Mumbai

Sameer is late for our meeting this morning. He’s got friends and relatives in Mumbai, and news starts to break right around time of our meeting about the subway bombings there. Phone calls to and from are down or jammed or something. He can’t get hold of anybody and they can’t get hold of him.

Reaction in the western press is somewhat muted, or much less anyway compared to the London bombings last year, which bombings these do in fact resemble. I generally think that this muted reaction is due more to our understandings of the tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India, between India and Pakistan, and the dispute over Kashmir, rather than simply that we are more pained by the deaths of white people.

Lashkar-e-Toiba and SIMI later both deny responsibility for the bombings, although people generally still think Lashkar-e-Toiba did it, likely with the help of Pakistan.