Over the last two days, an extraordinary story of arrogance and incompetence has been unfolding before us on Indian news television (newspapers have been rather subdued in comparison). Arrogance: home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde cheerfully attending a Hindi film’s music launch function hours after the blasts in Patna at Narendra Modi ’s rally. Incompetence: the Bihar police. We should by now be accustomed to and accepting of both the arrogance of our ruling classes and the incompetence of a substantial chunk of our law and order machinery, but we haven’t been able to. Maybe it’s our fault. Maybe we just aren’t good enough for our ministers and some of our policemen.

It was surreal to watch Shinde telling the audience at the music launch: “All of you know what happened in Patna today, so I thought I wouldn’t be able to come, but I came just for Mr. Patil." The director of the film is Vishwas Patil, a bureaucrat who is also an award-winning novelist. Shinde also revealed that he had given as many as three dates to Patil earlier, but had to cancel all three times because he was busy. Clearly, he wasn’t so on the evening of the 27 October, though at least six people had been killed in a series of blasts, and a massive disaster had been barely been avoided. It’s terrifying to imagine what could have happened if there had been a stampede in a maidan packed with several hundreds of thousands of people.

We’ve seen this stunning insensitivity before from this home minister of ours. Ten months ago, innocent young men and women were tear-gassed and water-cannoned by the Delhi police for demanding basic human rights, after the brutal gangrape of a young physiotherapy intern. In an interview with Rajdeep Sardesai on CNN-IBN, when asked why no one from the government had gone to India Gate and spoken to the agitators, he said: “No, the government can’t go everywhere where any group of people is protesting. If tomorrow 100 adivasis are killed in Gadchiroli or Chhattisgarh, should the government go there? No." Yes, he really said that. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears when I saw him say that on TV, and I would dearly love to believe that I was hallucinating, but I wasn’t.

But we see this sort of utter indifference—in small ways and big—to average Indians’ lives and priorities every waking moment in this country even as our politicians go apoplectic declaring nearly manic-obsessive love for the common man. Just one example. Every day, in various cities, traffic is brought to a standstill for periods ranging up to an hour because some minister is hurrying somewhere by road with his convoy. We will never know how many Indians have died inside ambulances that couldn’t reach them to a hospital in time due to this reckless power exhibitionism. But then, we are still a feudal nation, at least as far as our political class is concerned. They are the lords and masters, and the rest of us are but mere subjects. So what if a few subjects died or got killed here and there?

It’s paradoxical, actually. Technically, traffic is stopped for miles around to give clear passage to our masters for security reasons. Which can logically only mean that they are scared out of their minds that if they let any of the subjects come too close to them on an open road, there’s a chance they could get killed. So our lords give a damn if their subjects lose their lives, yet are also sure that the subjects could kill them given half a chance. This is where we stand as a democracy, 66 years after Independence.

And with a man like Sushil Kumar Shinde in charge of our domestic security, what can you expect from the Bihar police? (Shinde, as a matter of fact, started life as a policeman, and this was highlighted by his party when he was appointed—a former policeman, the Congress said, would make a great home minister. The exact opposite has turned out to be true. Which says something about both the man and our police system).

And we mustn’t forget that Shinde was promoted to home minister even as India was suffering a nationwide power outage—its biggest in history. He was then power minister.

It has now been proved beyond doubt that the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Gujarat police had warned the Bihar government that there was a high threat perception about the rally. Patna’s top policemen met BJP leaders on 23 October and assured them of tight security, but nothing was done. In fact, as a former deputy director of the IB said on a TV news programme, it does not even matter whether the IB had sent an alert or not. Everyone in India’s law and order establishment knows that Modi is at the top of the hit list of Islamist terrorists, and when such a large rally had been planned, it is naturally incumbent on the police force to take extra precautions, and make sure that the area is fully sanitized. But the police did not even do the routine stuff.

I was talking to my friend Shovon Chowdhury, author of that hilarious dystopic novel The Competent Authority, about this, and he said: “Maybe when the policemen were told to sanitize, they all went to the loo and washed their hands thoroughly, and came back and said that sanitization had been done." Yes, we laughed heartily at that, but it was the dark laughter of despair. “The lesson is," said my friend, “Be afraid, be very afraid."

The trouble is that, in Indian polity, especially in a Congress regime, some important Cabinet posts invariably go to long-time loyalists as reward for decades of stolid unwavering sycophancy—competence is not even considered in these cases. So when you get that job, you’ve basically achieved your life’s goal. Why would you work any more (assuming you did any work before this, other than sucking up to the Family)? Besides, in all those years of climbing up the slippery ladder of power, you’ve been cut off completely from the average Indian’s worries and troubles, and you really don’t have a clue.

Of course, the government is defending him. External affairs minister Salman Khurshid has said that the home minister “has a life beyond Patna".

Meanwhile, within 24 hours of the blasts, the Bihar police have cracked the case and arrested many members of the Indian Mujahideen module that was responsible for the attack. Instead, if they had performed the routine duties they are needed to before any large political rally, some innocent lives would have been saved, and the terrorists could perhaps have been caught anyway. But then, those who died were just lowly subjects of our feudal lords.

As our home minister is on record, implying: So what if 100 adivasis are killed tomorrow in Gadchiroli or Chhattisgarh?

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