Seven Years Later, a Look Back at TIME’s Cover on the 2008 Mumbai Attacks

Mumbai is no stranger to terrorism. The bustling, teeming metropolis on India’s western seaboard has faced nearly a dozen militant attacks since the early 1990s, most of them in the form of explosives placed on its overcrowded public transport systems. The South Asian nation’s financial capital has thus become known for its resilience, and the so-called “Mumbai spirit” that allows it to bounce back and move on from such atrocities.

On this day in 2008, however, the gunning down of more than 150 people in a series of coordinated simultaneous attacks, by terrorists who entered from the Arabian Sea that frames Mumbai’s picturesque skyline, would make the city — and country — take a long, hard look at itself.

As TIME wrote in a cover story a week after the attacks entitled “India’s Pain”:

Most of the core social and political issues that the story goes on to describe, laid bare by the shock of the “26/11” attacks — India’s tenuous relationship with neighboring Pakistan, its treatment of its own Muslim population and its preparedness for future acts of violence — endure today.

But even as Mumbai stops to remember, it continues to question.

Read the full cover story from 2008 here in the TIME archives