At the Congress Working Committee meeting last Saturday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh listed seven challenges facing the country. Five of these challenges were related to internal security, including leftwing extremism and communalism. The remaining two were inflation and the energy deficit. While Finance Minister P. Chidambaram made a spirited 20-minute intervention and apprised the Congress’s apex body about measures he intended to take to control inflation, the rest of the meeting was given over to back-slapping on the success of Indo-US nuclear deal.

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.

That only the nuclear deal, and not terrorism, was the focus of the CWC appears symptomatic of the ostrich-like mentality of the ruling UPA and the Congress, both of which have a strange reading of the sensitivities of the minorities. With crucial assembly and Parliament elections only months away, this reading is showing itself in a kind of appeasement that had Congress, BSP and SP leaders trooping to the house of the Ahmedabad blast accused, Abu Bashir, last month to offer sympathies to his relatives after he was arrested.

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