The Warning from Bombay Riots
This article was first published in the print edition of Manushi Journal. (Issue-74-75, Jan-Apr 1993)
It is unfortunate that our political leaders, industrialists and opinion makers have responded to the tragedy of the bomb blasts that shook Bombay in March, as well as to the earlier riots of December, 1992 and January, 1993, in their usual irresponsible manner. Instead of mourning the dead, our political and business leaders are mostly concerned about the negative impact the bomb blasts and the riots will have on foreign investments. Never mind if the lives of the people of this country are safe or not; never mind that hundreds of thousands of people lost their source of livelihood in the repeated riots and massacres instigated by our political leaders. All they seemed concerned about was whether the investments and profits of the elite who enter into collaborations with foreign corporations are safe.
So far there is no definite evidence
of who is behind the blasts. Even if
we were to accept the version that the
bomb blasts were indeed the
handiwork of Pakistani intelligence in
collusion with certain Muslims in the
Bombay underworld, the self- righteous indignation of our political leaders is rather misplaced because the
Indian government has been involved in somewhat similar activities over the last couple of decades: injecting
terrorism into the politics of Punjab and Kashmir to destroy the ruling parties’ political opponents, getting RAW, the Indian government’s own intelligence agency, to train the terrorist outfit, LTTE, for insurgency operations in Sri Lanka…