Bullet Politics

India’s latest anxieties over the renewed conflict in West Asia, and the accompanying fear of another fuel shock, has produced a flurry of political symbolism. Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for austerity, the Maharashtra government unveiled a Standard Operating Procedure urging ministers and officials to cut fuel consumption, avoid foreign tours, hold virtual meetings and embrace electric vehicles. Then came the pièce de résistance: Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis riding a Bullet motorcycle from Varsha to Mantralaya, accompanied by Minister Ashish Shelar.

While the gesture was designed to project restraint and solidarity with ordinary citizens who are bracing for higher petrol and diesel prices, it risks looking faintly theatrical. Fadnavis is among India’s more competent administrators. He has little need for choreographed displays of modesty. Maharashtra does not require its Chief Minister to cosplay as a fuel-conscious commuter. It requires him to govern well.

Indeed, one suspects that many residents of Mumbai and Pune would happily tolerate a Chief Ministerial convoy if in return they received roads that did not resemble obstacle courses after every monsoon. A smoother commute saves more fuel than a symbolic motorcycle ride ever will. Vehicles trapped for hours in snarled traffic, inching across cratered roads and unfinished flyovers, consume fuel with remarkable efficiency. Urban India’s great fuel wastage, prominent in crowded cities like Mumbai and Pune, is not ministerial convoys but infrastructural dysfunction.

There is something faintly misplaced about governments lecturing citizens on conservation while presiding over traffic systems that guarantee maximum inefficiency. Pune’s commuters routinely spend hours crawling through chaotic junctions. Mumbai’s motorists endure endless bottlenecks caused by perpetual construction, poor road maintenance and planning that appears to have been conceived during a power outage. If Maharashtra genuinely wishes to reduce fuel consumption, its government should begin not with optics but with repairing the asphalt.

That said, the State government’s push for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure is sensible enough. Encouraging virtual meetings instead of bureaucratic pilgrimage is also long overdue. The cancellation of foreign tours, though largely symbolic in fiscal terms, at least conveys some awareness that governments ought to share public anxieties during periods of economic uncertainty.

But symbolism has limits when it begins to undermine practicality. A Chief Minister is not an ordinary commuter. He is a high-security protectee governing India’s richest and politically most consequential state. Security protocols exist for reasons that transcend public relations. The Chief Minister weaving through Mumbai traffic on a motorcycle may delight social media managers, but it is less likely to delight security professionals.

Governance in modern India increasingly risks becoming a branch of performance art. Ministers wield brooms for cameras, travel in metro trains for a day or cycle to work.

Fadnavis should resist that temptation. His reputation rests not on populist theatrics but on managerial competence. Maharashtra faces problems substantial enough to occupy a full-time government. None will be solved from the saddle of a Royal Enfield.