How much more can Mumbai take?

At various affected spots, the residents set up living arrangements for stranded commuters inside schools, colleges and marriage halls. At Santacruz, relief and rescue work was affected as the approach to the railway station is congested. However, police teams barricaded the entry and exit points to allow rescue vehicles to move in and out. Mumbai’s local trains are the very lifeline of the city. Some 5.5 million passengers travel in them every day, in a north-south direction. That day, the life-line was choking. Why?

The inability of the intelligence agencies to sniff out an operation of this scale is as scary as the Mumbai Police’s inability to have read the signals on the streets. Even though the authorities have started blaming militant outfits like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) for the blasts, the foundation for this tragic incident was visible closer home.

Sparks to trigger communal tension had been around for the last couple of weeks. Riots broke out in Bhiwandi over the construction of a police outpost adjoining a mosque. And just when the tension was dying down, the desecration of the statue of the late Meenatai, wife of Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, led to Shiv Sainiks going on a rampage. Legislators of the Shiv Sena and the bjp staged protests, charging that Samajwadi Party leader Abu Asim Azmi was involved in the Bhiwandi riots. Thackeray joined issue by saying the “fanatic” forces in Bhiwandi had a hand in the statue desecration.

The political invective had not even settled when the blasts rocked the megapolis.

Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh sees a pattern emerging. Speaking to the media, he said that the agencies will probe any link between the blasts and the Bhiwandi and Dadar riots. But what the chief minister did not dwell upon was the State’s failure to protect its ordinary citizens - the Mumbaikar who has time and again borne the brunt of communal hatred and its after-effects.

It can’t be denied that there has been a pattern in the blasts earlier. The 1993 serial blasts followed the Mumbai riots, which came in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Though no party or government agency is ready to buy the argument that there were prior indications, intelligence agencies had enough inputs to warn the authorities. But the agencies chose to treat them as isolated incidents.

Other recent incidents like the abortive attack on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters in Nagpur and the arrest of three suspected LeT members in Aurangabad pointed to bigger assaults.

On March 10 this year, the Railway police in Mumbai defused a bomb at the Byculla station. The bomb blasts in the city have been planned to target the most crowded railway stations with the intention of causing maximum casualties and panic among the people. But no security agency thought the terrorists would place explosives on the crowded local emus of the Western Railway.

While local trains are Mumbai’s lifeline, best buses form the other equally important mode of transport for Mumbaikars. These too were not spared. On July 28, 2003, four persons were killed and 32 injured when a powerful explosion ripped apart a bus in Ghatkopar in northern Mumbai. Why had the security apparatus failed to analyse these reports?

The chronology points to a deliberate attempt to tear apart the country’s communal harmony. And it could have been a true indicator of what could be coming our way. But the intelligence agencies have hardly been in a state of full alert to avert any major disaster.

Several LeT and SIMI modules were busted and a huge amount of explosive material, including RDX, was recovered during raids in Aurangabad, Nashik and Nagpur in the last two months. The probe also revealed that similar LeT modules were actively operating in several towns of Maharashtra, besides Hyderabad and Bangalore.

But all these inputs didn’t translate into action that could have saved the casualties of July 11. Blaming intelligence failure for the blasts, Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil, who also holds the Home portfolio, said, “These blasts had no link with the Bhiwandi riots. But an international terror network could be at work. However not only the state intelligence failed, but also the Intelligence Bureau, which comes under the Centre,” he said.

Patil, who had a long meeting with Mumbai Commissioner of Police Roy, said, “It’s not only the state that has an intelligence wing. The Centre too has it. We have still not come to any definite conclusion on who triggered the blasts, but we believe that an international terrorist organisation could have done it.” According to a senior police official speaking on terms of anonymity, attacking Delhi and Mumbai is like paralysing the mind and heart of a vibrant nation.

The magnitude of the synchronised blasts has conclusively pointed to the use of RDX by the attackers, official sources said. Mangled coach after mangled coach bore the imprint of the damage that powered explosives like RDX can cause but Mumbai’s heart and mind kept ticking.