Can Mumbai take any more?

Source: The Hindu



THE SERIAL bomb blasts on Mumbai's trains on July 11 have almost made us forget another anniversary that will take place on July 26. Last year, on this day, Mumbai came to a standstill. It almost drowned. And for the next 48 hours practically nothing moved. No trains, no planes, no buses, no cars, no people. For a city that tentatively picked itself up the very next day after the devastation caused by the bombs that went off in seven rush-hour commuter trains on July 11 this year, that was quite a feat. How easy it is to forget that more people died on July 26, 2005, than on July 11. Those 182 who perished in the trains were victims of a plot that is beyond anyone's control. Till today, the Mumbai police remain clueless. Some arrests have been made. Some theories have been set out. But none of these add up to a credible explanation for what happened on that day. Not yet.

Yet, even before we know who did this, some television channels are suggesting how we should deal with the perpetrators of the crime. Within days of the blasts, a few television channels had begun conducting one of their inane instant polls asking people to vote whether India should do an Israel on terrorism. In other words, should India bomb the alleged terrorist training camps in Pakistan? And the response, not surprisingly, has been an overwhelming "yes" for this absurd proposition. Absurd because no one can win a war fought between two countries with nuclear weapons.

Needless to say, none of these channels has bothered to give its viewers a little bit of history about Lebanon, the genesis of the conflict there, what happened in 1982 when Israel resorted to almost identical action, the fact that Lebanon had finally begun to look forward to a period of peace and prosperity after decades of being an arena of proxy war. In fact, most Indians would not have known that there were so many of their fellow countrymen and women working there.

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