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It isn8217;t possible to begin with a clean slate, not really. That unfestive message comes to us from Patna, Bihar, this new year. Just wh...

It isn8217;t possible to begin with a clean slate, not really. That unfestive message comes to us from Patna, Bihar, this new year. Just when the nation was determinedly ringing out the old and searching out the new and the hopeful8230; it isn8217;t always possible, said Laloo8217;s Bihar. Patna, on New Year8217;s Eve, was a city under siege. Mobs fought pitched battles with the police on the streets, angry students danced on police jeeps before setting them ablaze, shops were forced to down their shutters and commuters were grounded in safe places as tyres burnt and smoke billowed. Opposition parties had called a bandh on that day to protest police inaction after their personnel allegedly gunned down three innocent students in an 8216;encounter8217; outside an STD booth in the city on Saturday. No arrests, except of the STD booth owner, had been made in the four days after the killings.

After all, this is Bihar. It is tempting to put down the meaningless killing of three young men to Bihar-as-usual. What else can one expect in a state that has two chief ministers, but no government? Isn8217;t this the state where kidnapping, extortion and murder have acquired industry status? Doesn8217;t Bihar lead the way in the criminalisation of politics and the politicisation of crime? Everyone knows that the government is accountable no more, if it ever was, in Laloo8217;s Bihar. This cynicism is sterile and it is dangerous. It has nothing to offer to Kundan Gupta, mother of 22-year-old Vikas, who had just completed a course in computer hardware and who got four bullets in his head on Saturday. Cynicism must not be allowed to scuttle the outrage that every citizen must feel at this latest evidence of brazen lawlessness in the republic of Bihar. It mustn8217;t blunt the demand that the state must move immediately to bring the guilty to book.

Laloo Yadav has accused the opposition parties of fanning the violence. He has charged that the shopkeepers were all BJP supporters while those killed were RJD followers, all of them backwards. This must be seen to be a last-ditch, sordid attempt to eke out political capital from the crime. The de facto chief minister of Bihar must be told that doling out spectres of casteist conspiracies will no longer do the trick. The government must deliver justice.