Chilling story of how Bombay riots were fanned by Pakistan to create Mayhem in India

It just takes a few provocateurs to unleash mayhem.

http://m.indianexpress.com/news/national-interest-because-we-forget/1095140/

Excerpts-1

The key to understanding that plot lies in separating, analysing and sequencing three different sets of events. The first riots broke out on December 6, just as Babri fell. Angry Muslims hit the streets first, and then they faced the full fury of the Shiv Sainiks and the rest, and an openly partisan Bombay police. These riots settled by the third week of December. The second round began in the first week of January. But a few significant things had happened in the interim.

First, a large consignment of arms, ammunition and RDX landed at a place called Dighi on the Konkan coast in the first week of January. Second, and most significant to me, coming from Delhi to investigate the story and thereby having been saved the horrors of the riots, was the fact that, in the run-up to the second round of riots, the police had discovered an intriguing pattern. Several key officers I met then told me that bodies of poor Hindu mathadi (head-load) workers from the Maharashtra hinterland were being found early mornings on streets where they often slept, slit at the throat with a small knife as if in some ritualistic style. That was, however, an analytical afterthought as the investigators pieced the story together. These bodies were mostly found around Dongri, a communally sensitive area. The conjecture was that someone was trying to provoke a second round of riots. That there was a plan to this.

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M.N. Singh has one regret even today. “Arms were delivered to Sanjay Dutt on January 16. Instead of concealing them, if he had only told his father, who in turn would have surely informed the police, we would have been able to prevent the bombings and save so many lives.”

You also understand now why M.N. Singh and his many colleagues see the bombings of 1993 as an essentially failed operation. It killed many people, but failed in its strategic objective. Singh tells me in 1993, Bombay Police did not have even one AK rifle, had never seen grenades blow up, and even he did not know something called RDX. In the aftermath, his police recovered 71 AK rifles and 500 grenades, dispersed strategically. We knew what mayhem just 9 AKs caused in 26/11. What would 71 have done in 1993? In addition, there were 3.5 tonnes of RDX and 1,200 detonators.

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Not only was it the ISI’s first major operation in mainland India, it was also the most audacious to date. Much more ambitious than even 26/11. So ambitious and so audacious, in fact, that they risked their most important asset in India, Dawood Ibrahim, and his underworld army. They would have known that irrespective of how this ended, they would have to evacuate the whole lot, and find them safe harbour in their own country. Now you know why they pamper and protect Dawood and the Memons the way they do. They were key to their most sinister and brutal conspiracy in India to date.

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I had had one long, and partly on-record conversation on the phone with Dawood Ibrahim before the blasts, set up through my colleague Sheela Bhatt, who edited the Gujarati edition of India Today and was a veteran on the underworld beat in Bombay.


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And then, as I turned around to leave, making no secret of my dismay and even reluctance, he sensed something.

“Ai bhai,” he said, as I turned around, hoping somehow that he had changed his mind.

“Dekhna bhai, likhna nahin maine jo kaha (see, brother, do not report what I said)”, “dekho na, achcha nahin hoga (see, it won’t be nice)”.

It felt as if the temperature had suddenly dropped 30 degrees below zero, and yet I was sweating on the forehead. That memory isn’t selective, nor is it convenient. And it hasn’t faded even a bit after two full decades