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.

... contd.