Thread by @DeathEndsFun

For weeks starting on this day (or actually December 7) 26 years ago, Bombay descended into a maelstrom of vandalism and slaughter. I realize half this country wasn’t even born then, but many of us lived through those horrible weeks. #Bom9293

And we remember what happened. How it happened. Who was responsible. We remember. We don’t plan to forget. Especially not that it was the mob that demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6 1992 that sparked the violence. #Bom9293

Your fellow Indians slaughtered about 1000 of your fellow Indians then: more than Mar 12 1993, more than 26/11, more than any other bomb blasts in this country. That number is matched only by the Gujarat massacre of 2002, exceeded only by the Delhi massacre of 1984. #Bom9293

That is, your fellow Indians killed many more Indians in those weeks than murderous scum like Ajmal Kasab and his colleagues did in 2008. Yet we have no memorials, no plaques, no glittering functions at the Gateway to remember those murdered Indians. #Bom9293

And let’s also not forget: nobody punished for that massacre of 1000 Indians, like Kasab was punished. #Bom9293

So here’s a reminder of at least some of what happened then. #Bom9293

(During those weeks, several of us under the loose umbrella of Ekta fanned out across the city to meet and interview victims of the violence. I took notes in a red notebook. From those notes, a series of vignettes about a city.) #Bom9293

Note: Some of the vignettes that follow are necessarily split into one or more tweets. (Also note that I'll post some, take a break, post some more, like that through the day). #Bom9293

1) Residents of a slum we visited saw people from a nearby building throwing bags full with petrol at them, by the fistful, dozens of them. (1/11) #Bom9293

1a) The petrol-bag-throwers followed that up by flinging bombs to set off fires in the slum. (2/11) #Bom9293

2) From one building we visited, someone had thrown bombs or something else onto a communal toilet in the slum, destroying its roof. (3/11) #Bom9293

3) Till today I cannot understand a person who would drop stuff, explosive stuff, on the heads of people taking a crap. (4/11) #Bom9293

4) When I asked a man in the building,"Who dropped these bombs?", he said slum residents destroyed the toilet's roof themselves. (5/11) #Bom9293

5) That is, he hoped I would think, as we looked down, that crapping slum residents broke their own toilet roofs to make him look bad. (6/11) #Bom9293

6) “How did so many huts get burned down?” I asked him. He said slum residents did that too. They do it frequently, he told me. (7/11) #Bom9293

7) From the terrace of one building, a man pointed to what he called a "bunker" and "firing range" in the slum far below. (8/11) #Bom9293

7a) What he meant and was pointing to were three sandbags we could just make out, lying on a broken roof below where we stood. (9/11) #Bom9293

8) A woman in a slum showed us bullet marks inside her hut. Then I positioned myself to line up these bullet holes in her pots and on the wall … (10/11) #Bom9293

8a) … When I sighted along them, it was immediately clear: the bullet had come, unmistakably, from a green window in a fourth floor flat in the nearby building (11/11). #Bom9293

9) Met a milk seller on Reay Road. A mob robbed his house and took his clothes and vessels. (1/2) #Bom9293

9a) Later another gang of thugs came there, beat him and told him to leave the area. (He didn't). (2/2) #Bom9293

10) An 18 year-old and his younger brother ran a raddi business nearby. A mob broke into the shop and beat the brother. (1/2) #Bom9293

10a) The mob stole Rs 300 from the shop and also their signboard, which read "GAMRA METAL & PAPER MART." (2/2) #Bom9293

11) Near Reay Rd, a handcart puller ran away to escape from a violent mob. When he returned, his handcart was burned. He had no way left to earn a living. #Bom9293

12) We met a man lying in a bed in JJ Hospital whose account of what happened to him reminded me acutely of Saadat Hasan Manto's chilling story “Mishtake”. (Read it here: thenewsminute.com/article/we-wis…) JJ hospital patient, like that. #Bom9293

