Who is responsible for what happened in the BJP’s Patna rally? Were the serial blasts merely the display of incompetence at the Union home minister’s level? The entire self-styled secular gang should share the blame for it. That as many as 18 bombs could be planted in and around Gandhi Maidan just before the rally exposes more than Sushilkumar Shinde’s incompetence. It is a deliberate refusal by the Bihar government to do its primary duty to ensure security when it knew that a huge rally was scheduled and the chief guest had been eyed by jihadi terrorists and Pakistani ISI for years by now. The Gujarat police chief has already exposed the “reluctance” of the Bihar police to undertake even the minimum recce of the rally ground and take even normal precautions before the rally. Why? That even normal precaution about searching all the entrants 24 hours before the event to the venue was not taken is amazing. Certainly, it creates suspicion that either the police were unwilling or under orders to let the ground be open to mischief. The latter seems to be the greater truth. If the Bihar police intelligence failed to detect when as many as 18 places were being dug up and filled with explosives shows that either it was totally incompetent or, much worse, it was conniving. Besides, the explosives now have been found to be the similar devices that were used at Bodh Gaya bombings two months earlier. And the perpetrators are also same. What does this reveal? That the Bihar government did not take the Gaya incident also seriously. Having information about what happened in Gaya and who did the mischief as a result of the NIA’s investigations, it did not follow this up and find out the ramifications of the jihadi terrorists and other local elements who were assisting the troublemakers. Look at the report that prime suspect Imtiaz Ansari, now in Bihar police custody, has told security men that the large number of bombs were assembled in Ranchi and brought to Patna. As the module involved in the Gaya and the Patna incidents is the same it is shocking to see that the Bihar intelligence is as dead as dodo in that it has not followed up the Gaya episode with trailing the suspects. It is public knowledge now that Indian Mujahideen (IM) operative Yasin Bhatkal, before his arrest by the Delhi police on the Nepal border, was actually in Bihar for quite some months. Even after he was traced, the state government was reluctant to grab the key terrorist till the central authorities took up the matter. In any civilised country if the government of the day has been found not having information about a gang that plants bombs in as many as 18 sites within a short area and on the eve of an important public event where lakhs are expected to participate, that government would have been under pressure to quit. Shockingly, instead of acknowledging its own incompetence or worse, Nitish Kumar is indulging in a series of verbal attacks on the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, calling him names. Perhaps he thinks he could insult the half a million people of his own state who had gathered on a Sunday to greet Modi. Should he not resign, accepting moral responsibility at least for exposing the strong gathering to extreme danger by letting terrorists have a field day? Shinde’s culpability in this is no less ignoble. What monitoring he was doing knowing very well the rally was going to be huge and that Modi is a declared target of the whole lot of jihadis and their foreign masters? That he was found at a musical soiree on the day of the blasts is a blot on his functioning and also the best evidence the nation can have of his neglect of ministerial responsibility. Despite having top IM operatives like Bhatkal and “Tunda” in their custody, what did the Union home ministry learn about the future programme of these dangerous terrorists and the IM? The fact is that this whole set of “secularists”, some of whom have held a consultation on October 30 in New Delhi, flexing their muscles — Mulayam Singh Yadav even recalled his “record” as defence minister in the short-lived Deve Gowda and I K Gujral governments — have been soft on jihadi and IM elements right from the start. When Bhatkal was arrested and the IM’s conspiracies were leaked out these secularists said they doubted the very existence of the IM. Why sympathise for those who are daily targeting our people with bomb attacks? Why Mulayam Singh Yadav begins his election campaign from Azamgarh, the epicentre of IM activities and its recruiting and brainwashing centre in UP? What this presages for a country where Mulayam hopes to be the prime minister of a third front that is still in the making, can be imagined. We have a whole lot of sympathisers among the secularists from CPM to SP to JD(U) to Congress. They have been bending over backwards to placate terror accused like Abdul Naseer Madani, currently in a Bangalore prison being tried for involvement in bombing a stadium. The CPM was consistent in nurturing Islamic extremism in West Bengal during its 34-year rule. The Nitish government refused to arrest Bhatkal and both SIMI remnants and IM modules are proliferating in Bihar and are able to hit targets in the country from their safe hideouts. The SP government in UP is seeking the release of a large number of jihadi suspects. The Congress government in Andhra is trying to give huge compensation for Muslim youngsters arrested on suspicion of involvement in bombings but released by the courts. Last Wednesday, when the self-styled secularists consulted, they have found the so-called Third Front idea is so nebulous and wrought with so many contradictions, there was only one point they could agree on. Each one of them would find only a one-point agenda for their so-called common action: that is, protect jihadi terrorists in the name of secularism and democratic rights. Is it not a fact that these “secularists” are responsible for creating an atmosphere in the country that helps the jihadis to recruit, motivate and put terrorists into action? And the result is bomb blasts, the like of which we suffered in Patna.