Don’t look away now

No one asked Home Minister Shivraj Patil, who due to his phenomenal incompetence has become an object of ridicule even in the ruling party and among the Congress’s allies, to address the CWC on internal security. Perhaps the busy Congress leaders did not want a long-drawn high fat and low protein lecture from Patil.

Exactly 11 minutes after the conclave ended at the Parliament

Annexe at 6 pm, an improvised explosive device (IED) went off just 5 km away at Gaffar Market, in Karol Bagh. In the next half an hour four more bombs exploded in Delhi’s busy markets, in the city’s worst terrorist incident since the October 2005 Diwali blasts, which to date remain unsolved.

Rather than segregate politics, religion and terror, the present ruling dispensation and the opposition are using the frequent bombings to throw mud at each other. Two days after the 7/11 Mumbai train blasts in 2006 at the Union cabinet meeting, two senior ministers in front of the prime minister pointed fingers at assorted groups for the carnage despite National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan stating that Pakistan-based jihadis were behind the local train bombings. Cut to the July 31, 2008 cabinet meeting after the July 26 Ahmedabad blasts. After Shivraj Patil meandered on internal security from the Gorkhaland agitation, Amarnath crisis, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Surat bombings before the cabinet, again a senior minister argued that the Centre...