[Nine blasts and no
fatalities. Nangzey Dorjee, the secretary of the Bodh Gaya Temple Management
Committee, smiled and said, “It is a miracle. It is beyond reason.” He drew
attention to the fact that one of the bombs had been put under the diesel tank
of the ambulance parked outside what is called the Butter-lamp House. But other
than shattered windows, there was no damage to the structure. Mr. Dorjee was at
the temple when the explosions took place. He was aware of his own happy
escape.]
 |
Manish Bhandari/Associated Press
A National Security Guard soldier collecting evidence from the blast site inside
the Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bihar on Monday.
|
In Bodh Gaya in Bihar, the Buddha sits inside the Mahabodhi Temple
with a brilliant crystal bowl in his lap. The Buddha’s gilded figure is placed
on a plinth, inside a glass enclosure, rising more than seven feet above human
height. His beautiful hooded eyes are downcast, his eyelids and irises lined
with a shade that is the blue of water and bright skies. And his full lips are
painted pink and fixed, for all eternity, in a quiet, imperturbable smile.
The Mahabodhi Temple,
completed sometime during the reign of the Gupta kings in the seventh century
A.D., was built on the site where the Buddha is said to have attained
enlightenment during the sixth century B.C. Early in the morning on July 7, a bomb blast damaged
a small section outside the temple. There were three additional blasts inside
the temple premises that morning, and five more at other places of Buddhist
worship in Bodh Gaya.
The damage was surprisingly
small, injuring only two worshippers. Tenzing Dorjee, a Tibetan Buddhist who
has been living in India since 1959, was one of the injured. A five-inch-long
shrapnel pierced his left foot. Vilas Ga, a monk from Myanmar and a graduate
student in Buddhist studies at the nearby Magadh University, was more seriously
hurt. Mr. Ga was meditating when the explosion under his bench drove shrapnel
into his arms and face.
Nine blasts and no
fatalities. Nangzey Dorjee, the secretary of the Bodh Gaya Temple Management
Committee, smiled and said, “It is a miracle. It is beyond reason.” He drew
attention to the fact that one of the bombs had been put under the diesel tank
of the ambulance parked outside what is called the Butter-lamp House. But other
than shattered windows, there was no damage to the structure. Mr. Dorjee was at
the temple when the explosions took place. He was aware of his own happy
escape.
Inscribed in red stone
outside his office are the words of the Dhammapada: “Do not judge the faults of
others nor what they did not do; check what is right or wrong for you to do or
not to do.” Mr. Dorjee said that he had no “expectations” from the
investigations into the identities of the bombers. He wasn’t speaking with any
bitterness; he was simply conveying a spiritual attitude.
On Wednesday, a little
after dawn, the police arrived at the 80-foot stone statue of the Buddha, a
five minute walk from the temple, and asked all the vendors outside to remove
their carts and disassemble their makeshift shops. I tried to find out the
reason and was told that the Indian home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, was to
arrive in two hours. The terrorists had managed to put a bomb on the statue at
a height of about 20 feet above the ground. That bomb didn’t explode and was defused.
The Buddha retained his mysterious stone smile.
Two siblings — Sonu,
13, and Supriya, 8, children of a Chinese-food cook at the nearby Sujata Hotel
— were walking together to school. They walk past the 80-foot statue every day.
On the day after the blasts, their school had remained closed. Sonu had a
theory. “Pakistanis had done it,” he said. “Pakistan had done such things
before too.” His sister said shyly she didn’t know what her brother was talking
about.
Back at the Mahabodhi
Temple, those waiting for the home minister heard that the Congress Party
leader Sonia Gandhi was also arriving in an hour. Suddenly, among the assembled
journalists, there was excitement. Television reporters, microphones in hand,
marched toward their cameras.
The number of white
Tata Sumo and Tata Spacio cars parked near the temple multiplied. A fire engine
drew up the neem tree, and so did an ambulance. Police officers and soldiers
from different battalions and in a variety of uniforms and headgear gathered in
groups. More officers commenced their inspections, and two female police
officers carrying sticks jogged toward the gates of the temple.
The premises were
cleared of visitors. Constables from Bihar Police tied a long and heavy nylon
rope from tree to tree, marking a clear line of control for the journalists
massed on the other side. A bomb-clearing squad arrived, and with them a
bomb-sniffing dog named Dimpy. Commandos climbed on to the roofs of nearby
shops and stood guard with their AK-47 rifles.
