Victims of Statistics

On July 11th freedom-fighters bombed the heck out of commuter trains in Bombay. Those who were lucky didn't even hear the blasts.

Given the Government and general public's total lack of objectivity, we decided to do a little analysis. There were two theories floating around:

a) These blasts were to avenge the 2002 Gujarat riots
b) The planners tried to avoid Muslim casualty

We set out to do some basic analysis. We pulled the list of the names of the dead from the Bombay Police Helpline. Then we took a list of common Gujarati last names from here. For some reason we ended up with 214 dead. We decided that this wouldn't hurt our analysis much. A quick and dirty analysis revealed:

a) There were 47 Gujaratis among the dead
b) Total number of Muslims killed: 7

Now, the percentage of Gujaratis in Bombay is reported between 14 and 18%, while the percentage of Muslims is about 17%. Assuming a reservation type logic, we should have seen about 30 - 38 Gujaratis and 34 Muslims among the dead.

Conclusion: huge success on both counts. Of course you would think that to kill Gujaratis you would go to Gujarat but that's another story.

Note: I will post the names of the dead as a comment on the blog with Gujarati and Muslim names highlighted. As I write this, there are reports that the Government is totally clueless about the bombings. Not that there is a huge political will to find any clues.