A Dare Letter from a Post-Terror Voter

Dear Mr/Ms Politician

I just wanted to remind you that Mumbai bled last week and lay helplessly maimed and crippled. The pictures went out everywhere of a city unable to protect herself, overrun by a clutch of only ten terrorists, too ashamed even to whine or whimper. The world watched her moments of painful embarrassment for more than three eternal days. Mr Politician, I have to remind you because your memory has been playing truant ever since 24/7 television channels began dominating our lives. You seem to forget even the immediate past once the camera lenses disappear from the terror-ravaged spots.

Mr Politician, you display remarkable sensitivity when you escort Bollywood to the hotel where terror challenged the very essence of life and human existence. You are known to be a patron of the arts and you have been encouraging the fledgling career of your actor son for a long time now. So, there's nothing wrong if you accompany a director who probably wants to make a film on terror when the public memory is still quite fresh. You may be the chief minister of the state where the tragedy unfolded but haven't we heard of the great Nero before. At least you weren't fiddling. You are aware that the Congress will take a long time to find a replacement for the unique Vilasrao Deshmukh. Till then, you can spend quality time at one of those film awards functions where your son enthrals the audience with his cute dance steps.

Mr Politician, you are the greatest, you are the face of development. How can you be accused of playing dirty politics when you reach Mumbai while the operation is still on and NSG commandos don't even know where the next hail of bullets will come from? You are, after all, the great Narendra Modi. You have been looking beyond Gujarat and preparing the country for faith and confidence in you before your coronation takes place in Delhi. How would poor Hemant Karkare's widow know that you never accept 'No' for an answer? Nobody does that to Narendra Modi. Modi alone has the right to decide that terror has a religion. Therefore, as long as a policeman is chasing evidence, which incriminates a Sadhvi, he is the face of dangerous pseudo-secularism. As soon as he is slain by Lashkar terrorists, he metamorphoses into a martyr. So, you reserve your right to insult his family with a brutally magnanimous rupees one crore reward. His widow has seen her husband maligned by your henchmen in days preceding his death but then you are the one and only Modi.

And you Mr Politician have every right to hate those apolitical masses, those women with lipstick and those men in suits. They have no right to be angry with the politicians who were doing their duty. While the commandos fought terror, the politicians carefully calculated the impact of terror on state elections. How can you Mr Naqvi tolerate those buffoons marching on the streets with stupid candles in their hands? Mr Naqvi, you have the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh standing by you and insisting that Mumbai is overdoing its grief. You can never go wrong when you are in such august company.

Mr Rahulbaba, is this the right time to compare poverty with terror? Are these really comparable entities when the nation is still in mourning? Or is this another of your politico-intellectual discourses that has become the hallmark of your great discovery of India? And you Madam Vasundhara Raje, one must appreciate your political sense, your astuteness for bringing out newspaper ads which screamed Rahulbaba believes poverty outstrips terror in importance.

Mr Achyuthanandan Sir, you must have always understood terror better than others because you are the ideal Communist. You have been taught in indoctrination classes that Gulags are good medicine for the masses. Absolutely understandable that you have reasons to be upset when a dead commando's grieving father throws a sympathetic chief minister out. Your police had gone there ahead of you with sniffer dogs. And they were rudely shown the door. How inconsiderate of Unnikrishnan's father! You were so delicate and so dead right when you said not even a dog would visit the Unnikrishnan home.

In times like these, we pity you Mr Gopinath Munde, Mr Sanjay Nirupam. Both you politicians, with your love for the spectacular and the Big Boss, were asked to leave by an unintelligent angry crowd who didn't even realize that the two of you are overloaded with political sympathy. How dare they, those Mumbaikars, turn you away? Don't they know we are a democracy. Don't they know we vote. We may vote like morons but we do elect people who get automatically elevated to the political class and grab the right to govern.

Respectfully yours

An Indian

(Who would have been proud to be a Mumbaikar)

P.S. And Mr Raj Thackeray, we dared not mention you because not all of us can write in Marathi. We saw how wonderfully you counted the Marathi corpses while rest of Maharashtra and Mumbai counted the 195 dead. After all, except for the nine terrorists they were all either Indians or guests of India.