Sunetra Choudhury: After the blast, it’s all very sketchy

I’m tempted to wait a little longer to write this piece. I’m wondering if I wait another night, if I listen to more people, if I read a little bit more, I will have a better understanding of what happened Wednesday morning when the Delhi high court was attacked.

I’ve already pushed the deadline of this piece trying to make sense of this briefcase bomb striking at a place where lawyers handle boring briefs, and all I know for sure is that another dozen have been added to the National Crime Records Bureau’s growing list of terror casualties.

As tiny bits of information come in slowly, all of us are trying desperately to get the big picture, to connect the dots, see if it fits in with any of the attacks before. For instance, was Wednesday the new Friday for Indian terror attacks?

The blast at the Delhi high court in May and the Mumbai blasts in July were also on a Wednesday. Was it because that’s the day slotted for PILs in the court? Or was it because the bunch of terrorists behind these plots didn’t have that much imagination and were just inspired by Naseeruddin Shah’s movie A Wednesday?

Was LK Advani’s connection with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 farfetched or was he right? All of us kept trying to play with the dates in our heads — 9/7, 13/7, 26/11 — hoping that like those pictures that throw up hidden images, even the trend behind this attack would emerge. But of course, no such thing happened.

In fact, some of the expected never took place either. For those who thought the government would throw up the usual bogeys of Pakistan, they had a totally new spin — the government blaming its own machinery, the home minister faulting his own police force.

The Harkat-ul Jihad al Islami sends an email to the media claiming they are behind this attack which gives another angle to our explorations. Was the Bangladesh-based outfit attacking us in Delhi because our prime minister was visiting Dhaka? It sounded plausible and was being probed by the National Investigation Agency till the Indian Mujahideen a day later says, it’s not them, we’re the murderers behind the blasts. (At press time, there was a third mail, which said Ahmedabad would be the next target.)

No, none of it makes sense anymore and I’m a fool for thinking it ever will. After covering a handful of terror attacks starting with the one on Parliament in 2001, I should have figured that even years later, we know very little about all of them.

Now Malegaon, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and the multiple locations in Mumbai have all merged together to form a monstrous mess with the saffron terror angle also being thrown into the mix. I don’t know what the government can do to put a hold on NCRB’s terror toll.

But there is one suggestion I have for the things they shouldn’t do. Hours after the blasts, the police released sketches of terror suspects which were carried by newspapers and channels across the country. Apparently, there were two eyewitnesses who saw the man carrying the briefcase bomb. In one version, the suspect was 26 and the other version, he was about 50.

So, the police released the two sketches so that both eyewitness versions would be covered. But, have you seen these sketches? Do either of them look like they could be of a 50-year-old, and doesn’t one of them look sub-human? I don’t know how many of you will agree with me, but when I first saw the sketches, I thought the Delhi police had released sketches they’d made during the Monkey Man episode.

It’s not like the identification software with which they make sketches went wrong only in this case. The software the Delhi police has consists of a portfolio of facial components. The eyewitness is asked to select from them the type of eyes, nose and other features and while it may be a good idea in theory, it confuses the eyewitnesses’ fragile memory.

So you end up with an unbelievable portrait which has very little success rate. Off the record, my source tells me, these sketches have never helped them catch any suspect and officially, they claim success only in the Dhaula Kuan rape case. Of course, when they finally catch the accused on the basis of the suspect, they keep his face hidden, so we can’t really compare the sketch to the accused. The only use for such sketches, the official said, was that they boosted the public morale and made the police look like they were doing their job.

Even in the UK, the photo-fit as they call it, is becoming obsolete. Last year, police in Hampshire faced a lot of flak for putting out images of a burglar who looked like he had lettuce for hair. Critics rightly said victims put their faith on the system and expected results and that’s the same over here.

The families of those who died know that terrorism is a battle that the world is trying to fight, that there are no easy answers to it. But the least they deserve is respect for their intelligence. They know their relatives were not killed by a monkey-man so do away with these stunts.

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News