I can’t but envy Barkha Dutt. Undeterred by trolls, the NDTV anchor reaches these Congress ministers faster than most. And then she shoots them down with one simple question. In the olden days their answers would merit a two-para press release and a grudging Times of India printing the operative para, with the channel, a child of a lesser god, expected to remain grateful even without any credit.

Today, with the social media on 24x7 alert, the world comes crashing down. Barkha, as a pure example of the changed milieu, sends out a tweet. Sometimes there’s a link too. Sometimes that’s kept tantalizingly for a few hours later. In moments, the message reaches her 6.4 lakh followers. And “virality” takes over. Commentator after commentator descends on the minister and his world of delusion and “chamchas” has a brush with ground reality.

In pre-Twitter days, this happened to K Natwar Singh, the foreign minister embroiled in a harmless letter seeking oil-for-food contracts for a relative and a cold-shoulder from Sonia Gandhi, shut himself to the rest and spoke to Barkha about his own tune on Iran. Result? End of career! And to the extent I know, no private meeting with Sonia after that.

With Twitter around in full bloom, the new home minister has done much the same: killed himself with one word of self-assessment, “Excellent.”

Here’s how  the New York Times goes for a kill. Within hours of the Barkha tweet, the NYT bangs in a piece with a clip and the NDTV transcript:

Barkha Dutt, NDTV anchor: So you’re satisfied with your stint in the power ministry? How would you rate yourself? Would you rate yourself average, good, very good or excellent?

Sushil Kumar Shinde, the outgoing power minister:  Excellent!

Hinging on Shinde’s immortal modesty, Heathor Timmons and her other NYT writer then tell the big bad world: “Mr. Shinde, who just has been promoted to minister of home affairs, India’s top security position, raised some eyebrows when he declared himself an 'excellent' power minister in an interview with NDTV on Wednesday. After all, Mr. Shinde has just presided over the world’s biggest blackout. Two of them, in fact: on Monday and Tuesday, when massive grid failures left hundreds of millions in India without power.”

The duo then go on to curate a series of scathing editorial comments from the Indian press, suggesting just how hollow our self-image of a global super power is.

Paul Becket of the Wall Street Journal put it via satire. The WSJ bureau chief slams a piece titled, “India’s leadership outage.”

"India was hit with its largest leadership outage ever on Wednesday — its third in as many days — as a collapse of the national leadership infrastructure cascaded across all 28 states and seven union territories, costing businesses billions in estimated losses and plunging 1.2 billion people into gloom,” Beckett tells us.

“The failure of the leadership grid started around midnight in central Delhi and by dawn had spread to the north, northeast, and eastern regions. By mid-morning, it had also severely affected the south and west of the country, too, reaching from Arunachal Pradesh in the east to Lakshadweep in the west.”

“Emergency rooms, law enforcement authorities and schools had to rely on backup leadership mechanisms but supplies for those were running low in many places after two days of lengthy outages. On Monday, a blackout across northern India deprived an estimated 370 million of leadership. By Tuesday, with another outage affecting 600 million, the state of the nation’s rickety leadership infrastructure was exposed for the nation and the world,” Beckett continues with unsparing accuracy.

The WSJ man then “quotes” an advisor to the spokesman for prime minister Manmohan Singh saying that “the prime minister also had ordered the head of the nodal agency in charge of leadership distribution to introduce himself to the head of the nodal agency in charge of leadership transmission. Earlier this year, Mr. Singh had taken direct responsibility for improving the country’s leadership capacity.”

Welcome to the world that awaits super-power pretenders. They puff you up till you achieve 9 percent growth, your reserves are rising, your FDI flows still look pretty, and Slumdog Millionnaire is winning its Oscars. But if you screw up like leaving 660 million of your countrymen in freeze frame, and then your PM doesn’t have the guts to put on hold the promotion of his power minister, and the learned gent decides to rate himself “excellent”, don’t expect any better.
 
In the early hours of the day, Beckett’s colleague asked tweeps to suggest why Shinde has been promoted. My own essays have pointed to reasons such as the power minister getting the Indi-Chinese recipe of political donations right. To my relief, Vinayak Chatterjee, India’s highly-regarded infrastructure expert, credited with a good-boy image in the Prime Minister’s Office, confirmed the mess we are in:

“What's your sense of 1) quality 2) after-care 3) local sourcing (of Chinese power equipment)?” I asked Chatterjee on his handle @Infra_VinayCh in an exchange that’s available on Twitter.

“Very apprehensive of quality, local servicing etc. Huge problems recently in Haryana, and earlier in W Bengal,” he told me and the rest of 250 million on the social media with candour.

The questions, therefore: Who but Shinde could have slammed the brakes? Why did it take years of laissez faire to end only on July 24 when crappy Chinese ware had swamped 60 percent of what we need until 2017? Why weren’t BHEL and L&T met with deaf ears and punitive duties slammed a week before Shinde would move out? Why is his former protectorate, the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, asking mute engineers of five states to depose before them on August 14 to explain an action that they, no doubt took, only on the orders of their respective chief ministers? What, in any case, are the terms of reference of the three-member enquiry he announced to tell us what’s going on? Do the terms involve a deep dive beyond blaming Akhilesh Yadav?

The answers are an insult to our intelligence. Clearly, Shinde did an excellent job of what he was mandated to do for his party. The Nation be damned!

(Tweets @ therohitbansal)