Nitish Kumar is welcome to smirk, but Narendra Modi wave is sweeping Bihar

Narendra Modi consoles the family of Rajnarian Singh, a victim of the October 27 serial bomb blasts at Gandhi Maidan, in Patna on Diwali eve. Photo courtesy PTI.

The fraudulent Left-liberal ‘idea of India’ now looks dangerously similar to the ‘idea of India’ of jihadis who were allowed to bomb Modi’s Patna rally

Let it be said, and said right away, that if the alleged Indian Mujahideen jihadis who planted more than 16 bombs in the stretch of Patna’s sprawling Gandhi Maidan where Narendra Modi addressed a mammoth public rally on October 27, are guilty of trying to trigger a stampede with catastrophic consequences, then Nitish Kumar is guilty of not preventing a situation that could have been used by assassins to target the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate. The consequences of even a failed attempt on Narendra Modi’s life would have been too horrendous even to imagine. It would be silly to suggest that the Chief Minister of Bihar is not sharp enough to have known both the consequences.

Yet Nitish Kumar not only failed to ensure adequate security measures for the ‘Hunkar Rally’ of which he had known for months, he also displayed amazing callous indifference after the bombings left six persons dead and at least a hundred people injured. Hours after the rally Nitish Kumar, while speaking to mediapersons, put on a little boy act, pretending great surprise that something so dastardly should have happened and refuting valid charges of lax, indeed absent, security measures at the venue. He also asserted, firmly and repeatedly, that his administration had not received any information from the Intelligence Bureau, alerting the police about a potential attempt to target Narendra Modi. In the event, both his ersatz condemnation of the jihadi strike and denial of an IB alert have been proved to be as hollow as his cynical politics of donning the ‘topi’ and the ‘tilak’ to fool Muslims and Hindus.

It is now established that the IB did send a letter to the police chiefs of various States, including Bihar’s Director-General of Police, on October 1, alerting them about the Indian Mujahideen’s plans to bomb cities. That alert may have been ‘non-specific’, but a subsequent message sent by IB on October 23 to Bihar’s Additional Director-General of Police who heads the Special Branch was as specific as any intelligence report can be. According to this message, Indian Mujahideen operatives were planning to attack Narendra Modi’s rally. Two messages, two alerts, yet Nitish Kumar says his administration had no information. We can only surmise that he is telling a lie — blatantly, brazenly.

What serves to underscore Nitish Kumar’s brazenness, his almost criminal callousness, is the subsequent silence he has maintained on this issue. We haven’t heard a pipsqueak from him on why his administration, which he counter-poses as the ‘Nitish Model’ to the ‘Modi Model’ of governance, failed to take preventive measures, why only a handful of constables were deployed to ostensibly ‘sanitise’ themaidan, why no senior police officer trained in standard security operations was on duty on the day of the rally, why there was no emergency evacuation plan in place even hours after the first bomb had exploded at Patna Railway Station. If we are to presume that the police kept him in the dark about the IB alert, we are yet to see him take disciplinary action against the errant police officers. If we are to believe that he is truly shaken by the turn of events, then it is grossly missing from his crass and fanciful attacks on Narendra Modi.

Hence we can only come to the conclusion that Nitish Kumar couldn’t care a toss whether the bombers succeeded in their evil mission to trigger low intensity blasts, create panic among the more than five lakh people who had gathered on Gandhi Maidan, and trigger multiple stampedes that would have left hundreds dead. He couldn’t care less if in the resultant chaos assassins would have found it easier to target Narendra Modi in a classic replay of similar assassinations in other places at other times. This was a copybook conspiracy that fortuitously failed —not for want of effort by the conspirators but due to possibly their incompetence or, as some would believe, the intervention of the hand of fate. Destiny has other plans for Narendra Modi, plans which understandably unsettle those who think they are destined to rule India, not the man who now rides the crest of a never-seen-before popularity wave. There is no reason to respect such individuals: They are undeserving of regard.

The intolerable cussedness if not complicity (that would be an exaggeration unless evidence emerges to the contrary; it may be entirely coincidental that he instructed his officers not to provide Narendra Modi with a custom-built bulletproof SUV and jammers to neutralise remote-controlled bombs) of Nitish Kumar is further heightened by the fumbling investigations by the National Investigation Agency. It is stunningly unbelievable that a potential key witness was allowed to escape from the NIA’s custody. It is equally unthinkable that the NIA should come up with the lamest of all excuses in defence of its appalling lapse in guarding Mehre Alam, who could have led the investigators to the hideouts of the conspirators, by saying that he could not have escaped from its custody as he had not been formally arrested. Which would raise the question: Why wasn’t he arrested? Does the answer lie in Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde’s recent instruction that has left jihadis feeling bolder?

We could also ask some discomfiting questions to the ‘topi-tilak’-wallah Chief Minister of Bihar whose smug smile reflects his confidence that he shan’t be called to account for his severe lapses, and that’s putting it mildly. We could, for instance, ask him as to why he told the Bihar Police not to arrest Yasin Bhatkal after IB sleuths picked him up at the India-Nepal border. The IB does not have the power to arrest and needed Bihar Police to take Bhatkal into custody before bringing him to Delhi. We could ask him why he has refused to allow intensive combing of certain districts, for example Darbhanga and Madhubani, where Indian Mujahideen cells are believed to be located. We could ask him why his party, the Janata Dal (United), found it expedient to declare Ishrat Jahan, a Lashkar-e-Tayyeba operative, as “Bihar ki beti”. We could ask him what restrictions he enforced for Eid-ul-Juha this year, corresponding to the restrictions he imposed on community Durga Puja.

Sadly, these questions will not be asked because that would be deemed to be politically incorrect, an assault on the secularism practised by charlatans who occupy high office and, hence, an attack on the ‘idea of India’ about which fraudulent Left-liberals in the political establishment and the establishment media never tire preaching, an idea that increasingly looks not dissimilar to the ‘idea of India’ of jihadis, some of whom planted the bombs at Gandhi Maidan.

All, of course, is not lost. Or else Narendra Modi would not have been in Bihar on Saturday, visiting the homes of those who died in last weekend’s bombings, meeting their families, sharing their grief on the eve of Deepawali. While Nitish Kumar smirks, Narendra Modi has emerged the winner, winning hearts in Bihar and India.