 | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | ABLAZE: Sarojini Nagar in flames | | Terror stands on no ceremony. When it strikes, it leaves its indelible scar on a city and its people. Before he commits murder, the terrorist first commits theft. He takes away a precious, unregarded asset-normality-and turns an ordinary moment into a timeless nightmare. October 29, 2005 now joins the modern world's datelines of death. When darkness fell over Delhi, the night couldn't have been brighter. Chattering crowds were milling around market lanes under coloured lights just beginning to glimmer in the dusk. In less than a minute, all that was left was fire, smoke, shattered glass and broken lives. Like that of 14-year-old Rahul Kochar stumbling around the Safdarjang Hospital, mumbling the names of his missing parents. Or the relatives of Richa Pandey, 28, who identified her by a call-centre identity card on her unrecognisable body. Or the three families locked in a bitter claim over the bodies of an eight-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy. The serial explosions that ripped through Delhi, leaving 63 dead and more than 100 injured, were the biggest terrorist strike in India, outside Kashmir, since the Bombay blasts of 1993. Unlike the attack on Parliament in 2001 or even in Red Fort in 2000, the Delhi bombings were not directed at the symbols of the state, but at the heart of a nation. Their targets were not institutions of power but people-average Indians everywhere. The bodies of the two little children in the Safdarjang morgue were being claimed by Dilbagh Singh, a Sikh air force sergeant, Anupam Gupta, an insurance agent, and Apurva Kumar Sarma, an Assam Government employee. Paharganj, Sarojini Nagar and Govindpuri, the sites of the explosions, are a world apart from the whitewashed bungalows and tree-lined avenues of Lutyens' New Delhi. These are localities where many Indias meet, push, shove, argue and transact business. At Paharganj, low-budget tourists try to experience the "real" India and, in turn, the real India rips them off with a wink and a smile. The DTC bus, a symbol of Delhi's overloaded, inadequate public transport system, could have been a site of more carnage but for two unlikely heroes, its driver and the conductor. Sarojini Nagar is bargain basement country, where memsahibs shop for cut-price FabIndia-style furnishing and clerks from their husbands' offices buy cheap clothes off the street. | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  |  | | WOUNDED: Sarma (circled) lost three of his kin; (right) a teen victim | | In Delhi markets during festival season, there is room only for two types of people, buyers and sellers, and little time to linger. It was no surprise then that on October 29, three days before Diwali, no one noticed unattended bags in Paharganj and Sarojini Nagar. The young, bearded man in a blue baseball cap, who boarded dtc's Outer Mudrika service and placed his satchel under the seat, was unremarkable too. At around 5.25 p.m. in Paharganj the first bag erupted, ripping apart shop fronts and killing 18. In Sarojini Nagar, another bag exploded, triggering off secondary explosions from the two LPG cylinders at a chaat stall and starting a blaze. Freelance photographer Anand Murgod, who waded against the tide of fleeing shoppers to reach the Sarojini Nagar inferno, says, "People were on fire, there were bodies lying everywhere." A man threw a tarpaulin over a woman weakly waving her charred hands, and tried to pull her to safety. | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | MAYHEM: Paharganj in a shambles | | As Paharganj's markets burnt, the DTC bus reached the Kalkaji temple. The youth wearing the baseball cap hopped off the bus, leaving his bag behind. An alarm was raised by a co-passenger, whose identity is still protected by the police. Driver Kuldeep Singh and conductor Budh Prakash took the bus to a less crowded area in Govindpuri where they evacuated nearly 70 passengers. When they carefully opened the bag, they found wires inside. Kuldeep did the first thing that struck him-fling the bag away. It exploded mid-air, wounding five bystanders. The act cost Kuldeep his sight and hearing. As the news of the blasts spread, other markets in Delhi began to empty out. Grief and shock spread like a bloodstain. There was indignation of teary-eyed relatives waiting in hope and fear outside the emergency rooms of three city hospitals. Provoked by the loss of life, outgoing chief justice M.C. Lahoti broke from convention, his farewell address ringing with strong words. "We do not have the political will to fight terrorism," he declared. | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | AFTERMATH: Bomb squads at work | | His admission was little consolation to families left to deal with the wreckage of their lives, like the teenaged Kochar who soon discovered that he had been orphaned in an instant. The 63 fatalities have brought with them 63 individual stories of almost unimaginable loss. Sarma, 42, an employee in the deputy commissioner's office in Nagaon, Assam, had gone to Sarojini Nagar to shop for woollens with a family of