The Americans cancelled JocJoc’s ‘visa’ on Senate request – why didn’t our gov’t cancel his passport?

It turns out that the reason the Fertilizer Scandal’s "Running Man", former Agriculture Undersecretary Jocelyn "Joc-Joc" Bolante got nabbed upon landing in Los Angeles airport is the fact that the American government and its INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) had cancelled his US visa.

The US government did so at the request of the Philippine Senate which had issued a "warrant" of arrest for Bolante after the ex-Usec had repeatedly snubbed Senate subpoenas to appear in that chamber to shed light on the P728-million fertilizer fund scam. For months JocJoc had evaded appearing in the Senate by skipping off abroad, mostly to some haven in the US West Coast.

Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Aquilino "Nene" Pimentel insists Bolante must explain where hundreds of millions (perhaps "over a billion"?) pesos in fertilizer funds earmarked for farmers went. The Opposition claims it was disseminated for political purposes as well as pocketed by big shots during the May 2004 campaign.

Senator Ramon "Jun" Magsaysay is determined to get Bolante extradited back to Manila to be investigated by the Senate and, he indicates, the Ombudsman. Jun, the son of the late President Ramon Magsaysay, is eager to secure closure on this sordid case since (as he told me) this is his last term in the Senate. When it ends in 2007, he will not seek reelection, he says, and will return to private business.

Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita stressed yesterday that the government is not doing anything and will not attempt to get JocJoc out of jail in Los Angeles because he is no longer connected with the government and is a private citizen. Mixed signals are being received, however, by the public. One is that the Consulate in L.A. must "help" Bolante because he is a Filipino citizen, just as it would any Filipino in distress in that area. Susmariosep, guys, don’t touch Bolante "voluntarily" with a ten-foot pole. Let him do his time in stir, and leave the tender loving care to his lawyers.

In fact, I’ve a question to ask. Bolante humiliated the Philippine government, and the Senate in particular, by refusing to testify and merrily traipsing off abroad to escape repeated Senate subpoenas. Bolante would have been forced to stop his hi-jinks sooner and come home to face the music, if our government, through the Department of Foreign Affairs had merely cancelled his passport, thus depriving him of a travel document.

Why wasn’t this done? The Americans acted promptly. We didn’t act at all. Isn’t that embarrassing – and a cause for shame?

* * *

"OPLAN TRIDENT", the rebel officers’ alleged plan to seize the Batasan and take our Congressmen hostage, while mounting Anti-Administration protest marches, demonstrations, and all sorts of distracting mayhem outside the Batasan complex on SONA Day, was first exposed in this column.

When I got the plan from my Deep Throat in the military, I had expressed a caveat. Why had it been discovered in the captured PC (laptop) of one of the rebel officers nabbed in a safehouse on Batasan street in Fil-Invest village. Had the mutineers been so careless as to have encrypted their own strike conspiracy, "Oplan Trident", in a computer which could be seized and deciphered by the military and the police?

It seems, as the military "confirmed" when they acknowledged my scoop the following day, the plotters were that dopey. "Oplan Trident," which became the talk of the town and was headlined by the print and electronic media, and its targets were discussed daily – with the Armed Forces and PNP finally declaring they had crushed the plan, and taken stringent measures to protect the Batasan and keep the troublemaking mobs at bay in the St. Peter’s church area.

But what I suspected when my "exclusive" made the conspiracy known, continues to bug me. Were the lurid "details" genuine, or had they been "planted" by military psy-war experts?

In any event, GMA, the Cabineteers and sundry officials who’re trooping to applaud the Boss Lady, and all who’re going to the State of the Nation Address before the joint Houses, the diplomats and other gliterrati, have been pronounced "safe" and secure. I trust this will be so.

In love and war, as in the drinking of coffee, there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip.

As William Shakespeare remarked, the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go awry. Of Mice and Men, now I recall, was taken from the Bard Bill by the great novelist John Steinbeck for the title of a powerful novel. Let our men triumph this time, and send mischievous mice scurrying off to their holes in fear and fright.

