The 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai were a retaliation to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya a few months earlier. Most people now are curious, and clueless, about why so many blasts targeting not VVIPs or institutions, but the common man are going off in Mumbai.
But the city police have a fair idea, although they can do little about it.
Saquib Nachan, the mastermind of the series of blasts since December 2002, now in police custody, did not let through much information to the police. But what the cops did pick up on is that Nachan and his fellow terrorists are more motivated than the underworld which put on the 1993 blasts, was.
Although police officers fight shy of admitting this on record, Monday's blasts at Mumbadevi make clear what they knew all along - that this is not Kashmir or Ayodhya that the SIMI activists are reacting to. They are far more motivated - it is Gujarat which is on their minds.
These former activists of the Students Islamic Movement of India are also far more committed than the underworld was. While the latter were essentially a bunch of misguided, largely uneducated and unemployed youth in it mostly for the money, today's activists are committed zealots and the police are finding it impossible to crack their network.
Worrying them is the fact that the newer lot of terrorists are not misled at all. They have simmered for over a year over the massacre of fellow Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and when the minorities of that state were found to be too cowed down to retaliate, Nachan and his gang decided to take matter into their own hands.
Not surprising then that the first of the recent blasts happened in a bus at Ghatkopar which is an area largely populated by Gujaratis. The next major one happened at Mulund on a train - Mulund again is largely occupied by Gujaratis.
Monday's blast at Mumbadevi and Zaveri Bazaar has only reinforced the fact - the area is almost entirely populated by Gujarati shopkeepers, diamond, gold and grain and textile merchants - and its residential premises are also occupied by this community.
It may also not be a coincidence that Gujarat's Chief Minister Narendra Modi was in Mumbai on Saturday, in a yatra round town, typical of his party, after bringing the ashes of freedom fighter Shyamji Krishan Verma from Geneva. He was triumphant, gung-ho and as arrogant as ever - and the Gujaratis turned out in large numbers to give him a hero's welcome.
According to top police officers, Nachan and his gang of terrorists have sworn to avenge themselves of Modi and his butchery in Gujarat last year and they might stop at nothing to achieve their goals - the elimination of Gujaratis in Mumbai (who are more than half the population of the city) which might be a very difficult task. In the process a lot more innocent people are being killed and the police seem unable to stop the massacre.
One measure of how difficult the task is that these terrorists are all highly educated - among them doctors, engineers, chartered accounts and systems analysts with enviable job and career profiles. They speak English better than their lawyers at times and are far more articulate than the prosecution when produced before the courts.
The police believe that some of these activists may also belong to the little known sect, the Ahle Hadees - impenetrable and incorruptible.
That leaves the police with a lot
of intelligence reports (like about a possible blast at the Tajmahal Hotel
(it happened a few metres away closer to the Gateway of India on Monday)
but little that they can do about it - except simply wring their hands
and wait for it to happen.