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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Déjà View | Relative magnitudes
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Déjà View | Relative magnitudes

The people who died in the 1993 Kolkata blast find themselves struggling to be remembered by individuals or communities

Despite the fact that it was directly borne out of malicious intent, and devastated a complete neighbourhood, the 17 March 1993 Kolkata blast instantly faded from public memory. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/MintPremium
Despite the fact that it was directly borne out of malicious intent, and devastated a complete neighbourhood, the 17 March 1993 Kolkata blast instantly faded from public memory. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint

Memory is a funny thing.

As individuals and as communities, we have a tremendous capacity to remember what we want to. And to forget what we want to.

Which is kind of a mixed blessing.

Forgetting is a good thing. If we all had to live our lives incapable of forgetting anything, that would be such endless agony. Imagine never being able to forget that terrible, unfunny Sholay spoof you acted in back in college. (I can’t. And it has been 18 years.)

Remembering is also essential. This is a column on history and part of its point is the virtue of remembering things and drawing lessons and insights from the past.

What makes things complex is the interplay between individual and collective memories. Communities can make us remember things we don’t want to. Communities can make us remember things differently than we would as individuals.

Communities can also make us forget things that we really shouldn’t.

I’ve been thinking of such matters of memory ever since the Yakub Memon trial entered its final stages earlier this week. It is really quite interesting how so many young people, many born around or after the event, have such visceral feelings about the 1993 bomb blasts in Mumbai. Where do they get this emotional intensity from? None of them were anywhere near old enough to remember it first-hand. At least some of this must be down to their communities—online, social, local, familial, religious—helping them to “remember".

But what about the things that are forgotten by both individuals and communities?

Between 1.28pm and 3.35pm on 12 March 1993, 10 bombs went off all across Mumbai. S. Hussain Zaidi’s gripping account of that day in his book Black Friday has meticulous details. The two most destructive bombs, in terms of human life, were the ones set off at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), and inside a BEST bus in Worli.

The BSE blast killed 84 people and the one in Worli took the lives of 113. These two blasts accounted for 197 of the total toll of 257 killed or missing. The third most devastating blast to go off in India that month was not any of the other 11 in Mumbai.

When that blast took place in Kolkata just five days later, everyone suspected the worst. That a nationwide network of bombs was about to go off. This did not happen. Instead, investigators quickly realized that the blast in Kolkata was unrelated to the carnage in Mumbai. Therefore, despite the fact that it was directly borne out of malicious intent, and devastated a complete neighbourhood, the 17 March 1993 Kolkata blast instantly faded from public memory.

Within weeks, journalists even forgot the death toll. Such was Mumbai’s domination of the public mind.

The best description of what happened in Bowbazar in Kolkata is to be found deep inside court documents. In 1993, Mohammed Rashid Khan, a local gambling don, ran his bookie business from 266-267, B.B. Ganguly Street, Calcutta-12. Khan already appears to have had a secret workshop above his office to make small bombs and explosives.

But after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the riots that followed, Khan began to redouble his efforts. He began to stock huge amounts of explosives “for preparing large number of bombs with a view to kill the Hindus in Calcutta by using those bombs through Muslim brothers". (Court documents seem to suggest that those are Khan’s words as told to the police.

Preparations went on secretly until, around midnight on 17 March, Khan’s entire bomb stock blew up. Everything indicates that this was accidental. The blast itself killed five people. But collapsing buildings later killed another 64. Forty-six people were injured.

The toll could have been much higher. Had the blast taken place in the daytime, it would have almost certainly killed many more in this busy commercial area. More importantly there is no saying how many people would have died had Khan managed to place the bombs all over Kolkata. Eight years later, in 2001, Khan and five associates were given life sentences.

Appeals for the death penalty were rejected because the blast itself was accidental. By then, Bowbazar had faded into obscurity.

And then, in 2014, Khan was in the news again. Because in prison he had trained as an artist and was now exhibiting his work along with other inmate-artists in Kolkata. In an interview with The Hindu, he said: “I have been languishing in the home for the past 22 years. Once I am out, I aspire to open an art school for orphans and little children."

Then, this June, The Times of India reported that the West Bengal government was planning to free Khan. “It is believed that Khan has been considered for release as he is more than 60 years old and has maintained good conduct inside prison," the report said. “He now learns painting in the jail."

But once again, this news appears to have been lost in the furore happening in Mumbai. Yet again, the dead of Bowbazar find themselves struggling to be remembered by individuals or communities.

Memory. It is a funny thing.

Every week, Déjà View scours historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs. Comment at views@livemint.com.

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Published: 31 Jul 2015, 08:20 PM IST
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