13) Another man I met in JJ Hospital was there because he had been surrounded by a dozen men and attacked with swords. (1/2) #Bom9293

13a) He had wounds on his head, arm, chest and back. He had no idea how he had survived. Or how he had reached JJ. (2/2) #Bom9293

14) Still another man at JJ Hospital, whose thigh was nearly sliced through, was sitting on his bed dazed, unable to comprehend what had happened to him and why. #Bom9293

15) We came across a small group of quietly weeping men and women who told me, "We are Marathi speakers. Still they attacked us!" (1/2) #Bom9293

15a) Everything perverse about this tragic calamity, right there. (2/2) #Bom9293

16) A man I met was buying cigarettes at a paanwala in Byculla at 930 one morning. (1/2) #Bom9293

16a) Suddenly, forty or fifty men surrounded him and attacked him with knives. A friend managed to rescue him. (2/2) #Bom9293

17) A mob set fire to Dalal Estate in Bombay Central. An elderly couple, avid stamp collectors, was trapped in their flat. They died. #Bom9293

18) In Bhendi Bazar, a 29 yr-old woman and her daughter left their home at 3pm one afternoon to get rid of their garbage. (1/2) #Bom9293

18a) Both were hit in the back by bullets. (2/2) #Bom9293

19) Woman in Kalachowkie left her hut to wash clothes. When she returned, a mob had burned her hut down. #Bom9293

20) A man in JJ Hospital said that a group of men ran up as he was walking on a bridge. Pointing to his beard, they lifted him up … (1/2) #Bom9293

20a) … paying no attention to his shouts that he was Hindu, and threw him onto the railway tracks below. He survived. (2/2) #Bom9293

21) We met a woman in a building beside a slum who said she had suffered greatly from “throne-stowing”. Wanted to laugh, but she was distraught. #Bom9293

22) On the ground floor of the same building, a flatowner had boarded up two of his windows permanently, terrified of attacks from slum residents. #Bom9293

23) Elsewhere, we met a man from Uttar Pradesh who had lived in Kalachowkie for 11 yrs. He had two kids. He ran a raddi-paper shop. (1/2) #Bom9293

23a) “300-400 people”, he said, arrived there one day, burned down the shop and looted all his vessels. (2/2) #Bom9293

24) In Nagpada, a 20 year-old woman doing her TYBCom at the Akbar Peerbhoy College lost her brother in police firing. (1/3) #Bom9293

24a) Two days later, as she stood on the street, a police bullet hit her in the head. (2/3) #Bom9293

24b) Luckily she was not seriously hurt. Except that her vision was affected permanently. (3/3) #Bom9293

25) One injured man I met at JJ Hospital could remember only this about his four attackers: two wore long pants, two wore shorts. (1/2) #Bom9293

25a) He also said a hotel owner came to the hospital and distributed Rs 100 each to patients like him, injured in the violence. (2/2) #Bom9293

26) Reay Road: a couple in a shack with four girls and a boy was saving money in a box for dowry for when they married off the girls. (1/2) #Bom9293

26a) A mob burned their hut down, but not before stealing the dowry money, Rs 5000. (2/2) #Bom9293

27) The man who delivered milk to my uncle every morning also drove a riksha. There was no milk delivered for several days. (1/2) #Bom9293

27a. My uncle finally made inquiries. The man had been pulled from his riksha and killed. (2/2) #Bom9293

28) Young journalist I knew called in tears one morning. The family had woken to find a prominent “X” painted outside their front door. They have since emigrated. #Bom9293

29) A taxi-driver, originally from Nasik, was walking in a lane near CP Tank. About 15 boys, he said, stoned and then stabbed him. He woke up in the hospital. #Bom9293

30) One afternoon on the train, I saw a gang of men on a low wall beside the tracks between Mahalakshmi and Lower Parel stations. (1/3) #Bom9293

30a) Their smiling teeth gleamed almost as much as the long knives many of the men held in their hands. (Really). (2/3) #Bom9293

