When A Gunman Held Commuters In Double-Decker Bus Hostage In Mumbai

2008 may easily qualify as India's blood-soaked year. Many big cities like Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, New Delhi and Guwahati were rocked by serial bombings, killing hundreds and maiming thousands. However, Mumbai remained peaceful. After the train blasts of July 2006, no further terrorism-related incidents were reported in Mumbai. Although the Indian Mujahideen, which confessed to many blasts across the nation, had links in Mumbai, the city remained untouched by their diabolical designs.

The popular Bollywood song, 'Ye Bambai shehar haadson ka shehar hai', charges Bombay to be a city of tragedies. True to its claim, Mumbai couldn't sustain peace for long. After a lull of an initial few months, a wave of fear and anxiety hit the common dwellers of Mumbai.

On October 27, 2008, at around 10:30 am, the news trickled in that a double-decker BEST bus numbered 332 had been hijacked at Kurla. As per the initial information, 12 passengers were taken hostage and one was shot. My immediate apprehension was that after conducting bloodbaths across India, the Indian Mujahideen was now back in Mumbai. I got a call from a source in the local police that the hijacker wanted to talk to the media. I hurriedly left for the spot, which was 14 kilometres away. My colleague Umesh Kumawat was on another shoot, and he rushed towards the spot as well.

I was thrilled with the thought of acting as a hostage negotiator. In my mind, I began preparing on how I should convince the hijacker to release the hostages and surrender. It would be a great learning experience, I thought. However, by the time I reached Kurla, negotiating a traffic jam, everything was over. The hostages were rescued, the area around the bus was cordoned off, the hijacker was killed, and his body was being taken to the hospital. I saw ACP Mohammed Javed standing near the bus, still holding the emptied service revolver in his hand. It was Javed who had first fired on the hijacker and led the police team inside the bus.

 'When I entered the bus, I saw him holding a passenger and pointing the gun towards him. I told him to surrender, but he didn't. What should have I done to save that passenger's life? I had to fire,' Javed explained to me. Javed and his team fired over a dozen bullets at the hijacker, of which three pierced his head and one ripped his heart.

The hijacker turned out to be 25-year-old Kundan Singh, aka Rahul Raj, from Patna in Bihar. He was instigated by the hate campaign against North Indians launched by the MNS chief Raj Thackeray. That year, after Raj Thackeray was arrested on charges of giving provocative speeches, his party workers attacked the North Indians. A few people were lynched by violent mobs. North Indian youngsters, who came to Mumbai to appear in a railway recruitment exam, were thrashed.

An enraged Rahul Raj reached Mumbai with a country-made pistol and boarded the BEST bus at Sakinaka. As the bus reached Kurla, he took control of the bus by brandishing the pistol and went on the upper deck and held several passengers as hostages. Seeing police approach the bus, he started firing randomly, and one bullet hit a passenger. The people around heard him shouting from the window that he didn't intend to harm the passengers but wanted to kill Raj Thackeray.

The encounter ensued a controversy, and a bitter war of words followed between the politicians of Bihar and Maharashtra. Bihari politicians across the party lines condemned the encounter and alleged that no efforts were made by the Mumbai Police to catch Rahul Raj alive. The Maharashtra government retorted by saying that the police did the right things as per the circumstances. Apart from a chief secretary-level enquiry announced by the Maharashtra government, the doors of the Supreme Court and Patna High Court were also knocked by the petitioners.

Although the bus hijacking incident made the citizens of Mumbai fearful, especially those using public transport, it was a minor incident when compared with what the city had endured in the past. At the time, Mumbaikars didn't know that exactly after a month, something was going to happen in their city, which would shake the world.

(This is an excerpt from Jitendra Dixit's 2022 book Bombay After Ayodhya: A City in Flux, published by HarperCollins India. Only subheadings and paragraph breaks have been added by NDTV for readers' ease. These are the personal views of the author.

Disclaimer: The author and publisher of the book are solely responsible for the contents of the book or any excerpt derived therefrom. NDTV shall not be responsible or liable for any claims arising from the contents of the book, including any claims of defamation, infringement of intellectual property rights or any other right of any third party or of law.

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