Black Friday

Project for Paper 4 Contemporary Socio-Political Philosophy for MA Part 1 (October 2012 Examination
Old Syllabus)

By Jeenit Mehta MA Part 1

Index
Objective 3 Introduction 3

Approach to the Project

Description of the Blast

Past is Prologue and benefit of technology to the perpetrators

The law of Unseen Consequences and the Means-End debate

Film Appreciation - Situating Black Friday: Crime, Cinema, and the City

Conclusions - What would have happened if there was no Black Friday Bomb Blasts??

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References

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Objective
Analyze the event of the 1993 bomb blast with the help of feature film Black Friday in relation to the ideas of Hannah Arendts book On Violence.

Introduction
Hello, I take an immense pleasure in presenting to you my ideas relating the book of the Austrian born philosopher Hannah Arednt (the book written in the year 1969) and the infamous serial bomb blasts of 1993 in Mumbai. The events in the years of 1992-1993 were mind numbing in Indias history and importantly set the tone for the next two decades. Also it was the first serial bomb blasts the world had ever witnessed and was a precedent to bombings later in the London Underground Metro, trains in Madrid and then later many bomb blasts in Mumbai and other cities in India and World. The aim of this project is to analyze the event of the 1993 bomb blast in Mumbai in terms of why the people responsible for it did it, the way they did it, the intended outcome and the actual outcome of the event. Also I will try and analyze a hypothetical situation if this event did not happen. As and when possible I shall try and relate the analysis of the event to the ideas of Arendt on Violence. Her thought of ends being overwhelmed by the means very rightly fits in this event. Also the way she has distinguished Violence into Natural, Traditional and Cultural phenomena, I shall try to relate it to this event. Her ideas on violent actions are irreversible and the return to status quo being unlikely also shall be discussed. The study of text under consideration is the film Black Friday (released in the year 2007) based on the book by Zaidi Hussain Black Friday on the 1993 bomb blasts. The movie as well as the book is based on true facts and were in accordance to the confessional statements of the witnesses and accused in trial. I have also read autobiography of L.K Advani My Country, My life which especially helped me to get a thorough understandings of the precedents of the bomb blasts. Also many personal interactions with my relatives and friends discussing the times of this event have helped me to discuss and gauge the moods and mindsets of the people in general in Mumbai and India. Introduction on the bomb blasts has been taken from the source of the research report from How to read a bomb by Rao.

Approach to the Project

Since the purpose of the University for asking such a project is to make sure the concept of violence and dissent are properly ingrained in the student, and I being from a creative profession, I decided to read all the theoretical texts on violence and dissent as well as the event of the 1993 bomb blast together and then pen my thoughts at one go; giving it a structure of an essay.

Description of the Blast

On March 12, 1993, ten bombs exploded across the city of Bombay within a period of about two hours. The timed explosions were caused by large quantities of an explosive known as RDX, a black soap like substance, which was loaded onto several four- and two-wheelers. Planted strategically in and around important city buildings, crowded marketplaces, and hotels, each vehicle exploded within fifteen or thirty minutes of the previous one. Their itinerary not only was timed serially but also, perhaps accidentally, followed a north-south geographic trajectory, beginning with a dramatic explosion in the basement of the Bombay Stock Exchange in the citys historic, colonial Fort area and ending with a series of unexploded grenades hurled onto the runways of the airport in the northwest suburb of Santacruz. These explosions followed nearly after three months of tension and murderous riots in Bombay between Hindus and Muslims after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque in northern India by a mob of Hindu nationalist youths. While the riots took place immediately after the mosques destruction on December 6, 1992, followed by a second round a month later, in January 1993, the blasts came after two months of uneasy calm, on the last Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. More than two hundred people died in the blasts on that single day and hundreds were injured. The event, simply referred to as the bomb blasts in Bombay (until the serial bombing of commuter trains in 2007), is treated as a singular eventthe serial blastsinvolving a vast conspiracy. Its singularity was self-evident even on the day of the blasts, when the citys police commissioner suggested that the bombings had turned the entire city into a battlefield.

