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'Now we know what it means for the people of Kashmir, Punjab and Assam to live with terrorism'

Eyewitnesses in Coimbatore provided a graphic and moving description of last Saturday's catastrophe when N Sathiya Moorthy met them in the city this week.

It was past 4 o'clock, maybe 4.15 pm. I was speeding through the street, after delivering cases of soap to retailers. I heard a deafening sound that left me dumbfounded for a while. When I recovered from the initial shock, I could see burnt human flesh and parts of arms, fingers, legs flying across the place and settling down on the dusty sand. There was smoke, and as I dropped my scooter, and moved forward in a daze, I saw an old man, all burnt and charred, running across towards me. He dropped down and died, his body and face covered with blood."

Days after the event, Shanmugam is still shaken when he describes what happened that gruesome Saturday evening. What he saw was just the beginning of an evening of death and terror, when serial blasts across the textile town of Coimbatore killed over 60 people and left several score others injured.

The site where Bharatiya Janata Party president L K Advani was to have addressed an election meeting that day is deserted, a deathly silence descending on the area as it had done at Sriperumbudur a day after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in May 1991.

Barring policemen and others who keep dropping in with measuring tape and the like, there are not many who venture out, particularly after sunset in the R S Puram area of the city these days.

"I used to get threatening calls and also kept hearing about attempts to abort that evening's meeting," recalls C P Radhakrishnan, advocate and RSS activist who is the BJP candidate for the Coimbatore Lok Sabha seat. "We had all hope of winning the election; Advani's campaign would have added to our comfort-levels."

By the time the evening was over, 13 blasts in all had rocked the city, most of them in and around the venue of Advani's meeting. It did not leave hospitals and shopping complexes, and did not differentiate between men and women, young and the old, nurses and policemen.

"We have lost our colleague," sobbed one of the nurses at the local government hospital where an explosion had taken its toll. None here wants to give any names or details, but still sob uncontrollably.

"It is not just at the loss of their friends, but the very fact that they themselves had survived," says a doctor at the hospital. The confusion caused by the blast at the hospital delayed help being extended to the victims of blasts elsewhere in the city. "Maybe, that was the intention of those devils," adds the doctor.

"I was passing R V Hotel," recalls Siva from the Gandhi Nagar area. "I heard a noise, saw flames and was within seconds witnessed two-wheelers and cars parked on the side of the road destroyed and burnt. People were running helter-skelter. It took us some time to realise that a bike-bomb had gone off."

"It would have turned into another Jallianwalla Bagh, with no escape routes for the prospective victims," says Selvakumar of Coonoor who had come to Coimbatore for Advani's meeting. As he points out, going by the timings of the blasts and the locations, it would have caught the audience in their midst, as they escaped from the carnage of the first blasts.

"Advani was delayed, and so was the start of his meeting. Hence, there were not as many people around as it would have been otherwise. But for this, the casualty figures might have been much higher," says he.

If women are still scared to venture out and men are equally unsure, children in the city are housebound after a stray blast rocked a park in the suburb on Tuesday, killing four children, all of them Muslim. "Death knows no religion and terrorists do not differentiate between communities and religions," says Ramaiyan Gounder, wryly.

Intelligence sources claim the police recovered a bomb from a post office building on Saturday after sniffer-dogs had identified the same. "That was sometime before the first blasts and we kept it under wraps, hoping that nothing else would happen," one police source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

As he points out, if nothing else had happened, the BJP organisers of Advani's meeting would have blamed the police for "spreading unsubstantiated rumours" to help the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in a tough election. Cancellation of Advani's meeting, if nothing else had happened, would have been interpreted to mean that the police was colluding with the DMK.

"This situation Chief Minister M Karunanidhi wanted to avoid when he offered the seat to the CPI-M which, however, did not want it," says a DMK leader.

Karunanidhi, it is said, was concerned about a possible charge of a police-DMK nexus, particularly after the November/December riots when policemen in civvies joined Hindu militants to attack Muslim individuals and businesses, after Islamic terrorists killed a traffic constable, Selvaraj.

Not that Karunanidhi could escape the ire of the people. "What brought you now?" a wailing woman shouted at him when the chief minister visited the government hospital a day after the blast in the company of Tamil Maanila Congress chief G K Moopanar, police officials and bureaucrats.

What restored sanity to the shocked city was the state government acting without further delay. Whatever the reasons behind it, the government banned two Islamic fundamentalist organisations, the Al-Umma, and Jihad Committee, within hours of the blast and arrested its leaders.

Also arrested were leaders of the Tamil Nadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam, a budding political outfit aimed at the ranks of the 'discredited' Islamic political parties, namely the Indian Union Muslim League and the Indian National League.

In Coimbatore, the government lost no time in summoning the army and the Central Reserve Police Force, not just to assist the police but also to boost their morale.

"Now we know what it means for the people of Kashmir, Punjab and Assam to live with terrorism," says Shobha, a 35-year-old housewife. "It shatters not just your family and finances, but your confidence as well. It will take a long time for me to accept it as natural if my husband is held up somewhere, or if the children are late from school."

Elections '98

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