Back On Track

As he lay in his Bombay hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, Tejas Pathak looked up and beheld India’s turbaned Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, who had tears in his eyes as he saw what the explosives had done to human flesh all around the room. “Get well soon,” Singh told him. “God bless you.” The 29-year-old stockbroker, badly wounded in the head and face, reportedly responded by congratulating Singh on his economic reforms.

In any other city, if the leader of the nation were to come to the sickbed of a person grievously wounded by a terrorist bombing, the first thought in the victim’s head would probably not be to praise the leader’s economic policy. But for the young brokerand for most of those wounded in the Bombay blasts, who are able to afford the price of a first-class train ticket in large part due to the economic reforms that Singh set in motion as far back as the early 1990sthe admiration arises from the main reason why they live in Bombay: to make money. Bombay gets struck again and again because it is, more than any other Indian city, all about money; the migrants who flock there call it a “golden songbird.”

This songbird is what the terrorists aimed to silence. That’s why they targeted the first-class compartments. They could have achieved a higher kill ratio if they had chosen the even more crowded second-class carriages, but their victims would have been poorer. So the casualties were from the great striving middle class, not rich enough to afford a car and driver, but enriched enough by Singh’s reforms to commute first class: stockbrokers, small-time diamond dealers, software technicians.

The day of the blasts, the world was wondering what would become of Bombay. “Is it going to be like Sarajevo?” an American television interviewer asked me. There were predictions that the stock market would nosedive, but it actually gained 3% the very next day. This was history repeating itself; after a bombing in 1993, when the exchange building itself was attacked, traders stood amid the ruins and used the old manual system, sending the Sensex shooting up 10% in two days. Just to show ’em.

This civic spirit of Bombay is not well understood by the rest of the world. The week before the blasts, Reader’s Digest came out with a specious, culturally biased survey declaring that Bombay was the world’s rudest cityand the politest was that famed citadel of courtesy, New York City. “In Mumbai, they’ll step over a person who’s fallen in the street,” the magazine quoted a Bombayite as saying. But as soon as the bombs went off, Bombayites stooped low to pick up anyone who had fallen in the street, and carried their blood-soaked bodies to hospital in their arms. People rushed out of the slums to pull victims out of blasted trains; they gave complete strangers rides home; and the hospitals had such a crush of people wanting to donate blood that they issued public pleas asking volunteers to stay away. In their darkest hour, Bombayites of all religions and classes became blood brothers. Readers Digest’s editors should now eat the July issue of their magazine, page by page.

Another prediction that Bombay defied was that it would erupt in riots. It didn’t, because Bombay learned an important lesson after the last riots in 1993: they are bad for business. And, as in the rest of India, business in Bombay is booming, because the political foundations for a truly democratic, composite culture have been laid. The fact that the Prime Minister, who gave wings to the golden songbird, wears a turban is proof of this. This country is 82% Hindu, but it’s led by a Sikh Prime Minister, a Muslim President and an Italian Catholic woman who’s leader of the governing coalition. (To put that in perspective: 21/4 centuries after independence, the U.S. has yet to elect anyone who’s not Christian, white and maleeven as Vice President.)

But the city has to be careful, after the initial euphoria of having survived, not to bask in continuous self-congratulation. Traveling every day in the Bombay locals is a form of slow-motion terror; people commute in conditions (500 to a compartment) that would be illegal for the transport of animals. Much of the city exists outside the scope of basic municipal services such as water, roads and security. The government admitted that it had indications that an attack of this kind was coming, but could do nothing to prevent it. Through floods, bombs and riots, Bombayites have been forced to rely on their famous resilience and humanitybecause they can’t rely on their government. Perhaps this horrific tragedy will powerfully focus the government on the problems of the country’s galloping urbanization, and the dire need to invest in infrastructure.

When Tejas Pathak leaves his hospital bed and joins the great swarm of commuters once again in quest of the golden songbird, the least that his government owes him is that his commute has a modicum of comfort and the maximum of safety. Bombayites, in responding to terror, have shown the world their best. Now it’s their government’s turn to follow suit.