For weeks starting on this day (or actually December 7) 27 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 March 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. #BOM9293
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
The petrol-bag-throwers followed that up by flinging bombs to set off fires in the slum. (2/11) #BOM9293
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
Till today I cannot understand a person who would drop stuff, explosive stuff, on the heads of people taking a crap. (4/11) #BOM9293
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
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
“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
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
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
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
… 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
Met a milk seller on Reay Road. A mob robbed his house and took his clothes and vessels. (1/2) #BOM9293
Later another gang of thugs came there, beat him and told him to leave the area. (He didn't). (2/2) #BOM9293
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
The mob stole Rs 300 from the shop and also their signboard, which read "GAMRA METAL & PAPER MART." (2/2) #BOM9293
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
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
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
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
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
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
Everything perverse about this tragic calamity, right there. (2/2) #BOM9293
A man I met was buying cigarettes at a paanwala in Byculla at 930 one morning. (1/2) #BOM9293
Suddenly, forty or fifty men surrounded him and attacked him with knives. A friend managed to rescue him. (2/2) #BOM9293
A mob set fire to Dalal Estate in Bombay Central. An elderly couple, avid stamp collectors, was trapped in their flat. They died. #BOM9293
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
Both were hit in the back by bullets. (2/2) #BOM9293
Woman in Kalachowkie left her hut to wash clothes. When she returned, a mob had burned her hut down. #BOM9293
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
… paying no attention to his shouts that he was Hindu, and threw him onto the railway tracks below. He survived. (2/2) #BOM9293
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
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
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
“300-400 people”, he said, arrived there one day, burned down the shop and looted all his vessels. (2/2) #BOM9293
In Nagpada, a 20 year-old woman doing her TYBCom at the Akbar Peerbhoy College lost her brother in police firing. (1/3) #BOM9293
Two days later, as she stood on the street, a police bullet hit her in the head. (2/3) #BOM9293
Luckily she was not seriously hurt. Except that her vision was affected permanently. (3/3) #BOM9293
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
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
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
A mob burned their hut down, but not before stealing the dowry money, Rs 5000. (2/2) #BOM9293
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
My uncle finally made inquiries. The man had been pulled from his riksha and killed. (2/2) #BOM9293
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
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
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
Their smiling teeth gleamed almost as much as the long knives many of the men held in their hands. (Really). (2/3) #BOM9293
Called the 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
At the office one evening, I was waiting for a late meeting. An old family friend called. (1/2) #BOM9293
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
A timber merchant had been running his business near Currey Road station since 1951. (1/4) #BOM9293
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
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
… only to find that a complaint had been filed against him for burning a rival's stock, and for selling liquor. (4/4) #BOM9293
In the ash of a burned-down set of homes near Bombay Central, I found half-burned scraps of explicit pornographic photographs. #BOM9293
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
Now most other victims we met were Muslims attacked by Hindus or Hindus assaulted by Muslims. (2/5) #BOM9293
Horrifying, but at least in line with the twisted logic of those weeks. (3/5) #BOM9293
But this man was, on the face of it, a senseless instance of the violence: a Hindu attacked by other Hindus. (4/5) #BOM9293
Why? Because he had a beard that made him -- in his own words -- "look like a Muslim". (5/5) #BOM9293
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
His chart said he was "unconscious on arrival", his "pupil reaction [was] sluggish" and he was "irritable". (2/2) #BOM9293
A scrawny young man advanced threateningly on us when we were speaking to the owner … (1/3) #BOM9293
… of a small chai shop near Marine Lines station that was vandalized and burned down. (2/3) #BOM9293
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
Woman we met came here from Tirupati 30 years earlier and owned a scrap iron shop near Reay Road station. (1/3) #BOM9293
One day in December ’92, a large mob came and looted her shop. (2/3) #BOM9293
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
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
The claims don't score so well. #BOM9293
Nor do the claimants. #BOM9293
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
Nor the fellow who had boarded up his windows, fearing for his life. #BOM9293
Nor the journalist who found the “X” painted outside her door one morning. Probably not the painters either. #BOM9293
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
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. Or even if a court has ruled. Because I remember. #BOM9293
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
This one episode summed up for me the senselessness of those weeks — For Raju, who died alone: rediff.com/news/1996/1612… #BOM9293
“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
