Everybody’s invited

It was a development that had shocked the nation and threatened its peace. But, amazingly — or should we say typically? — four days after it had happened, the situation on Ground Zero had reverted to bucolic apathy. The Sunday Express expose of life behind the barricades of what is, arguably, India’s most contentious religious site — the makeshift temple at Ayodhya — is a snapshot of institutional inertia.

Typically, there is a great deal of drawing of bolts and barring of doors at the site today. We have been informed that the Uttar Pradesh government has ordered a high-level inquiry into the latest security lapse. But even as the inquiries proliferate, our sense of security evaporates. Why did it need a newspaper investigation for the Uttar Pradesh authorities to register the fact that the site needed to be better lit, that its watch towers required to be better situated, that its bullet proofing is far from satisfactory? Surely these inadequacies were as clear as daylight on July 5, when the site had been stormed by armed terrorists? Where was the thorough investigation that the incident required? Where was the follow-through? Where was the institutional memory?

For sheer contrast, look at how the London police handled the aftermath of 7/7. There was a visible display of the institutional will needed to get at the perpetrators, and the networks that supported them, through a variety of ways — including through media briefings. At Ayodhya, we have instead a situation where the bodies of the terrorists are buried without a thought, where various wings of the police quarreled over the distribution of award money, and where — just four days later — the men in charge of guarding the actual boundary of the disputed site were busy buying garments from a passing hawker. If this isn’t an open invitation for further trouble, we don’t know what is.