SIX MINUTES OF TERROR
The Untold Story of the 7/11 Mumbai Train Blasts
Nazia Sayed and Sharmeen Hakim
Blue Salt, Penguin; 227 pages; Rs 299
On 11 July 2006, Prashant Rathi was on his way to Malad, a northern suburb of Mumbai to attend a meeting of International Society for Krishna Consciousness. He had taken his usual mode of travel — the local train — from Lower Parel. In the crowded compartment, he was forced to keep standing for a while before finding a seat. Chanting his prayers and counting his beads, he had fallen asleep, only to be rudely woken a few minutes later — not by a fellow passenger but an explosion in his compartment. There were bodies all around him, of the dead and injured; he was one of the few who had been saved by “the merciful glance of the lord”.
Bombs laden with RDX killed 189 people and injured 829 others as they exploded within six minutes of each other in seven first-class compartments of seven different trains on the Western Line of the Mumbai local train network. Now, Nazia Sayed and Sharmeen Hakim, crime and legal reporters at Mumbai Mirror, have put together the complex details surrounding the investigation and the case (the police submitted a 10,667-page charge sheet accusing 13 people) in the 227 pages between the covers of their book, the first on this subject. The blasts have inspired at least two Hindi films, including the razor sharp A Wednesday starring Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher, and a Malayalam one.
Dealing with such an incident and its aftermath, along with the endless apocryphal and mythical anecdotes that attach themselves to it, is an enormously challenging task at best, and mind-boggling and frustrating at its worst. Writing about the 9/11 terror attacks, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright used anecdotes to dispel the gloom in his book, The Looming Tower. Don DeLillo, on the other hand, uses fiction in his classic Falling Man (the title is inspired by an eponymous photograph by Richard Drew) to deal with the world of uncertainty post the collapse of the World Trade Centres in New York. In Six Minutes of Terror, the writers take a blandly journalistic approach — and that’s where its problem lies.
To be fair to Ms Sayed and Ms Hakim, their research is quite thorough, except places where it is impossible to gather information. At the beginning of the book, they provide minute-by-minute details of the blasts, the chaos and confusion that followed, the sloppy rescue efforts and the shock and awe that stopped Mumbai — the city that never sleeps — on its tracks for at least a day. Then, they painstakingly reveal the details of the terror plot, from the training of its chief executor Faisal Atta-ur Rahman Shaikh to the recce of various targets, the investigation, and finally, the trial of the accused. Yet, the mountain of information fails to transform into a cohesive and engaging narrative, and as a result can hardly be engaging. For instance, we follow Mr Rahman from the courtyard of the mosque in Pune which he used to frequent to Lashkar-e-Taiba training camps in Pakistan but one can hardly feel anything — empathy or aversion — for him.
The book, however, does raise two very important questions: (1) How effective are our investigation agencies in preventing or tracking down terrorists? (2) How effective is our legal framework in assessing guilt in such cases? The answer to the first question should be obvious from the fact that despite having claimed to have burst the terror plot in the Mumbai train blast case, one of the five planters were “ever named or arrested”. The various twists or turns — recorded in great detail in the book — reveal the great challenges investigators face in such cases. As for the second question, only one of the accused was acquitted: Schoolteacher Abdul Wahideen Mohammad Shaikh. He spent nine years behind bars and has accused the police and jail authorities of coercion and torture — an accusation made by all the other accused as well. The length of the judicial process, especially in a terror case where an accused is presumed guilty at large by society till proven innocent, is alarming. This book is also an appeal to make such processes more efficient and effective.
