Sitting here in Dubai I am stunned to hear that a person in New Delhi suffered a cardiac arrest and could not reach the hospital because they closed the roads for the PM’s cavalcade.

Awesome. Technically, under any law of jurisprudence, the PM and his convoy are accessories before the fact and guilty of contributing to a death that may or may not have been avoided. Ergo, they are accountable because nowhere does it say either in the constitution or in the legal tomes of our system that the traffic has to be halted for a VIP to pass by. Taken to its logical length the PM and his entourage have no defence, they voluntarily blocked the survival of a human life.

In a perfect world the whole entourage should be arrested, booked and then given bail. The charge: culpable homicide in the third degree. And depraved indifference to life.

There has to be a limit to the harassment of the public by those they have elected to serve them, these so called servants of the people who think nothing of the inconvenience they cause to everybody else. So many times have I sat aimlessly in a car in the capital of my country while some VIP whizzed past, often as much as an hour later. If you block 600,000 cars you block out 600,000 manhours in idling if you assume one person per vehicle. The backup becomes geometrical in progression.

People are late, they get into trouble, they have to handle traffic jams, the whole works just because one person, duly elected, has to go from point A to point B.

Even as I write this the Indian president is landing at Dabolim airport in Goa. They have blocked the roads. My daughter is to catch a Kingfisher flight out of that airport today and a connector to Dubai. They have advised her to get to the airport early.

With due respect to the office of the president, why can’t she just take a helicopter and go to the Cabo Raj Bhavan which is 25 kilometres away, constructed on a promontory overlooking the sea and has a helipad? Instead, the powers that be think it better to create chaos across the narrow roadways of Goa, cause stress and tension for travelers by choosing the surface route.

I was on the way to Brussels once and the man next to me in economy class turned out to be a minister. No one received him at the other end. Nobody took him through a VIP entrance and he was in front of me in the cab rank. Go figure.

All these Indian ministers blab on about austerity and Gandhian spartanism and wearing khadi and their actions are so blindingly contradictory it baffles one’s mind.

Do a small study. Is the PM concerned about that cardiac death? Does he toss and turn in bed and wonder if maybe he should get a helicopter to trot about the place so that people don’t have to die? Did anyone even tell him? Who are these people that we treat them like demigods and strew petals in their way? When will it stop, this pretence of democracy?

Better still, let us be truly democratic and ensure by law that an ambulance gets precedence over a damn motorcade.