Coming as it did after 14 major terror attacks across the country, it might have been a little late in the day, but Home Minister Shivraj Patil was finally made to feel the heat by his own Cabinet colleagues on Thursday and grilled about the internal security situation at the Cabinet meeting.The first salvo was fired by a non-Congress Cabinet minister, Sharad Pawar, who brought up the issue of back-to-back serial bomb blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad over the weekend. So perturbed was Pawar that he did not even care for conventional niceties. Generally, either the Prime Minister asks the Home Minister to brief the Cabinet after such incidents or the Home Minister briefs on his own.Following Pawar’s anxious intervention, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked Patil to present the facts of the case. Patil, who has been under all-round attack for his failure to prevent terror attacks, did make a briefing, but so uninspiring was his statement that one Cabinet minister was found inquiring about the facts of the recovery of unexploded bombs in Surat soon after the Cabinet meeting.“I think there is more information in the newspapers than in what the Home Minister told us,” confided the minister to some reporters, before asking them about the latest news in Surat.Another senior Cabinet minister expressed ‘disgust’ at the fact that the Home Minister sounded ‘business as usual’ while presenting the facts of the case. “What do you expect from Shivraj Patil in any case?” the agitated minister said. He said Patil was asked several questions, including the possibility of these being a result of intelligence failure, but none of his answers were satisfactory.The terror attacks so occupied the minds of the ministers at Thursday’s Cabinet meeting that no one cared to check with Defence Minister A K Antony about Tuesday’s firing incident at LoC.Saturday’s serial bomb blasts in Ahmedabad, which has left over 50 people dead, was the 14th major terror attack in the last three years, starting from the attempt to storm the disputed structure in Ayodhya in July 2005. In none of these incidents, which included such deadly attacks as the one on the local trains in Mumbai in 2006 and at a busy market place in Delhi in 2005, has any perpetrator been punished.
