Shakeel Ahmad should be ashamed of his shocking tweet

As a police crack team moved in for a fearsome storming operation against armed terror suspects in the Saint Denis suburb of Paris, one of the immutable inevitabilities of the universe played out 6,500kms away in Delhi, where senior Congress spokesperson and former minister Shakeel Ahmad squinted into his phone to tweet the following:

Thankfully Chhota Rajan&Anup Chetia(ULFA) are not Muslims. Had they been Muslims Modi govt would have a different narrative altogether.

— Shakeel Ahmad (@Ahmad_Shakeel) November 18, 2015

You'd think that the frisson of global anger, sobriety and contemplation of the implications of Paris - and the world's terrible dangers, hypocrisies and predicaments - would introduce a sort of ceasefire for imbecility and nearsighted political pot-shottery. But that's one of the comforting things about Indian politicians: their brilliant inevitability. It is a delight that netas like Ahmad offer us a tenuous predictability at a dark, uncertain time for the world. It is infinitely pleasing that while three major powers, two of them geopolitical adversaries, show the first signs of willingness to align against the world's only terror organisation with a veritable state to its name, back in India, we need never expect that the vision of politicians will step beyond their chalk-white Lutyens' banglas.

Indian law enforcement has been a punching bag for communally charged finger-pointing for decades, so in that sense, Ahmad's grammatically embarrassing tweet (for a spokesperson) breaks no new ground. What it does is show an arrogant myopia, a purposeful insulation to the world. More dangerously, it is an indicator perhaps, of precisely why India has never been able to mount a credible war on terrorism in the country, and against it from the outside. In Ahmad's tweet lies manifest not just the malaise of how perceived justice disparities have been used to appease, provoke and incite for political gain over decades, but also the terrifying impossibility of any real bipartisan impulse when it comes to fighting terror.

Ahmad may be no big fish, but in his tone of easy cynical offence lies a gut-punch of a reminder to all of us in this country, and something that separates us from the rest of the international order we so desperately seek to be counted in: Terror is good for politics. Anti-terror isn't.