That responsibility and power are closely intertwined is a message that appears to have escaped some of the political leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Thus whatever grace marks the union home minister scored by directing the Tripura administration to maintain law and order while a change of government was underway was negated by party stalwarts ~ including the state’s Governor, Mr Rajnath Singh’s own junior minister, and a host of BJP spokespersons ~ endorsing the vandalism of two statues of Lenin.

For just as there can be no condoning the physical destruction, there must be no ignoring the vulgar display from elements in the BJP.

What was exhibited was medieval ~ when victorious armies went on an orgy of loot, rape and bloodshed.

While the initial silence of the BJP and RSS top brass was puzzling, the Prime Minister has now condemned the vandalism and, more important, asked the Home Minister to intervene effectively.

This is a welcome intervention and it is hoped that states will fall in line. For, two can play at the game of statue-busting as became evident when some rival activists sought to deface a statue of Jana Sangh ideologue Syama Prasad Mookerjee.

This is a zero sum game and the political class that has traditionally thrived on installing statues would collectively do well to eschew a tendency to pull them down.

The demolition of the statues in Tripura ~ there are visuals of a bulldozer at work ~ and the defacing of a statue of Periyar in Vellore (after a provocative tweet from a BJP leader) testify to the intolerance of some within the saffron brigade, an infection that could spread easily to other parties.

This intolerance is evident in the hooliganism of gau rakshaks in several parts of the country, attacks on places of worship of the minority communities and acts that have trickled down to attempts to subjugate the “depressed” classes.

While it would be naïve to expect ideologues to introspect since their aim is to reshape society according to their own specifications, surely leaders of the government ought to assess the extent to which slogans such as sabka sath sabka vikas translate into ground realities.

If all divergent views were criminal, the BJP would not exist in its present form: surely it will grant at least that to the liberalism of the formative years of the Republic?

The country and its people were plunged into despicable depths when saffron leaders equated the Tripura “mobocracy” with the removal of colonial statues after Independence, the dismantling of Hitler’s images after World War II and how the G.I.s cheered when Saddam’s statue was toppled in Baghdad.

What next, the statues of Nehru etc? Before the Prime Minister intervened, the BJP leadership was at pains on Tuesday night to explain away the violence in Tripura as an outpouring of public resentment at decades of CPI-M rule.

Yet they were flattened by Mamata Banerjee’s condemning the statute-destruction. Who better posited to speak on Marxist misrule than the person who dismantled the Leftist’s garrote in West Bengal?