All those reported plots and counter-plots in our Metro Manila area make the situation sound like comic-opera. But last Tuesday’s train bombings in Mumbai (Bombay) show that terrorist attacks are not comic – the death toll there has now soared over 200, as I expected when the "reports" of the eight bombs planted in trains and station platforms began appearing (we watched BBC and CNN half the night until early morning).

I know Bombay (stupidly renamed "Mumbai" in January 1996, thus making the city disappear from the map) very well.

In younger days, I rode those trains, including the ones going to the Western suburbs which were "hit" Tuesday at the height of the evening rush hour. They are always packed to the gills. Indians cram themselves into each coach like sardines, some hanging from the sides of the moving coaches – in the old days, they even clambered up to ride on the roof. One bomb would have blown up at least 20 to 30 people, and injured many more.

Six million, out of Mumbai’s 16 million inhabitants, ride the trains daily – and that fatal Tuesday, one million at least were on the rails, heading home in the late afternoon in the rush hour. The terrorists knew what they were doing. An Indian train station platform is always bedlam (in the dead of night, one treads carefully, people are fast asleep on the platform). Any bomber could drop a bag packed with explosives unnoticed, with a detonator. (A cellphone like they used in the Madrid train bombings – which the Spaniards call movil – to trigger off a backpack crammed with Goma Dos explosive? Indians have cellphones galore, they come cheap there in the homeland of Infosys and Wipro, the IT giants of Bangalore. Or the bombers of Bombay could have utilized some more rudimentary detonating device, and casually left a bag or backpack in a moving train coach – like the preferably targeted First Class compartments where the executives and Marwaris travel in more comfort than the hoi polloi.

The early reports had said 40 had perished in those well-timed, successive blast. Nonsense, I said to myself. There’s something wrong with their arithmetic.

And apparently as the night wore on into dawn, with body parts, cadavers and the wounded survivors getting sorted out, the latter taken to primitive clinics and aid stations (there are few real hospitals in a metropolis which boasts scads of homegrown billionaires and millionaires, and the most multinational corporations, the financial, humid heart of the Indian subcontinent) the true ghastly proportions of the tragedy emerged.

But you know Bombay (Mumbai). Tragedy is their daily bread, or their daily chapatti. The next day, the wreckage bulldozed away, the trains were running again, the commuters piling into them – fearful but eager to go on striving to make a living in an overcrowded corner of humanity where inhabitants literally live almost knee to knee.

* * *

As to the carnage wrought by the Mumbai train "bombers" (Islamic terrorists, or vengeful pro-Muslim-radicals, or infiltrators from Pakistan?) you can be certain the toll will continue to mount.

Explosives which shred train coaches the way we saw them on television have a long lethal reach. The authorities, the last I heard them, are cautious as to where to point the finger to blame. Muslims who make up 15 percent of the population have flared up in riots, or calculated violence, before. They have also been "massacred" by Hindu militants, like the murderous fanatics of the Shiv Sena. Most of the train victims were Hindus, so one wonders.

Bombay is described as a City of Gold, but in its golden yet shabbily faded precincts, millions of Bombayers (Mumbaikars) swelter in such dehumanizing conditions that four million squatters or denizens of the dark live in putrid slums – or on the street. When your driver rushes the outbound passenger to the Sahar International Airport, he has to have the swift reflexes of the Formula One racer, the dash and panache of the kamikaze, the ability to swerve and tack ruthlessly. The fainthearted will never make it through the obstacle course of hundreds of thousands of Mumbaikars blocking the vehicle’s progress, rushing across to miss death by a few centimeters, doing gymnastics in the street, or combing out lice on the pavement, or bikes suddenly reeling into the wrong direction. Our driver, pomaded and smelling of armpit, was superb – Ben Hur crowding Massala off the chariot tracks with courage, tenacity and not a little bullishness. We drew up the driveway in a squeal of brakes and the stink of burning rubber to make it, our luggage tied atop the backs of porters, to the Last Call.

