“Even if one incident occurs or one person becomes a casualty, it should cause us concern and should make us alert. However, it should not demoralise us and give wrong information to the uninformed section of the society,” he said.

True, there were a few meetings during which issues like modernisation of police forces and improving the intelligence network was discussed. True states were repeatedly being urged to fill up the burgeoning vacancies in their police forces, to increase their spending on modernising the forces and buy equipment, and to encourage coordination of efforts by various policing agencies.

But these were not able to stop the almost predictable cycle of terror attacks. Instead, his penchant for referring to terrorists and Naxalites as ‘misguided brothers’, his ill-advised equation between Mohammad Afzal and Sarabjeet Singh, his adamant opposition to the promulgation of a tough anti-terror law and denying the same to the state governments, all contributed to the perception that Patil was soft on terror. He came to symbolise everything that was wrong with India’s internal security mechanism.

So much so that he started getting attention for the number of times he was changing clothes on a day when about 30 people had been killed in a coordinated serial bomb blasts in Delhi.

Patil could have resigned — or sacked — after any of the numerous terror attacks in the last three years. But he survived, probably because — as Patil himself mentioned recently — “he had the blessings of the Congress president”.

... contd.