It’s peculiar how events pan out in Indian politics.

On March 15, shortly after assuming charge of India’s most populous and complex state, Akhilesh Yadav, then all of 38, was seen as more promising than he had promised. Soon after the swearing-in function at Lucknow’s renowned La Martinere College ground, the 33rd chief minister of Uttar Pradesh said the usual stuff.

“Law and order will be our responsibility from today. Action would be taken against officers doing injustice,” he told the media in the state capital. “There were restrictions during the previous government (under Mayawati) and UP is now celebrating democracy."

Most of the rest if his speech, like these two fragmented sentences, was bunkum – the stuff netas usually mouth when they have to open their mouth. But what the junior Yadav said in the initial bit was significant – law and order, good officers, restrictions (read corruption) and democracy. And all hail broke loose, to distort the proverb.

Was Uttar Pradesh, known to most non-Hindi heartland people as Ulta Pradesh, actually going to walk and talk straight? Aye, everyone seemed to say – most of them more confident than the young chief minister himself.

Was the state finally going to see light after the years of dusk under Akhilesh’s father, Mulayam Singh Yadav, and the Bahujan Samaj Party’s Mayawati? Like most things young and arguably cherubic in an overtly sentimental India, there was no denying the ‘yes’ in the stress by most Indians, including the media.

Eighteen months on, three of those four emphases made by Akhilesh on La Martinere ground are part of would-be history, fodder for NCERT or UP Board textbooks a few decades down the line, when they have a separate chapter on post-independence UP politics.

As rioting in Muzaffarnagar came close to claiming its 30th victim, before going well past it, the CM of Uttar Pradesh did what his father is best known for – see red at saffron for all that’s wrong with the state, a lot of which has to do with his own doing, or not doing anything substantial. Blaming the BJP for the riots, he told the Indian Express: "Look, I do the best from my side. I have given a free hand to officers in the district to do their job. We have also given strict instructions within our party that no one should interfere at any level, in these matters.”

That comes close to Akhilesh’s promise at La Martinere – “action would be taken against officers doing injustice” – but for the fact that, well, it’s bunkum. Late July, the UP government had suspended Durga Shakti Nagpal, the sub-divisional magistrate of Greater Noida, for allegedly demolishing a mosque wall which had chances to foment communal trouble.

Among other reasons, the CM told the Wall Street Journal that “there was also a report by the local intelligence unit that peace in the area could be disturbed”.

Does Akhilesh mean there is no local intelligence unit (LIU) in Muzaffarnagar? Or does he want to say the LIU chaps there are not as intelligent as the ones in Greater Noida?

And if the CM now thinks it fit to give a “free hand to officers in the district to do their job”, what stopped him from doing the same at Greater Noida, where first Durga Shakti and then the district magistrate who purportedly gave a report favourable on her actions were suspended and transferred, respectively?

If suspending Durga Shakti was action taken “against officers doing injustice”, is one to assume no one erred in Muzaffarnagar? Certainly not, but why was no preemptive action taken in that district?

And if the chief minister thinks the BJP-VHP men sparked off trouble in Muzaffarnagar, who did he imagine would have fanned the anticipated trouble in that Greater Noida village?

The young chief minister, of course, will throw back the “communal opposition” card if you pop the questions to him but is it any wonder that babudom and khaki-dom were muted as Muzaffarnagar burned?