Hang Mumbai bombers, locals say

MUMBAI - The message was scrawled in chalk on a brick wall outside Bandra station, just 50 metres from where the first bomb went off inside a packed commuter train on Tuesday night local time (early Wednesday morning NZT).

"We condemn the ones who did a terrorist bomb here," it said in English. "The culprits should be hanged to death."

It was a message from the wrong side of the tracks.

As the death toll from the Mumbai bombings was confirmed as crossing 200, suspicions as to who was behind them centred on Islamic militants.

The simple message chalked on the wall was the heartfelt response from a dirt-poor Muslim suburb of Mumbai where the people had watched in horror as the bomb went off and immediately rushed to help the injured.

The Mumbai bombings were more than just an attack on the India's financial capital. It is no coincidence that India has already started referring to the attacks as 7/11.

Mumbai is India's New York -- a city that, more than any other, defines the Indian dream. Every day, hundreds of migrants from the villages and rural hinterland of India arrive in Mumbai, hoping to make it big.

The city has communities from every corner of India: every caste, every ethnic group, every religion is represented.

But it is also a city that has been riven by the Hindu-Muslim tensions that have haunted India over the last decade and a half, with a history of riots, and bombings that have been blamed on Muslim extremists. Whoever was behind the bombings appears to be trying to exploit those tensions.

But this time, there have been extraordinary scenes as Mumbai's Muslims have come out in defiance to defend Mumbai's unity. Muslims queued for hours to give blood for Hindus injured in the bombings yesterday.

Even the leaders of the hardline Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena, a party rarely given to praising Muslims, said they were "overwhelmed" by the reaction.

"Hindus and Muslims walked hand in hand yesterday," said Manohar Kargaonkar, a party official.

"They are trying to split us, but they cannot," said Tanweer Sheikh, a Muslim living in the slum that scrawled the chalk message of defiance outside Bandra station.

"We are 99 per cent Muslims living here, but we were the first to go to help the people on that train. The police did a good job, don't get me wrong, but they don't have a police station here. We were the nearest so we had to help.

"We didn't care if we got Hindu blood or Muslim blood all over us. As far as we are concerned in this neighbourhood, we are Indians first, and Muslims or Hindus only after that."

All along the tracks, it was the poorest of Mumbai's citizens, both Hindu and Muslim, who were the first to rush to the aid of the injured on the trains, the migrant slum-dwellers whose shanty towns lie along the side of the tracks.

It is riding the trains that brings India's rich and successful face to face with the Dickensian squalor in which the poor live, sometimes in tenements that hang over the tracks, more often in corrugated aluminium shacks hammered up against the railings at the side of the line.

At his shanty home next to Metunga station, Rajesh Jaktap was proudly brandishing a local newspaper with a photograph that showed him helping carry the injured from the wreckage.

In the photograph, he was covered in the blood of the wounded.

"I wasn't scared to help," he says. "We heard the bomb blast and looked out of our houses. People were screaming for help and jumping from the train while it was still moving.

"We all climbed straight over the railings and ran to help them. Some of the bodies had hands or legs missing. Some were alive and some were dead. We just picked up everyone we could and put them in rickshaws to be taken to the hospital."

All the bombs were set off in the first class carriages of the trains - why remains unclear.

"They were all businessmen," says Mr Jaktap. "They are like VIPs compared to us."

"Sometimes I feel angry when I think about it," said Mr Jaktap's neighbour Silvi Patangama, whose husband Mahindi was one of those who rushed to help.

"The government is always trying to move us away, saying we can't live here. But we were the only ones who helped. Some of us gave up our own bedsheets to carry the wounded in."

In the next station up the line at Mahim, part of the roof had been blown away by the blast.

"Two trains were passing when the bomb went off," said Pradip Pujari, who was working at a fast food counter directly opposite the site of the explosion. "People were injured on both trains. There were dead bodies everywhere."

Police armed with assault rifles and machine-guns were keeping watch on the platform yesterday.

"I'm a little scared to get back on the trains but I have to get home tonight," said Mr Pujari. "Last night the trains were all stopped so I stayed at a friend's house nearby. I didn't sleep at all."

Officially the government says it has no leads as to who was behind the bombings.

But Indian intelligence sources say they believe the bombings may have been a joint operation, planned meticulously for more than a year, involving several groups, including Lashkar-e Toiba, a Pakistan-based militant Islamic group, and the 'D company', a politicised mafia gang that is believed to have been behind coordinated bombings in Mumbai in 1993.

Some Indian press reports have also mentioned the possible involvement of the Students' Islamic Movement of India, which has been banned for several years.

Local police have also openly accused Lashkar, which issued a statement denying it was involved. Lashkar used to have close links to Pakistan's ISI intelligence - links that the Pakistani establishment says are long severed.

India has called on Pakistan to crack down harder on militants, but so far Delhi has avoided accusing Islamabad of any involvement in the bombings.

In a televised address yesterday, the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, told his people: "Do not let anyone divide us. Our strength lies in our unity...No one can make India kneel. No one can come in the path of our progress. The wheels of our economy will move on. India will continue to walk tall, and with confidence."

- INDEPENDENT