Car parks don’t kill people, car bombs do

It has taken the Maharashtra government 16 years to appreciate that parking lots of high-rise buildings are beachheads for terror incursions.

Basic lessons that were ignored in 1993 have become grand theses after 26/11. 

A government-appointed committee formulating the city’s first-ever security control norms has recently recommended that potential terror targets, such as high-risk public buildings, eviscerate the parking lots from their systems. Fittingly, parking spaces in basements have been marked as high priority cases for disembowelment. The committee has identified 430 buildings in the city, slotting them into high-, medium-, and low-risk categories.

The committee seems to have sternly disregarded banal details like convenience, and has urged the government to disallow parking sites even around the marked buildings. If that idea becomes an injunction, building owners will have to buy parking plots some distance from their properties.

Most Mumbaikars will concede that the new measures may prove to be a nuisance, but in the circumstances, are probably the best option. But why has the best option occurred to our babus now? Or, more to the point, why were they ignore it when 1993 offered the most dramatically destructive proof that the city needed rigorous security protocols?

The answers are coming in defeated sneers: “Not many who died in 1993 knew that hors d’oeuvre are not usually found at stables!” The defiant cynicism can be heard at malls and cinema theatres, and at housing-society meetings across middle-class Mumbai. Enough has been said about the classist nature of the mourning that followed the 26/11 attacks.

Sociologists and shrill news anchors have admitted, some less greasily than the others, that the tragedy of the CST was somehow dimmed by five-star conflagrations. So I will not put too fine a point on it.

But I will point out that the government is not the media. The government does not have to cravenly appease those who do know what hors d’oeuvre means. So the government has to answer why it did not figure out for so long that parking lots constituted a risk?

It is worth noting the 1993 sites which were hit by car bombs: the Air India building, Zaveri Bazaar, Centaur hotel, and the passport office.

Even in the 26/11 strike, the bombs that went off on Dockyard road, and the two that exploded near Vile Parle, had been planted in taxis. On that evidence, I am forced to rephrase a slogan beloved of gun lovers: Car parks do not kill people, car bombs do. So won’t it be an idea to thwart terror before it begins its journey rather than banning all the stations that might lie on its route?

Had the lessons of 1993 been heeded, perhaps some of the subsequent damage could have been mitigated.
Our babus and ministers often undertake ‘educational’ overseas tours. May be they will learn how New York has been coping without banning car parks at every building.