India Is Resilient In Wake of Deadly Blasts; Injured to Terror Attacks, Citizens Resume Daily Lives and Investors Defy Fears of a Selloff
Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2006

By PETER WONACOTT in New Delhi and ERIC BELLMAN in Mumbai

Nearly three years ago, Panchraj Singh was selling ferry tickets to tourists seeking to escape Mumbai's August heat. A second later he had lost a friend and his hearing, when a series of car bombs rocked this cosmopolitan city, killing 60 people.

Back on that day in 2003, he scrambled to get the injured into taxis for the hospital and then, as his hearing returned, went back to work. Yesterday, on the morning after bomb blasts killed an estimated 200 people and wounded more than 700 others on seven crowded commuter trains, Mr. Singh was similarly resolute. He predicted business as usual by the weekend.

Since well before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S., Indians have been learning how to live with bouts of terrorism. Several attacks by suspected Islamist militants in the past decade on the country's biggest cities have provided searing lessons on how to return to normal amid shock, anger and anguish.

The key lesson, say those who have lived through attacks, is that even if markets go down and political temperatures go up, life goes on.

By yesterday morning, Mumbai's trains were resuming their routes as lines were cleared of wreckage. Investors defied fears of a sharp selloff, driving the Bombay Stock Exchange's benchmark Sensex index up 3%.

The resilience emboldened people from juice salesmen to top government officials. "Your resilience and resolve will triumph over the evil designs of the merchants of death and destruction," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said yesterday in a nationally televised speech. "No one can come in the path of our progress. The wheels of our economy will move on."

SJ's Binny Sabharwal3 gives an eyewitness account of the explosions that hit Mumbai's commuter-rail network. Plus, read about her harrowing commute home in this reporter's notebook4.

Helping to lift the stock market was a bellwether for India's technology sector, Infosys Technologies Ltd., which reported a 50% rise in quarterly net profit from a year earlier. Chief Executive Nandan Nilekani said he saw no signs of the bombings slowing down business or altering the investment environment. India's economy is expected to expand more than 7% in the year ending March 31.

"We have seen this in New York, Madrid and London. Lots of countries today are dealing with terrorist attacks," Mr. Nilekani said in an interview. "The people of Mumbai are especially resilient."

Police in Mumbai seeking the perpetrators of the bombings were investigating militant groups from the northern region of Kashmir, said P.S. Pasricha, the director general of police for Maharashtra state. Some security analysts have pointed blame at Pakistan, which has gone to war with India three times since 1947, two of those times over control of Kashmir. The same day as the Mumbai blasts, seven Indian tourists were killed in Kashmir, and five more were wounded yesterday. India yesterday repeated demands that Pakistan crack down on militants who New Delhi says operate from Islamabad's part of Kashmir. Pakistan rejected the allegations that terrorists use it as a base.

Meanwhile, the Mumbai attacks prompted other Indian cities to put more security personnel on the streets. In New Delhi, rifle-toting police were seen patrolling markets.

Islamist militants are suspected to have been behind a number of recent terrorist attacks in India. The most deadly attack was in March 1993, when a series of bombs exploded across Mumbai, targeting symbols of the city's wealth: trains, hotels, offices and the Bombay Stock Exchange. Police connected the 1993 attack, which killed more than 250 people, to Muslim mafia figures that possibly had support from Pakistan-based militants. In another incident, Islamist militants stormed Parliament in New Delhi in December 2001, killing six policemen and spurring India and Pakistan to mass troops along their border. Most recently, Indian police traced three bomb blasts that killed an estimated 60 people in crowded markets and a bus in New Delhi last October to an Islamist group based in Kashmir.

But India, a vast mixing bowl of beliefs, has endured a spectrum of political violence beyond Islamist militant attacks.

In the early 1990s, police in the northern Punjab region put down a movement among adherents to the Sikh religion fighting for a separate state. In recent years, the government also has struggled to suppress a burgeoning insurgency among agrarian rebels who have attacked police stations and killed local officials.

As director general of the Punjab police, K.P.S. Gill said crushing the Sikh separatist movement came with a heavy cost in lost lives. He estimates that 2,000 security personnel died between 1988 and 1992. But people also learned a valuable lesson -- how not to react to violence. "I think last October's bomb attacks in New Delhi show how quickly a city returned to normal," said Mr. Gill, who is now the editor of a journal that focuses on counterterrorism, called Faultlines. "The city began moving again almost immediately."

Desraj Soni, who runs a soda-and-juice stand in New Delhi's Sarojini market, which was targeted in the October blasts, said he went back to work after the bombings as soon as police allowed merchants to do so. A bomb at the market killed his 32-year-old nephew.

As he handed out bottles of Pepsi-Cola and water at his stand yesterday, Mr. Soni said part of his earnings now support the son and daughter of his dead relative. The family still operates the nephew's juice stand around the corner. "Life continues," he said.