Black Friday - True Story of the Bombay Blasts

Just finished this gem of a book, source for another Anurag Kashyap film that we shall never get to see.

03/93 – Nine years before 9/11 and twelve years before 7/7. Indias very own tryst with international terrorism when what is positively India's greatest city came under the line of fire.

Hussain Zaidis compelling account offers a disturbing insight into the genesis of the blasts, the execution and the investigations that followed. Zaidis research is impeccable. His narrative is drawn from interviews and court statements of police, investigation officials, associates of Dawood Ibrahim, motley groups that comprise Bombays underworld and most importantly perpetrators of the crime who later turned approvers.

The Bombay riots that followed the Ayodhya demolition saw large scale violence against Muslim establishments. Tiger Memon suffered major losses when rampaging mobs burnt down his business . And Tiger swore revenge. Meanwhile a large number of Muslim youth began sending SOSs to Dawood exhorting him to avenge the humiliation. Dawood was indifferent initially but when news spread of his former associates raising slogans of 'Dawood bhai murdabad' and when parcels of bangles with missives that read 'Jo bhai behen ki hifazat nahin kar sake use yeh tohfa Mubarak' began to arrive at his 'White House' in Dubai, Dawood decided the time had come for the retribution of the Babri Masjid demolitions and the deaths during the riots. It was left to Tiger Memon to plan and execute the 'jihad'. The initial plan was to seek help of terrorists from PLO or the Hamas to get Thackeray and Advani assassinated. – an idea later dropped by Memon lest the leaders should be turned into gods by the Hindus. What followed was a diabolic plan that included recruiting youth, arranging for training in Pakistan ( where else??? ), identifying targets and the execution - a process that saw small time smugglers turn into international terrorists. These were not trained al-qaeeda operatives grown on a diet of jihad. These were petty criminals who grew up playing galli cricket and watching Hindi films , brainwashed by Tiger into defending the honour of the qaum and sacrificing their lives if need be.

If the tragedy caused by the blasts when sheer panic gripped the city was of unspeakable proportion, the aftermath saw police excesses like never seen before. You just had to be a 'friend of a friend of a friend' to become a TADA detenue. Entire families of suspects ended up in police lockup . A battered suspect after being released shot his entire family and himself after the police violently manhandled a woman in the adjacent cell before him and threatened him with similar treatment to his wife if he did not speak up.

One observation drawn from the book, is that while common perception places Dawood as the mastermind behind the blasts, it is Tiger Memon who played the most significant role. Other stories that make for a very interesting read are the the police-media overenthusiasm on the Sanjay Dutt connection and the incredible breakthrough achieved when a teenaged girl from the Al-Hussaini building bumped into Inspector Rakesh Maria and provided him with crucial information on the happenings at the Memon house on that day.The revelation on how close the crooks came to bombing the BPCL Oil refinery is startling. (Badshah Khan the man responsible for it drops the idea after realising the magnitude of the havoc it would cause). Memons plan to transport the RDX from Dubai to India and how he hoodwinked the customs officials could have been straight from a Bollywood flick.

A must read.