INDIA: Mumbai's Trains One Year Past the Blasts Commentary
INDIA: Mumbai's Trains One Year Past the Blasts
Edited by: Bernard Hibbitts | JURIST Staff

Eric Linge, Pitt Law '09, files from Mumbai:

One year ago today, July 11, 2006, a day Indians call 7/11 (or 11/7), seven coordinated blasts within fifteen minutes tore through rail cars on Mumbai's suburban railway killing 187 people. Nineteen suspects are to stand trial for the blasts at the end of this month.

Today there were small, solemn memorials at train stations on which people laid thousands of red flowers. There was extra gun-wielding security in the stations. There were no anniversary explosions. Rather, the trains appeared crowded as ever, and life on the suburban railroad continued normal.

Not that the suburban railway could ever be "normal" for an American lawyer. Even the Indian lawyers at my company refuse to ride the trains. When we go to court we take taxis that take an hour and a half through the grind of Mumbai traffic. A train would take only a half hour, but riding the train means having to struggle through the mean crush of people. It was never enjoyable, but I have ridden the train tens of times — each time without an Indian lawyer.

Mumbai's suburban railroad is the most densely packed train network in the world, and it requires a certain willingness to trample people in order to get into or out of the cars where people are literally packed tighter than sardines. To avoid this crushing crowd, people hang out the doors, stand in window sills, and sit on the roofs dangerously close to the wires of the overhead power supply.

Within days of last year's blasts, over three hundred suspects were rounded up, and 30 were charged. Nineteen are to be tried.

Justice moves slowly in India, and there is a huge backlog of court cases. Twenty-four million civil cases in the backlog is one estimate I've heard. So the bombing suspects' cases have been put into special fast-track courts. JURIST originally reported the trials would start last November, but even fast-track courts get delayed in India. The new estimate is that the trials will begin by the end of this month. The Mumbai police believe the bombings were orchestrated by a Pakistani militant group, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).

— Christine Chen, Singapore Management University '08, contributed to this report

Opinions expressed in JURIST Commentary are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JURIST's editors, staff, donors or the University of Pittsburgh.
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