One really has to admire supporters of the current Narendra Modi-Amit Shah led mega-majority BJP government at the Centre (plus sundry allies). And I’m not even talking about the tired “Jawaharlal Nehru is to blame for the current pollution in Delhi because he didn’t foresee it in 1963” excuse.

No, we have new and innovative ideas which come up every day to defend the dear prime minister, his dearly beloved home minister and all the rest of our slightly less-beloved worthies “in charge”.

The bureaucrat excuse:

This is a real humdinger! For five years, from 2014 to 2019, fans of Modi and/or the BJP informed us that Modi had great and fantastic ideas to fix all India’s problems, but it was evil bureaucrats who stymied him. They did not appreciate his true genius, or they were lazy and good-for-nothing, or they were stooges of the last government.

As five years of the first term came to an end and most bureaucrats in senior positions had been changed, co-opted, rules changed to allow bureaucrats to jump into government post-retirement or resignation without a cool-off period, bureaucrats now became the wizards of change. I am not even mentioning the disaster that is the Niti Ayog. Shhh.

The old argument was conveniently flipped after the 2019 general elections. The Modi government Part II was going to soar ahead because fabulous bureaucrats were in charge. Hence the great joy when Dr S Jaishankar hopped from IFS to a Cabinet minister to the BJP. Indian foreign relations would never be better, now in good hands, they told us. Ah well.

The less said about the publicity machine which attempts to hide the misery in Kashmir the better. And then there’s the wilful and somewhat, er, badly implemented, is it fair to say, “internationalisation” of the Kashmir issue with the visit of members of the European Parliament paid for by some shady “NGO”. About which the External Affairs Minister (former brilliant bureaucrat) apparently knew nothing because this show was run by the bureaucrats in the Prime Minister’s Office and the National Security Agency. Ah, well.