At 1330 hours, on a pleasant Bombay afternoon, a car exploded in the basement of the Bombay Stock Exchange, rocking the 28-storey building and killing 50 people. Just 30 minutes later, another bomb went off at Corporation Bank. More casualties. Within the next two hours, 12 blasts ripped through Mumbai, killing 257. A strategic choice of time, on a Friday afternoon. The then chief minister found this out pretty quickly, and so he invented the 13th blast, purportedly in an area of the other community.
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“To prevent communal riots,” he
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