Pune Porsche crash and VIP culture in India

India is a strange country. At one level, a great many people complain that our elected representatives are unresponsive and indifferent to the needs of those they are meant to serve. Another well-founded concern is that the bureaucracy is inefficient and reacts far too slowly.

But we have high-profile examples to the contrary as well. In the early hours of May 19, 2024, two IT professionals driving a motorcycle were the tragic victims in Pune of a seventeen-year-old drunken teen driving his rich and influential father’s Porsche.

The crowd caught the juvenile and handed him to the Yeravada police station. The same morning, Maharashtra MLA and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Sunil Tingre showed up at the police station. That was indeed prompt action, if its purpose was to ensure that justice was done, the case was fully investigated, and the punishment of the guilty. But what was the reason for his promptitude?

According to Tingre, Vishal Agarwal (the accused teen’s father) was his former employer. There are also allegations of call records of conversations between Tingre and Dr Taware (who is accused of attempting to cover up the accident by manipulating the blood samples of the minor and whose promotion Tingre had earlier recommended to the Maharashtra government). The circumstantial evidence is clear, but the police say that there is no evidence to suspect the MLA’s role.

This certainly proves our honoured legislators can act with unprecedented alacrity, but they show this dedication, alertness, speed, and solicitude only when the constituent is someone powerful and rich. Then, the interests of both coincide.

Even as the din of our democracy competes to prove which leader and party can do the most for the deprived in our country, some 20,000 people die every year from something as controllable as malaria. Some 600 people get dengue every day; West Bengal alone has 68,000 cases annually.

In most cases, due to the paucity of primary health care, fatality rates are high. I am giving here official statistics, so you can imagine, given the accuracy with which officialdom records cases, how much larger the actual number must be. As many as 300,000 children under the age of five die of diarrhoea every year, mostly for a lack of something as basic as oral rehydration solutions (ORS).

That this is happening today, when India is proud to be the fastest-growing economy in the world, is almost unbelievable, but it is true. As many as 69 per cent of the deaths of children in India, as per a statement made by the government in Parliament, are due to malnutrition and malnourishment. TB, which in most countries has been eradicated, still kills 331,000 people in India every year, accounting for 26 per cent of all global deaths due to this disease. None of this usually impels our legislators to rise early in the morning and reach a hospital.

Is our administration incompetent? Again, this case illustrates that, when it wants to, it can be super-effective. The Sasoon Hospital, a government hospital in Pune, where the accused was taken, allegedly delayed his blood test till 11 am, gave him a pizza to eat to reduce the traces of alcohol further, and then—just in case—threw the sample in the dustbin, replacing it with that of the juvenile’s mother. This is called efficiency of the highest order. The alleged lubricant to ensure this—the police claim—was Rs 3 lakhs paid to each of the doctors and the middleman peon. The guilty doctors, Ajay Taware and Srihari Halnor, have been arrested. So have Vishal Agarwal and his father. The mother is absconding.

Contrast the above episode with how British Prime Minister Tony Blair behaved when his 16-year-old son, Euan, was arrested for lying drunk on the road after a night of revelry in celebration of his clearing the GCSE exams. Euan sought to hide his identity by giving a false name and producing an old identity card that showed he was 18. But the police established his real identity without any attempt to hide it. PM Blair, who was on holiday in Portugal with his wife Cherie, flew back immediately. On his return, he said publicly that his son should not be treated any differently from any other young offender. Both he and his wife accompanied Euan to Charing Cross police station, where, under the law, his son was cautioned and reprimanded.

Would the doctors who acted with such alacrity do the same for the millions of poor people suffering from diseases that should have long been eradicated? Would our MLAs respond to every case of the death of a young child from diarrhoea or loss of life from malaria, dengue, and TB? And finally, how many of those who are politically powerful in our country would have behaved in the manner in which Tony Blair did?

In India, even now, the real definition of an orphan is one who has neither the ‘father’ of power and influence, nor the ‘mother’ of wealth.

The author is a former diplomat, an author and a politician. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.