If the quiet, stately angst of a smoking Taj will forever remain its defining picture, an equally lasting memory of the Mumbai terror strike may be the way tragedy brinksmanship of the political kind began taking a hit. Perhaps it’s only a poetic coincidence that the shamed and the shunned belonged to all sides of the spectrum — Left, Right and Centre. If Marxist heavyweight V.S. Achuthanandan was heckled in Bangalore when he made a belated but politically expedient trip to the home of Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, where the dead soldier’s father refused even to see him, no less red-faced was saffron poster boy Narendra Modi, after he gatecrashed the home of slain ATS chief Hemant Karkare, even after being refused thrice. Another sign was Congressman Vilasrao Deshmukh inviting wrath for guiding massacre tourists in before the blood had dried.

Perhaps the best example of how things work at that level could come from neighbouring Gujarat. For once, the official Narendra Modi hype machine forgot something when the BJP’s anti-terror mascot flew into Mumbai last Thursday, Rs 1 crore cash-for-blood in kurta pocket:  that cash-and-carry may not work every time.

To be fair, cash had often worked in Gujarat — sometime ago, he had effectively leveraged even the gang rape of a Dalit school child, throwing Rs 1 lakh to the victim much before the courts even decided if there was a rape. The cash-for-rape facility, however, was not extended to the many rape victims of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat — women who dared not even complain.

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