My gut reaction to the Pune blast last night was a sense that it was somehow linked with the Shiv Sena protests against the release of Shah Rukh Khan's latest film. I first got the news through a couple of concerned messages from friends I am connected with on social media, checking on people they knew in Pune. I was a bit preoccupied with the blog post I was just finishing (which, uncannily, was about love and hate, among other things) at that time. I vaguely remembered catching the news earlier in the day that most cinema halls in Pune had chosen not to screen the controversial movie, out of fear of incurring the Sena's wrath, notwithstanding the security arrangements and the strong police deployment by the local authorities. But I did not expect things to get so bad so fast. So I hastily put my blog post aside and began investigating this breaking news story.
As it turned out, this was a bomb blast, a planned attack by terrorists (suspected to be the LeT and/or IM). It wasn't a mob of hooligans on a "spontaneous" rampage (a specialty of the Shiv Sena modus operandi these days -- they've become very good at organizing spontaneous acts of vandalism). And so it wasn't something the Sena activists did, after all. They would not plant bombs and kill people. Not in Pune, for sure. But I could still see a clear connection all the same: my initial gut reaction was not altogether wrong. Quite simply, the Pune police force was too busy with the security bandobast around the many cinema halls where the movie was originally scheduled to show, and the enemy saw this as an opportune moment to strike somewhere else, at a location they had most likely been targeting all along. All they seemed to have been waiting for was the timing.
Call it bizarre if you like, but it was almost as though the actors at two opposing ends of this horrific drama were colluding to act in concert. Almost as though these terrorists had partners in India whose task it was to create a big enough diversion that the entire law and order machinery would be compelled to focus their time, attention and energies on, exposing the soft underbelly of the city open to attack. I'm not trying to suggest that the Sena was colluding with the terrorists. But hey, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