30b) Called police to tell them. Man who answered said: “What should I do about it? There are mobs all over the city.” He hung up. (3/3) #Bom9293

31) At the office one evening, I was waiting for a late meeting. An old family friend called. (1/2) #Bom9293

31a) He urged me to leave for home right away: "The Muslims have poisoned our milk and are going to attack from the sea!" he said. (2/2) #Bom9293

32) A timber merchant had been running his business near Currey Road station since 1951. (1/4) #Bom9293

32a) One night some people came to his yard in a white Ambassador. They flung kerosene all over the wood and set it on fire. (2/4) #Bom9293

32b) He lost his entire stock, suffering a loss of Rs 1 crore. He went to the police station to file a complaint… (3/4) #Bom9293

32c) … only to find that a complaint had been filed against him for burning a rival's stock, and for selling liquor. (4/4) #Bom9293

33) In the ash of a burned-down set of homes near Bombay Central, I found half-burned scraps of explicit pornographic photographs. #Bom9293

34) Also at JJ Hospital, we met a badly injured cable TV employee. He had been surrounded by about 12 men in Kamathipura and assaulted with knives and choppers. (1/5) #Bom9293

34a) Now most other victims we met were Muslims attacked by Hindus or Hindus assaulted by Muslims. (2/5) #Bom9293

34b) Horrifying, but at least in line with the twisted logic of those weeks. (3/5) #Bom9293

34c) But this man was, on the face of it, a senseless instance of the violence: a Hindu attacked by other Hindus. (4/5) #Bom9293

34d) Why? Because he had a beard that made him -- in his own words -- "look like a Muslim". (5/5) #Bom9293

35) Came across an unconscious man with a head injury and a fractured jaw lying naked on a bed, and in fact tied down to it, in JJ Hospital. (1/2) #Bom9293

35a) His chart said he was "unconscious on arrival", his "pupil reaction [was] sluggish" and he was "irritable". (2/2) #Bom9293

36) A scrawny young man advanced threateningly on us when we were speaking to the owner … (1/3) #Bom9293

36a) … of a small chai shop near Marine Lines station that was vandalized and burned down. (2/3) #Bom9293

36b) I will always regret not standing up to that young man instead of walking away. Hell, what can I say, we felt the terror too. (3/3) #Bom9293

37) Woman we met came here from Tirupati 30 years earlier and owned a scrap iron shop near Reay Road station. (1/3) #Bom9293

37a) One day in December ’92, a large mob came and looted her shop. (2/3) #Bom9293

37b) The next day, several more people came, attacked her & said she had better return to Tamil Nadu. She told me she was staying. (3/3) #Bom9293

38) So … I remember these stories when I hear claims that December 6 1992 was a "day of honour”. I measure those claims by the yardstick of all these vignettes. #Bom9293

38a) The claims don't score so well. #Bom9293

39) Nor do the claimants. #Bom9293

40) I don't think the guy who was thrown off a bridge onto railway tracks below found honour or redemption in the events of December 6 1992. #Bom9293

41) Nor the fellow who had boarded up his windows, fearing for his life. #Bom9293

42) Nor the journalist who found the “X” painted outside her door one morning. Probably not the painters either. #Bom9293

43) Thus let’s ask: How tall does a country stand when it stands on the rubble of a mosque? Let me repeat that: How tall does a country stand when it stands on the rubble of a mosque? #Bom9293

44) December 6 1992: I don't really care if others, or the younger generation, don't remember. Or don’t want to remember. Or if they want to move on. Because I remember. #Bom9293

45) Finally, I know some of you out there have read it before, but this story never fails to sadden me, besides being a signpost of the madness. #Bom9293

46) This one episode summed up for me the senselessness of those weeks — For Raju, who died alone: rediff.com/news/1996/1612… #Bom9293

47) “You showed me that the true meaning of all that rubble in Ayodhya is not some reborn national self-respect, not some righting of an ancient wrong, but your death.” rediff.com/news/1996/1612… #Bom9293