seven-his wife, their two girls, his sister and brother-in-law and their daughter. The Sarmas lost four-year-old Upamita, brother-in-law Kumud and their eight-year-old niece Maitreyee. Waiting to take his relatives' bodies to Assam for cremation, Sarma fought for four days to claim the body of an eight-year-old girl in Safdarjang Hospital as his niece. Due to the blaze in Sarojini Nagar caused by bombs and cylinder blasts, the bodies were charred, making identification virtually impossible. Pandey, an ICICI Bank call-centre worker, was supposed to return to her hometown Lucknow on Saturday to spend Diwali with her family. When she failed to turn up on Sunday afternoon, they called her cellular service provider and discovered that her last phone call had been made from Sarojini Nagar at 5.10 p.m. on October 29. A 24-hour search in hospitals ended when a phone from Safdarjang asked them to identify a body found with a call centre card on it. In Paharganj's Nehru Bazaar, after the bomb exploded, the Chhe Tooti Chowk was covered with glass shards. Tourist Caroline Bowles, 34, from Cardiff, UK, said, "We had only heard about the London blasts, this was a close shave." Local shopkeepers wheeled out victims on rickshaws and handcarts while the first ambulances arrived, Bowles said, in five minutes. The two major blast sites are close to hospitals-Paharganj virtually across the road from the Lady Hardinge Hospital and Sarojini Nagar a short drive from Safdarjang and the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). There may have been anguish at the lack of information in the hospitals but many commended the quick response of the emergency services. The Centralised Accident and Trauma Services (CATS), which operates 35 ambulances stationed around the city, got the first message at 5.40 p.m. It sent out 11 ambulances to Paharganj and nine to Sarojini Nagar. In all, 26 vehicles were used, according to CATS Project Director K.S. Wahi. Major public hospitals in Delhi now have disaster management plans. The drill involves clearing the approach to the casualty area, calling senior residents, holding normal admissions, identifying which wards could be vacated in case of high casualties and opening the blood bank to donors. | | LASHKAR-E-TOIBA | | | Fear Factory
The finger of suspicion points to the terror group which is taking its anti-India jehad out of Kashmir to soft targets in the heartland | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | LeT's Ashfaq Ahmed after his sentencing in the Red Fort case | | Soon after the pre-Diwali serial blasts in Delhi, security agencies made their first port of call in Jammu and Kashmir and tuned in to the militants' clandestine wireless network for clues to one of the worst terror attacks in the capital. While the military detected wireless exchanges between most militant outfits active in the Valley and their master control stations in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), the Lashkar-e-Toiba (let) went into silent mode. There were no messages from its usually hyperactive cell located somewhere near Kotli in PoK. The let's silence was an eloquent pointer to its involvement in the Delhi attack. It was consistent with its tactics of not owning up to terror strikes to escape the US scanner. Though an obscure militant outfit called the Islami Inquilabi Mahaz owned responsibility, investigators discerned the let's hand in the Delhi blasts since it was similar to the attacks on Ayodhya in July this year, on Parliament in 2001 and in the Red Fort in 2000. Indian intelligence officials believe that the modus operandi of the October 29 blasts was based on manuals recovered from let hideouts. Printed in Urdu with graphic description about assembling and planting explosives, these booklets throw light on the militant outfit's new pattern of terror-bomb blasts. "From the battle of bullets, militants have shifted to the battle of explosives," says a senior army officer at Srinagar-based 15 Corps Headquarters. The Valley saw nine such explosions in the past six months, the latest one in Srinagar on November 2 claimed six lives. Of all Pakistan-based militant outfits active in Kashmir, let remains the most potent terror group, with about 300 combatants in its ranks. However, it draws its strength from stealth rather than numbers. Fired by a fundamentalist zeal to extend its anti-India jehad beyond Kashmir, it has sleeper cells across the country and the recruits are mostly local people. Also, they have switched over from mobile phones, which are easy to track, to satellite phones. The Delhi attack is also a pointer to the outfit's strategy not to let the India-Pakistan peace process go beyond a point until India makes major concessions on Kashmir. "The terror attacks are in line with Pakistan's tactics to keep the water hot but not let it boil over," says former Indian Army chief General V.P. Malik. Though the blasts have brought a certain degree of chill to the Indo-Pak engagement, the two countries cannot afford to let the peace process go up in smoke. -By Ramesh Vinayak | |
Index
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BUS BOMBER 
SALIM SALAR 
