel. As he moved back to focus the camera, a blast took place leaving him injured," Shishir's friend Prashant told IANS.

Shishir, a mechanical engineering student at the Jamia Millia Islamia, suffered injuries as a splinter from an exploding bomb pierced his spinal cord. Some of his friends too received minor injuries.

How haunted will his life be for him, if he ever gets out of the hospital?

Finally, the tragic news awaiting an expectant mother, who now has lost the father of her second child:

Till Saturday, Balbir Singh had the ideal family: two sons, a daughter-in-law expecting her second child in a week's time, a four-year-old grandchild and a younger son who had got married just six months ago. On Sunday though, Singh looked like a shell as he waited to claim the body of his elder son Tejinder at the LNJP mortuary.

Standing alone in a corner, Singh seemed to be divorced from the rest of relatives waiting to claim Tejinder's body as the police asked for details. Said Sunny, Singh's nephew, "My bhabhi is expected to deliver next week. We haven't told her about Tejinder yet. How can we, when even uncle is still to get over the shock?"...

For 36-year-old Tejinder, one of the first victims of the Ghaffar Market blast, the day had started routinely. "My cousin works in an electronics shop and was on the way to another shop with his friend when the bombs exploded. He and his friend, Manmeet, were both taken to Jeevan Mala hospital, where he was declared dead in only a few hours. His condition was so bad that doctors told us that survival was not possible. His face and torso were badly injured, and both his arms were broken," added Sunny. Tejinder's friend Manmeet fared better, and is being treated for severe head injuries in the same hospital, he added.

The immediate concern for the family though is breaking the news to Tejinder's wife. "We don't want to jeopardise her health by breaking the news right now," said Pankaj, a neighbour.

Even after all this bad news, dare I end on a positive note. As many of these terrible stories as there are, the number of them would have been higher still, were it not for the alert initiative and public spirit of two quick-thinking heroes:

Located at the bottom of the urban social pyramid, ragpickers are the smelly boys in tattered clothes whom everyone quickly passes by. Even street dogs, sub-consciously aware of their lowly status and often confusing them for thieves, chase them in shabby bylanes.

On Monday, one such ragpicker and a roadside vendor will be treated as heroes. Reason: their timely action saved dozens of lives in the Saturday bomb blast. Ragpicker Krishna and cloth seller Kundan detected live bombs and alerted the police.

Police point out that if the live bombs had not been detected in time, the death toll from the blasts would have been close to 100. ...

[For our other posts on the Delhi bombings, see
Another Terror Attack In India, and
Delhi Terrorists' Email From Hell.]

Delhi Terrorists' Email From Hell: "An Eye For An Eye..."

“An eye for an eye...”, boasted the subject heading in the fateful 13-page email received by India news media agencies, an email strongly suspected of being sent by the bomb-maker himself, claiming credit and justification for the latest terror bombings of markets and parks throughout the Indian capital city of Delhi. The body count from that act of "vengeance" stands today at 30 dead and a hundred wounded.

Portions of the email are appearing piecemeal in the Indian press. The message, expressed over and over again, is revenge:

"Eye for An Eye, The Dust Will Never Settle Down"… "To dreadfully terrorise you this time, by the Will and Help of Almighty Allah, we are about to devastate your very first metropolitan centre, your most strategic ‘hindutva hub, your green zone -- yes! It's your own capital".
…
“With this message, we once again declare that our intense, accurate and successive attacks like the one you will see exactly 5 minutes from now, Inshallah, will continue to punish you even before your earlier wounds have healed.”
...
"This accurately planned deadly strike is just another reaction to all those pre-and post-26 July harassments imposed by your ATS and police on the innocent Muslims."
...
"Your oppression will always be revenged Inshallah though after years to come. Never assume that we have forgotten the demolition of Babri Masjid and by Allah we can never forget it! It is that grave mistake of yours which will make you taste humiliation for generations to come."

