Quotes of the Day

Sometime after 2 p.m. on March 12, 1993, a man parked a scooter in Zaveri Bazaar, a busy jewelry market in Bombay, and walked away. Forty minutes later, the scooter exploded, killing 17 people?just one in a series of explosions in the city that day which killed 257 and injured over 700. It remains India's worst-ever terrorist attack. Last week, more than 13 years later, a Bombay court convicted 42-year-old salesman Mohammed Shoaib Ghansar of planting the scooter bomb. He was only the fifth of 123 defendants to be convicted of involvement in the blasts, believed to have been carried out by members of Bombay's Muslim underworld in retaliation for the demolition of a historic mosque in 1992 by Hindu nationalists.

Since they began to be announced last Wednesday, satisfaction over the verdicts has been tempered by frustration over the delay in delivering them. "It's a sign of complete failure that it's taken so long," says Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, a New Delhi-based security think tank. While the trial was carried out by a special terrorism court meant to sidestep India's notoriously clogged judicial system, it still took more than a decade to plow through 26,000 pages of evidence and testimony from 600 witnesses. In the meantime, 12 defendants have died, while the alleged masterminds?Bombay mobsters Dawood Ibrahim and Ibrahim (Tiger) Memon?have eluded police and are thought to be hiding overseas. Verdicts on the remaining suspects, including Bollywood film star Sanjay Dutt, accused of receiving arms from a gangster involved in the bombings, are expected in the next few weeks. But Sahni says the delay, and the ability of the main alleged plotters to escape justice, mean the verdict "will have very little deterrent value" to avert future attacks. With sectarian violence still rumbling in India?30 people were killed earlier this month by bombs during Friday prayers in Malegaon, a city 300 km northeast of Bombay?a little deterrence might come in handy.

• Aravind Adiga
• Thirteen years later, verdicts are coming in for the alleged plotters of India's worst terror attack. Is it too late to make a difference?