Dragon Fire

Mumbai/Bombay, Maharastra, southern India

Within an hour of the Kargil/Dras sector falling, explosions tore through cities all over India. The first was in Mumbai, the capital of Maharastra, where the state government was fervently Hindu nationalist. A massive car bomb went off on Madame Cama Road, outside the state government offices, near Horniman Circle on the edge of the main modern downtown business district. A security guard on duty was killed.

A second car bomb exploded in Delhi’s Connaught Place and over the next two hours there were bomb attacks in thirteen Indian states. The only significant city to escape was Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, for reasons which only became apparent much later.

The most concentrated violence was in the north-east. Two car bombs exploded in the capital of Arunachal Pradesh, Itanagar; one outside the town hall and the other close to the police station. Bomdi La, the southern town in the Kameng Division near Bhutan, was attacked by three timer bombs and grenades were thrown in the western town of Tawang, the closest major centre to the Bhutanese border.

In neighbouring Assam, guerrillas claiming to be from the once-defunct United Liberation Front of Assam fought running gun battles with police and troops in Dispur, the state capital, and in the second city, Narogong. When the fighting was finished, twenty-nine Indian security personnel were dead, together with more than fifty guerrillas.

Strategically, the most important target was the main trunk road heading north towards Sikkim from West Bengal, cutting across the smallest corridor of Indian territory. It was less than thirty kilometres across at its narrowest. Wedged between Nepal to the west and Bangladesh to the east, this was where the geographical cohesion of India was at its most vulnerable. It was known as the Siliguri corridor or Chicken’s Neck. The road, which linked Siliguri and Guwahati, was blown in three places and blocked with booby-trapped empty fuel trucks. Two hundred mujahedin fighters held the position, while Indian infantry and fighter planes tried to dislodge them. It was later discovered that the guerrillas had come over the border from Bangladesh, where they had been trained for the operation by Pakistani and Chinese specialists. Every man would die, but for a short time, Pakistan’s dream and India’s nightmare had come true. The seven states of the north-east were cut off from the rest of India.