13 years through trial and terror

Then one moonless night, a group of policemen swooped down on the silent village, dragged the men out of their beds, and beat them viciously. 8220;Show us where you have hidden the powder 8220; they yelled at their bewildered victims. Perplexingly, only Muslim houses were targeted; the Hindu ones remained untouched.

Wails of protest from terrified women and children provoked a torrent of abuse and fresh violence. One boy8217;s nails were brutally wrenched out, to extort a 8220;confession8221;; an epileptic old man was beaten unconscious. Then the younger males were spirited away in a police van.

Silence returned, except for the mournful sigh of the casuarinas. But this tiny coastal jewel would be forever flawed.

I visited Shekhadi one week later, following the trail of RDX that led to its sparkling white sands. By then, it had made international headlines, the landing spot for the ammunition that was used to kill 257 people in the Bombay Blasts of March 12, 1993.

The villagers had helped carry it in from the boats, never suspecting what was in those tightly sealed boxes. Never suspecting that they would be made to pay for a crime they never committed, 200kms away.

As I left, a middle-aged woman clutched my arm. 8220;You will tell them won8217;t you?8221; Hasina Sonde implored desperately. 8220;You will tell them he was innocent. You will tell those sahibs in Bombay to give me back my son?8221;

Today, after thirteen years, 13,000 pages of evidence and 686 witnesses, it8217;s judgment day for 123 accused in the Bombay Blasts Case of 1993. Ironically, most of them have already completed a life sentence in jail, even before they are declared guilty.

Meanwhile, those who masterminded the apocalypse are still absconding. So Dawood Ibrahim, Tiger Memon and Mustafa Dossa continue their reign of terror by remote control, across a porous border. Last week, while the Mumbai municipality demolished illegal structures in the heart of the city, one illicit mall still stood insolently. It is known to belong to Dawood Ibrahim.

Unfair? There8217;s an old folk proverb that Shekhadi probably knows well: when you go after the small fish, the big fish always get away.

Now, we are back to the future. Another holocaust. Another case. And that vague disquiet of the deacute;jagrave; vu.

8226; One day after the train blasts in Mumbai last month, 250 slum dwellers were dragged out of their beds in a pre-dawn police swoop, all from Muslim bastis. Many of them were detained for days, in flagrant violation of criminal procedure.

8226; Two days after the attack, a Muslim businessman was detained at the Mumbai international airport and grilled for eight hours, to uncover a possible 8220;terrorist link.8221; The gentleman was let off only after it became horribly evident that he had come to attend the funeral of his son 8212; who was killed by the bombs.

8226; Some days later, a pair of Muslim tourists from Saharanpur, UP, were arrested for shooting pictures of the Gateway of India with an instamatic camera.

8226; A week later, a sinister, mass sms pointed out that 8220;every Muslim is not a terrorist8221;, but that 8220;every terrorist is a Muslim.8221; Subsequently, Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh sought to calm minority groups by assuring everyone that 8220;innocent Muslims8221; need not panic.

8226; By the second week, nine former SIMI members including a carpenter and a laundryman were detained in Mumbai.. Incidentally, the same people were detained after the London blasts. 8220;On what grounds is never explained8221; they say. 8220;Our lives are a sentence in an open jail.8221;

After the carnage, a subtle pogrom. But so far, the investigations seem more like a game of Blind Mans8217;Bluff than skilled sleuthing, with the Anti Terrorist Squad bumbling around clueless in the dark. Eight arrested, no conclusive evidence. It8217;s been a dismal track record: thirteen years and nineteen bombs in Mumbai have yielded only one conviction to date. That8217;s why, today8217;s verdict is expected to boost the police moral, and mollify public apprehensions that India is being soft on terrorists. No doubt this is true : nail the culprits, we must.

Yet, whenever I think of Shekhadi, I cannot help but wonder if hatred can justify hatred. Or violence can ever be fought with violence. And I cannot help but remember a man we call the Father of our Nation. An eye for an eye, he said, will make the whole world blind.