The suspected author is Abdul Subhan Usman Qureshi, a 32-year old computer whiz-kid from Mumbai diffidently referred to as the "teckie jihadi" by the Indian press, a knick-name partially earned through the complex steps he takes to hide his tracks whenever he posts messages such as this latest hateful screed.

Abdul Subhan is said to be the bomb-making expert as well as the criminal mastermind behind several of the terror bombings that have ripped India in recent times. So far scattered "footsoldiers" from his group, the Indian Mujahideen, have been caught but the leader remains at large.

The lengthy email itself is sparingly quoted; most of the media is instead providing a summary of its contents:

The latest email from Abdul Subhan, who uses his alias "al-Arbi", which has the theme of revenge running through it, reads similar to the previous ones in many ways -- references to scriptures to justify the attack on non-believers, warnings of more attacks against those behind "injustice and oppression" inflicted upon Muslims all over the country, boasts of capacity and reach to strike anywhere and warnings to cops, media and judiciary.
…
…[T]here is no let-up in the effort to intimidate the cops, the media and the judiciary by warning them of retaliation. If anything, the warnings have become more ominous. There is no regret either for the previous atrocities, with the IM even threatening to repeat the barbarity it committed by attacking hospitals in Ahmedabad.
Yet, it is different in some crucial ways. To begin with, in comparison to the emails that preceded the blasts in courts in towns of UP, Jaipur and Ahmedabad, the latest one is thin on references to scriptures -- a factor which could be attributed to the imprisonment of Mufti Bashar, the Azamgarh cleric who provided the religious input for the drafts sent by Subhan till he was arrested for Ahemdabad blasts.

Reading the rage-filled words of this message from hell makes me feel like I’ve fallen down a hole so deep there’s no longer any light getting through. It’s the same spiritual void we can all fall into if we lose sight of the moral difference between justice and vengeance… And with the frequency of their barbaric attacks against us, it’s a pit that we are increasingly likely to topple into.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth… we’ve all heard the expression over the years. But rarely do we ever see it in its proper context; it isn’t supposed to be a prodding to bear a grudge over past crimes, it was supposed to teach us to restrain our natural urge to indulge in cruelty, by restricting our options regarding how we are to act towards those who do us harm. Through temperance of our natural capacity for evil we were supposed to arrive at a balanced and disciplined form of deferred retaliation, called justice, a different concept than vengeance. Deferring cruelty is no easy matter, even with trivial offenses made against us; it’s all the more challenging a task when we see our friends and neighbors maimed and blown to bits by unrepentant psychopaths, as just happened in Delhi.

Anyone who’s ever carried a grudge knows the awful truth: revenge doesn’t fill the hole, it doesn’t reassemble what’s been broken, it doesn’t return what’s been taken… it just makes bad situations worse. Revenge is an idea based on a lie, a presumption that there can be such a thing as "pure" victory. The folly that is human experience includes the paradox that in victory there is somehow defeat; we don’t need classic Greek history to teach us of Pyrrhic Victories, each of us can probably look within their own lives to find examples of how winning turned out to include losing. What’s harder to observe is the equal truth that defeat can contain triumph.

In gaining there can be loss, while in giving away there can be gains… isn’t this the whole idea behind sacrificial love?

When we are told to “Love Our Neighbor”, this guiding principle is not meant to replace the Ten Commandments, granting license for murder, pillage and violence to be committed against us. It is meant to moderate how we respond to the eternal flaws of human character that plague us century after century. Do we really win by becoming indistinguishable from those whose barbaric behavior wounds us so deeply, spiritually as well as physically? As an absolute, we could kill them all and be done with it, but what shadow would shroud such a victorious achievement, what price would be paid by such a dark triumph? To save our skins we must not sacrifice our souls… for giving in to the animal half of our inner nature, the part of us attuned to the material world around us, this surrender is surely more “humiliating” than to turn our backs on our other, spiritual, half, the part of our nature demanding we raise ourselves up to the light whenever we inevitably fall into our individual pits of anger and despair.

