The roofs above our children, the roadblocks for the chief minister

Two pictures from a single weekend tell you everything about what the Indian state has become. In Thrissur, roofing sheets of a temporary seating gallery at the aquatics complex tore loose in the wind and rain on Friday, injuring ten schoolchildren who had come to compete in the State School Games. The swimming events were postponed. Parents who had travelled with their children learned of the cancellation only after reaching the venue — standing at the gates, demanding answers from officials who had none. The Students' Federation of India marched to the complex in protest; the police removed the marchers. The child rights commission has registered a suo motu case, which is the institutional equivalent of arriving with an umbrella after the flood. In Coimbatore, some 2,000 police personnel will line the streets on Sunday so that Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay's convoy can glide through Chitra, Kamarajapuram, Singanallur and Ondipudur on its way to a bypoll campaign in Dharapuram. The route was deliberately chosen through crowded neighbourhoods rather than the usual airport road. On a holiday. With traffic expected to crawl. Two thousand constables — pulled from law-and-order duty across the districts — to manage the optics of one man's drive. Notice the asymmetry. The state has not run out of capacity. It has run out of priorities. Capacity is infinite for the spectacle and rationed for the child. Periyar taught us to measure a government not by what it announces but by what it protects. Here is the ledger for this weekend: what is protected is a convoy; what is exposed is a child. A bolted-down roof does not trend on social media. A roadshow does. So the roof gets the wind, and the road gets the police. And notice the choreography of accountability. The suo motu case, the inquiry, the report sought from three departments — all of it after the children were hurt. This is the Indian state's favourite ritual: the post-facto notice, the suspension that follows the outrage rather than preventing it. We saw the same ritual days ago in Thoothukudi, where two highway engineers were suspended only after the opposition raised the Hindi signboard row. Punishment after exposure is not accountability; it is damage control with paperwork. The roadshow state and the roofless state are not two different states. They are the same state, choosing every day what it is for. A government that can barricade a city for a campaign can audit a stadium for a schoolchild. It simply does not want to — because one photographs well and the other does not. Demand the audit anyway. Name the official who certified the Thrissur structure. Compensate the injured children. And the next time 2,000 police are summoned for a Sunday drive, ask the only question that matters: who is being served, and who is being left out in the rain?