Past is Prologue and benefit of technology to the perpetrators

The demolition of the Babri Masjid had and the riots that followed had made the Muslims of the country feel helpless. Muslims have a rich history in India as it was a religion brought by the Persian conquerors. Although most of the Muslims in India are converts originally Hindus, Muslims in India due to hundreds of years of religious differences with Hindus have developed a distict identity in terms of their speech, rituals, traditions and their allegiance to the Middle east centre point of Islam religion. It can be seen in the movie wherein Dubai was described as their native place when asked. Also Babri Masjid demolition was not all of a sudden but was intensified over months by the controversial rath yatra by Mr. L.K Advani, the leader of BJP. There was a court case regarding the dispute of the Masjid and Ram Janma Bhoomi and the issue was not resolved for over 40 yrs. The subsequent riots saw a huge chunk of Muslims and Hindus sidelined from the societies and being either a victim of violence or forced to leave their locality for good. One amongst them was Mushtaq Tiger Memon. He was a gangster involved in illegal activities like money laundering and smuggling. He saw his office burnt in front of him during the riots as well as close aids killed. He with the help of other gangsters and Pakistani Secret Service (ISI) planned and executed the Bomb Blasts citing them as revenge as well as keeping the head held high of Muslims of India. So was deterrence the primary motive of the perpetrators? Can we compare to that with the deterrence of the technological developments like nuclear technology preventing wars amongst nations? Let us first see what Arendt had envisioned as the new reasons for violence and that the traditional war going obsolute. She talks about the implements of violence with all the technological developments, makes the act of violence in terms of the intensity very harmful and hence it more effective in reaching the desired end. The example of Pakistani Nuclear weapons falling in the hand of the jehadis as well as the easy availability of the bio-chemical warfare that can wipe out sizeable amount of human race give a message to the nations fighting Islamic terror that they can be subjected to it any time at the whims and fancies of the terrorists. This was one of the key intended messages that was discussed by Tiger Menon with the ISI and other Pro-Islamic elements present at the meeting in Dubai where the plan was made. In the final monologue at the end of the movie Tiger Memon very categorically cited the killing Hindu leaders like Bal Thackeray or Advani wont serve the purpose. He said that they should do something that completely shatters and shocks the Indian masses by realizing the potential destruction that can be caused in the matter of hours that an entire country can be brought to a standstill by a handful of people.

Arendt rightly quotes that Extreme form of power is all against one; and extreme form of violence is one against all But yes as described by Arendt, the paradox of violence, that sophisticated weapons will deter nations to use them against each other as it is a loss-loss situation, this doesnt hold true in this case. She points out the one doing the guerilla warfare will be beneficial to the technological developments.

The law of Unseen Consequences and the Means-End debate

Analyzing the event of 1993 allows us to discuss the consequences in the next 2 decades. Talk about the further divide that was brought between the two religions due to it? I dont think so that the bomb blast affect much to it as the riots had already done it. What can be the unseen consequences can be the similar fashioned bombings that followed on Madrid, London and of course in New York. The bomb blast which was to be a one-time event revenge against the mass killings became a mascot or a case study that could be replicated. All over the world the similar blasts further caused deep political as well as power struggles. Example of Afganistan can be clearly seen. A cyclical effect of innocent people becoming terrorists has happened as more and more civilians are becoming victims due to terrorism or the war against terrorism by states. Arednt cites The very substance of violent action is ruled by the means-ends category, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affair, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which are needed to reach it. Since the end of human action as distinct from the end product of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals. Very clearly Tiger Memon used innocent affected young Muslims to carry out his goals of revenge. Same could be said on the inciting of people done by L.K Advani for political gains. In the case of Tiger Memon, he very clearly boasts to his friends that he was the one who organized it all alone. He overnight becomes the messiah of the team of 20 odd jobless youth he brainwashed without actually planning and securing their future. He himself ran to Dubai even before the blasts promising that he would call all the fellow team members and failed to do resulting in them getting caught by the Police. It was thus proved that it was more of personal vendetta than doing it for the community. LK Advani and BJP also succeeded with this strategy and came into power by rupturing such an event and then getting votes as guardians of the Hindus.

