Shah grounded

The entire drama surrounding Amit Shah’s ‘spontaneous’ meeting within the precinct of Goa’s lone Dabolim Airport has taken political arrogance to a new low. The gay abandon with which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has claimed that the meeting was spontaneous while simultaneously claiming that the Congress was ‘jealous’ of the BJP leaders and party’s popularity can only indicate that the BJP has reached a point where it believes that it is above the rules and regulations that govern such sensitive establishments.rGoa has never been short of VIPs and celebrities visiting the state with VVIPs like premiers of BRICS countries visiting recently, prime ministers of our own and other countries, as well as Bollywood and Hollywood stars and celebrities as well as several popular figures. While many of the arrivals and departures would understandably want to keep a low profile, and one cannot necessarily compare them to Shah, one doesn’t have to use the airport to make a statement -- unless the statement you want to make is that: ‘rules and regulations are for common men, not for rulers.’ While none of us may have any reason to hold a public meeting at the airport premises, it is worth remembering that a vehicle used to pick up and drop passengers from an airport offers you a window of five minutes only. If that is the rule for travellers, why should Shah be any different. Security considerations are a different matter altogether.rWith no way out of the mess they got themselves in, the BJP has resorted to a bundle of lies. The most obvious question is how can a spontaneous meeting feature a public address system set up in advance and a stage? Rather it seems that the BJP has not learnt any lessons from the recent drubbing in the assembly elections where popular notion has it that their numbers were reduced from 21 to 13 primarily on account of a perceived arrogance that had crept in. CM Manohar Parrikar’s refusal to comment, possibly with an intent not to stoke the controversy any further, is in many ways an admission that this indeed was a move that backfired. There’s only one graceful way out of this. Now that the event is ‘fait accompli’, the prudent thing for the BJP to do would be to own up to their mistake and apologise to the people of Goa for causing inconvenience to other passengers and more worryingly for taking such sensitive installations for granted.