• Some days later, a pair of Muslim tourists from Saharanpur, UP, were arrested for shooting pictures of the Gateway of India with an instamatic camera.

• A week later, a sinister, mass sms pointed out that “every Muslim is not a terrorist”, but that “every terrorist is a Muslim.” Subsequently, Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh sought to calm minority groups by assuring everyone that “innocent Muslims” need not panic.

• By the second week, nine former SIMI members including a carpenter and a laundryman were detained in Mumbai.. Incidentally, the same people were detained after the London blasts. “On what grounds is never explained” they say. “Our lives are a sentence in an open jail.”

After the carnage, a subtle pogrom. But so far, the investigations seem more like a game of Blind Mans’Bluff than skilled sleuthing, with the Anti Terrorist Squad bumbling around clueless in the dark. Eight arrested, no conclusive evidence. It’s been a dismal track record: thirteen years and nineteen bombs in Mumbai have yielded only one conviction to date. That’s why, today’s verdict is expected to boost the police moral, and mollify public apprehensions that India is being soft on terrorists. No doubt this is true : nail the culprits, we must.

Yet, whenever I think of Shekhadi, I cannot help but wonder if hatred can justify hatred. Or violence can ever be fought with violence. And I cannot help but remember a man we call the Father of our Nation. An eye for an eye, he said, will make the whole world blind.