One Lonely Planet book says it all. Over half the population live in squalor, or in the street. Two million people do not have access to a toilet, six million go without clean drinking water, and "for many electricity remains a dream. They live in discomfort . . . and disease, often plagued by fears of being driven from their homes by demolition squads authorized to pull down illegal structures."

Andrew Lloyd Webber poured all these ingredients into his least successful musical, Bombay Dreams, which was a failure in London’s West End theaters, and was even more of a disaster when he tried to put it on Broadway in New York. The whole thing became a Bombay nightmare to the tiring genius who had created Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar and The Phantom of the Opera. Why had his last opus failed? I saw it twice within a year in London, on separate visits, and somehow found it lacking . . . perhaps audiences didn’t believe such a fairy tale in a dung-heap, while local Indians in Britain yawned, ho-hum.

Yet Bombay to me was always an ever-changing drama – over the years. My favorite hotel was – and remains – the Taj Mahal hotel on the Apollo Bundar, overlooking the British erection, "The Gateway to India" on the dramatic pier. In years past, the crows came pecking at your window.

Nowadays, the Taj Mahal is an air-conditioned super-palace, gleaming with the splendor of wealth, and the redolence of the old India of the maharajahs and nizams, and the Maharashtri warrior kings, plus the echoes of the British Raj.

Bombay was not an Indian city or scatter of islands. It had been ceded to Portuguese, but the British crown had acquired the region by marriage. Basically, the English created "Bombay" to serve their mercantile interests, mainly by the East India Company.

The term Bombay is what shines and pulsates in Filipino memory. We’ve always called Indians – all of them Bombays (nobody ever thinks of Mumbai’s).

When I was a small child, the Bombays were heavily bearded itinerant traders (huge bags full of treasures and trinkets on their huge shoulders). They were actually turbaned Sikhs, but they were known as Bombays. (This was half a century before the 5/6’ers who’re mainly Punjabis). My lola, and other elder folk, would terrify us kids – since those gigantic peddlers with their fierce beards would be so intimidating in appearance – with the admonition: "If you don’t behave yourselves, the Bombay will come and get you!"

Now the terrorists have gotten the Bombays.

* * *

We were in Madrid on Black Friday, March 11, 2004, when bomb blasts rattled our hotel, the Palace, and trains pulling into the Al Atocha station were shredded by Goma Dos bombs. Body parts, corpses, horribly maimed and wounded all over the place. A total of 199 people dead, and more than a thousand horribly wounded. So, I’m sort of a reluctant expert on terrorist train bombings.

However, Bombay is a city of more habitual violence. The worst outrage occurred on March 12, 1993 (that awful month, Beware of Ides of March). Thirteen bombs exploded in a single day, smashing among other buildings the famed Bombay Stock Exchange, the Air India Building, the Sheraton Sea Rock Hotel, the Centaur Hotel, etc. Dubbed the "Muslim Revenge" for the rioting of Hindu mobs which slew 557 people, 70 percent of them Muslims, the bombings killed 317 people. Bombay got to its feet in the debris, and it was as the writer David Collins put it, "business as usual the next day."

On December 2, 2002, two persons were slain and 31 hurt in a powerful explosion in a bus just outside the packed Chatkopar railway station – and the banned Students Islamic Movement got the blame, with police collaring more than six suspects. On January 27, 2003, thirty were injured when a bomb planted in a bicycle went off outside Vile Parle railway station, near a shopping complex. Luckily it was a holiday and all shops were closed. Otherwise, hundreds of shoppers would have been sliced down or wounded.

On December 6, 2002, twenty-five were injured in a bomb blast at McDonald’s in the Mumbai Central Suburban Railway station. Fortunately, it was a crude explosive device tucked into an air-conditioning duct.

What next? Bombay waits for the next attack – but life moves on. Or what they call life. In the modern city center – Victorian in aspect really – stands an almost exact replica of the clock tower of Big Ben in London. When it tolls – for whom will it toll tomorrow?