The fall itself is not humiliating; it is really what we choose to do once in the pit, that shames us... and can ultimately place such weights upon us that we remain condemned to lurk there, in the darkest of nights.

It’s a fitting irony that the perpetrator of these vengeful attacks worships a moon as the sign summarizing his understanding of his belief system. The light of the moon is reflected light, needing something much grander than itself in order to shine. Honesty and self-awareness of its smallness would reconcile it to accept a secondary but still supportive role; yet if it succumbs to vanity it will strive to eclipse the light of its larger neighbor… and through such petty actions, its small size is made all the more apparent.

I pray that he, and others in similar holes, may one day see The Light.

Another Terror Attack In India

More awful news... at least 20 people have been killed, and almost a hundred more injured, in a series of five bombings in Delhi, India. Given the grim anniversary that hangs over us this week, one can't resist making comparisons between our situation in North America and that of India.

The US has not suffered a terrorist attack since 9/11. India, however, has lost 1,193 people since that date to islamist terror attacks. (Not counting the terrorism inflicted by other religious groups...)

This latest horror seems to have been committed by a group calling themselves the Indian Mujahideen, which is said to be a front for the "Students Islamic Movement of India" (SIMI).

SIMI took responsibility for the nine explosions in Jaipur last May, as well as the sixteen bombs set off in Ahmedabad later in July. The islamic group was also implicated in a similar attack that saw nine bombs rip through Bangalore the same week as the Ahmedabad slaughter.

I have many friends working in India, and since the carnage of the bombings in Mumbai back in 2006 I've despatched so many emails at the news of each latest attack when I've seen them in the headlines, it's getting to the point that they now proactively email me every month or so, essentially to reassure me that they weren't killed in the latest massacre.

We "talk" about the public mood over there, and what is being done about the ongoing bloodshed. The answer remains the same: not much. They always point with a resigned helplessness to the general inefficiency of a government riddled with corruption and other problems. "We just learn to get used to it", as one friend put it in her last letter to me... an attitude echoed in the Indian media's own reporting of this latest islamic attack: "It has become nauseatingly familiar...."

The Wall Street Journal account of this week's bombings in Delhi goes into specific detail about the additional challenges that exist in stopping these bloody attacks:

Indian police, however, have had severe difficulties in bringing successful cases against alleged SIMI members in part because confessions to police in India aren't admissible in court as they are in many other countries. Indian intelligence gathering rarely is of a quality that passes evidentiary scrutiny in court. And witnesses for the prosecution frequently renege on their testimony because of the time -- often more than a decade -- it takes for cases to be heard.

Because of that reality, this is what happened this week in Delhi:

The first blast took place at Ghaffar Market at 6.10 pm. Soon after that, two explosions rocked Connaught Place, one at Barakambha Road near Gopaldas Building at 6.30 pm and the other near the Metro station at the Central Park at 6.31 pm. Almost simultaneously, a blast hit M-block market in Greater Kailash-I near McDonald's and seven minutes later another bomb went off near Prince Pan Corner in the same market.

In the shadow of such a long trail of monstrous evil, the search for any light of hope seems futile. Maybe we should settle for the consolation that not all the bombs planted in this vile scheme went off as planned. Three of them were located, somehow, and defused... including one secreted at the Children's Park at India Gate, here:

Try as I might, I just cannot imagine the mind of a man that would delight in setting off bombs in a place like that. And maybe a similar failure of imagination can supply the initiative India seems to struggle for, that we all struggle for: the will to renew their collective efforts to do what is necessary to truly live in peace, not the false peace of the willfully blind, but the tragic peace of the adult who summons the patient discipline to honestly perceive what is really going on before their very eyes.

We must not let ourselves become apathetic to slaughter, lest we become no different than those who have declared war on us.

Godspeed to the families of India, may they find the resolve to see themselves through their latest nightmare, and live to see better days.