The Unconsoled

Denied the fixing of accountability for what befell them, survivors and kin of the slain in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts find their old wounds reopened after the recent acquittals

- By Jinit Parmar and Pritha Vashishth

WHEN the Bombay High Court on July 21 declared 12 prisoners not guilty after the bench found the prosecution had “utterly failed” to prove their involvement in the 2006 Mumbai suburban train serial blasts for which five of them had been sentenced to death and seven to life imprisonment in 2015, 40-year-old Mumbai resident Chirag Chauhan could feel his old wounds reopen after the same two decades the accused had spent in prison until acquittal.

On July 11, 2006, when the lifelines for the city's working class had become sites of carnage with seven blasts ripping through trains on the Western Railway line in a span of 11 minutes during the evening rush hour, killing 189 people and injuring over 800, it changed Chauhan's life forever. “I don’t remember the explosion,” he says. “I just remember waking up in a hospital and not being able to feel my legs.” The blast had severed both his legs below the knee.

Just minutes before the explosion, Chauhan had boarded the Borivali-bound train from Churchgate, like he always did. He was on his way home to Kandivali at the end of a day of his articleship at a chartered accountancy firm. Chauhan smiles as he recalls he had left earlier than usual on that day and wonders how drastically his fate would have been different had he stuck to the routine more exactly. But, then, who could have known his early exit from office would give him a new identity, a new self, before he finally reached home?