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.

But Modi did prove at the Karkare home in Dadar on Thursday that there is no stopping him, even away from home turf:  He simply drove down there after the bereaved officer’s kin thrice declined requests to meet him, while Hemant’s bullet-riddled body lay in a morgue.

No matter that Modi has been busy heaping mud on the Mumbai ATS that Karkare himself led, once it took the shroud off the Hindutva face of terror in Malegaon. For weeks before the Mumbai terror strike, Modi the vote-catcher, at assembly poll meetings, had been alleging that the same ATS was framing “innocent” army officers to demoralise the Indian army, playing minion to the Congress, even that its arrests did more harm to the country than Pakistan could.

And no matter that his own party, still trying to come to terms with the devastating Malegaon findings, debated hard and chose not to mention Karkare and his dead ATS officers in its condolence resolution on the terror attack.

When he flayed the prime minister’s address to the country soon after the Mumbai terror strike saying it was just not adequate, some of Modi’s saffron comrades like chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal in Himachal Pradesh, may have openly disgreed with his attitude in a national crisis. But Modi is not known to hold back on free advice — even if he, at times, may appear to need some himself.

Consider: “It seems the UPA government is still not serious about terrorism even after so many terror strikes in the country”, he wrote to the PM when terror gripped Mumbai. This was even while reports were pouring in about the Gujarat coast’s apparent link to the strike. When Modi was writing it, all ten marine police stations that the Centre funded to set up two years ago and handed to his government to maintain and guard the coast, were working only on paper — they have no equipment, not even boats.

The Centre had paid Modi’s government to buy speedboats for joint patrol and reconnaissance with central forces along the coast. The latter, instead, spent it on a few slow boats. After the Comptroller and Auditor General cracked the whip, the state government responded: “We got those boats to guide fishermen, not to chase terrorists”. About a quarter of posts in Gujarat police lie vacant. A considerable chunk of the force is made up of ad hoc appointees on contract, called Lok Rakshaks and paid Rs 2500 a month.

Gujarat’s intelligence machinery is apparently another problem. A retired top cop says it has only notionally improved from a few years ago. That was when the spooks would wait in their jeeps near newspaper offices in the wee hours for the first copies printed . They would rush to type out the day’s “intelligence” reports for the chief minister to read early in the morning, before he got down to reading newspapers. “Agar woh hamare state mein ayega tho chun chun ke marunga,” Modi had declared to terrorists the world over in Mumbai, after the 2006 Mumbai train blasts. Two years later the Ahmedabad serial blasts in July killed 59 people.

If Modi wasted no time rushing to Mumbai last Thursday to make his point with the Rs 1 crore for slain cops, scores of seriously injured in the Ahmedabad blasts, and the kin of the dead in the subsequent Modasa blast have yet to get central aid — all because the state machinery has been sleeping on the procedures. Modi’s cops were remarkably quick to nab the accused in the Ahmedabad blasts. But they claim to have no clue about who set off the Modasa blast, which had coincided in almost copycat fashion with the saffron-linked Malegaon blast the very same day: timing, location, methods, even the vehicle used. And going by the pattern, these may not be the last of the great bitter ironies.

rajeev.pi@expressindia.com