A long wait ensued. One
hour turned to three.
There was time
available now to exchange news. The Indian Mujahideen, or somebody claiming to
be the Indian Mujahideen, had posted tweets claiming responsibility for the
blasts. The I.P. address of the Twitter account had been traced to Pakistan,
but the language was all mixed up and wrong.
There was further
confusion. The young men and women who had been detained because they had
appeared on the closed-circuit TV footage from the night of the blasts had been
allowed to go. They were innocent. Why else would they have approached the
guards and chatted with them before planting bombs? The low boundary wall at
the back of the temple would have provided a much easier access. Three
reporters went to inspect the wall at the back and passed two bearded youth
wearing skullcaps coming out of the mosque that shares a street with the
Mahabodhi Temple. A reporter wondered aloud, “Have they been investigated?”
Then came the news
that two men had been detained. But they weren’t Muslim. They had Hindu names.
People took bets on which politician would jump on this new development first.
Manish Kumar, a
Patna-based journalist for NDTV channel, predicted that all the politicians in
Mrs. Gandhi’s entourage, including Mr. Shinde, were going to bear appropriately
sombre expressions. Around noon, Mrs. Gandhi arrived at the temple wearing a
creamy-lemon sari and a look of gloom.
She wasn’t smiling.
Mr. Kumar, the television journalist, said that Indian politicians have become
experts at “terror tourism.” Such attacks provided opportunities for the
politics of compassion and outrage, he contended.
Mr. Kumar had also
predicted that Mrs. Gandhi would not visit the local hospital where the two
injured victims had been admitted. In an hour, after Mrs. Gandhi’s cavalcade
had departed, I returned to the hospital where the Tibetan Buddhist and the
Burmese monk were being treated. Mr. Kumar was right: Mrs. Gandhi had skipped
the visit to the hospital.
In Ward 2 of the
intensive care unit, Mr. Dorjee was lying on his side, his arm cradling his
head. On the bed next to him, Mr. Ga sat surrounded by half a dozen fellow
monks from Myanmar. The monks were taking pictures.
The previous evening,
a cheerful Mr. Dorjee told me that he lost his parents as a child when they
were making the difficult crossing from Tibet to India in 1959, fleeing from
the Chinese Army. Mr. Dorjee was only 8 years old. Once he found himself in
India, he lived for a while in Ladakh and then in the Tibetan colony in Mankot
village, Uttarakhand, until 1967. For more than a quarter century, from 1976 to
2002, Mr. Dorjee served as an infantryman in the Indian Army. Since his
retirement, he has been working as a staff supervisor in a Tibetan monastery in
Bodh Gaya.
For the past eight
years, Mr. Dorjee has prayed at the Mahabodhi Temple from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. When
asked about his prayers, Mr. Dorjee said he prayed for world peace.
On the next bed, Mr.
Ga communicated in monosyllables with fellow monks. His face was swollen with
shrapnel wounds. His eyes were red with conjunctivitis and his right ear hurt.
Mr. Ga’s arms and hands were covered in blood-stained bandage.
A senior investigating
official, who didn’t want to be named because he was not authorized to speak to
the media, said that the bomb blasts had a possible link with Myanmar. Last
October, after the bomb blasts in Pune, an operative from the Indian Mujahideen
had been arrested by the police. The arrested man had revealed that his group
intended to attack Bodh Gaya to avenge the violence against Muslims in Myanmar
by Buddhist extremists.
Could the official be
certain of the Myanmar connection? The investigating official said, “If I
threaten you today and three days later you are found dead, I am the prime
suspect.” There wouldn’t be grounds for certainty, he said, but there would be
reason to forcefully pursue a particular line of investigation.
Under the current
circumstances, however, with the parliamentary elections around the corner in
2014, “everyone is being coy,” the official said. The ruling party would be
happy if a Hindu extremist was arrested and the opposition would like to blame
a Muslim outfit, he said.
I asked Mr. Ga if the
killings of Muslims in Myanmar could possibly have led to the bomb attacks in
Bodh Gaya. “No,” he said. Was he angry at what had happened? “No,” he repeated.
Was he at peace? “Yes,” he said.
Amitava Kumar is the author
of “A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna,” to be released this month by
Aleph Book Company. He is a professor of English at Vassar College in New York.