Film Appreciation

Situating Black Friday: Crime, Cinema, and the City

In the immediate aftermath of Black Friday, no group stepped forward to take responsibility, and a strange silence prevailed around the blasts. Rumors swirled around in the silence, and newspapers kept reporting more blasts, without even checking the veracity of the reports. Despite the atmosphere of confusion and silence, however, the blasts came to be seen as the Muslims answer to the rage and violence of militant Hindus who orchestrated the widespread destruction of Muslim lives and properties during the deadly riots of December 1992 and January 1993. An early breakthrough in the investigations revealed that one of the vehicles used for the bombingsone that had failed to detonatewas registered in the name of a relative of gangster Tiger Memon. The relationship between cinema and the narratives around Black Friday gains significance in the light of the critical role played by cinema in India. Since the fifties, popular cinematic narratives favored the crime genre to comment on the decline of a modern, democratic public sphere and the lost promises of freedom from colonial rule. Bombay and its criminal gangs were in particular, the subject of many of these films. Cinema forms the genetic code of the citys selfimage, and narratives about the city are often deeply intertwined with the cinematic vision of the city and with specific characters and situations drawn from the narratives of Bombay films. This particular triangulation of crime, cinema, and the city therefore rendered the bombings and their perpetrators comprehensible to the masses. The gangster is a central figure within these narratives. As several scholars have pointed out, there is a dominant relationship between the worlds of cinema and crime, and the Bombay underworld appears as a prominent character in Bombay films and also draws inspiration for its own acts and behavior from those very films. The riot seems to work, both in the moment and in the aftermath, through certain evident holes that spawn multiple narratives by imploding time, space, and memory into formations of rumor, silence, and testimony. The narrative structure imposed on the events post-violence is one familiar from countless situations, mixing hurt and anger, legalistic rhetoric about property damage, and the most intimate forms of recollecting personal violation and tragedy. Riot memory is often narrative and non-visual, often extracted through inquisitorial interrogations, archived predominantly in judicial reports, and recovered in moments of involuntary recollection. In the case of Black Friday it was more of visuals and straight forward questioning. Black Friday resorts to straightforward realism and the normative framing of the riots to tell the story of the gangsters involved in the blasts and the cops investigations. Black Friday the film while appearing to be objective and true to the events, is also, of course, framing the city in the manner that is most familiar from the narrative accounts of the riots and the nationalist reading that they engender. The spatiality of its framing similarly reflects this perceptual position.
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Black Friday bombings failed as acts calculated to destabilize the country by sowing discord between communities leading to further violence. Unlike the riot, in which agency is easily ascribed to a particular group of perpetrators and, indeed, agency is publicly sought through violent acts, the blasts left behind a mysterious hole into which no perpetrator was willing to step. Thus the terrorist as subject had to be understood within a different narration that connected crime, cinema, and the city, or criminality, spectacular, violence, and revolutionary social change.

Conclusions:
What would have happened if there was no Black Friday Bomb Blasts??
Although there is an increasingly shrill discourse surrounding the nature of the enemy a reappearance of certainty, as witnessed in the discourse surrounding the recent train bombings in Mumbai there is also an acute sense of awareness that Black Friday bomb blasts have transformed the landscape of violence not only for Bombay-Mumbai but also for the nation as a whole. It can be argued that instances of communal riots are becoming increasingly rare as terrorist attacks increase. A notable exception to this situation was the Gujarat riots, or rather pogroms, of 2002, when several thousand Muslims were ruthlessly killed by parastatal militant groups. Very importantly to note the brutality and barbarism of the violence in part draws on its intimate nature, which is in sharp contrast to the accident-like imagery associated with serial attacks. What is also interesting is that each instance of serial attack on Bombay-Mumbai (1993, 2003, and 2006) has been positioned by the public as an act of retaliation for riots and assaults elsewhere 1993 as revenge for the riots that followed the destruction of the Babri Mosque, 2003 as an answer to the Gujarat riots, and 2006 as the response to the now more generic attacks on Muslims in Kashmir and elsewhere in India. So what do we infer? I feel as a nation, India is not much affected by the Serial Bomb Blasts as much as the riots. Both have the motive to be an act of deterrence to the future but to conclude that the bomb blasts have acted as a deterrent is untrue. At the same time the riots in Gujarat where the majority sufferers were the minority community, in the next 10 years post the riots, not even a single curfew has been imposed in Gujarat. (Curfew was an everyday phenomenon in Gujarat that needed a sour cricket match to start with). My Grandfather hailing from Gujarat always lamented that the Muslims being disliked by the Hindus in Gujarat primarily as they were uneducated, violent (partly because they were non-vegetarians), goons and untrustworthy. Most of the Muslims in Gujarat would terrorize the common people with their violent instincts and thus people feared them. Post the riots, its now the Muslims who live in fear in the state of Gujarat. The same cannot be said about the serial bombings. Ofcourse the periodic repetition of these events causes great abnormality in public life but at the same time it wont deter any impending atrocity on Muslims if it has\s to happen. In fact as discussed earlier it certainly dents the homogeneity in the society. As the caption of the movie quotes Mahatma Gandhi An eye for an eye makes the world blind, such terror attacks just help the perpetrators to seek revenge without realizing that their violent actions are irreversible and the return to status quo are unlikely as suggested by Arendt.

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References
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Black Friday (Feature Film 2007 directed by Anurag Kashyap) Black Friday (Book by Zaidi Hussain) How to read a bomb Research Report by Rao. My Country My Life Autobiography of LK Advani Hannah Arendt On Violence Hannah Arendt: On Violence: An overview of Her Philosophy of Violence By Sen English http://www.visionsofpeace.ie/index.php/archives/16

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