It is the second instance in less than a fortnight that caught the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) on the wrong foot cutting a sorry figure in front of the media. On both the occasions, the PMO got its face blackened by the ‘infiltration’ of some foreign elements. While the first one was a direct attack exposing the susceptibility and deficiencies of our systems, the second one goes to prove that we Indians are self-sufficient when it comes to committing goof-ups.

Last week, the then National Security Advisor M K Narayanan, who is now a governor, painfully revealed the Chinese involvement in the hacking of PMO’s computer network. On Sunday, a callous mistake cost India its pride as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and many other celebrities were ‘made’ to rub shoulders with a former chief of Pakistan Air Force!
Worse still, the silly ‘slip-up’, which crept in a print-media advertisement issued by the Ministry of Women an d Child Development , could not be realised until the electronic media made fun of it. The advertisement, an appeal against female foeticide on the occasion of the National Girl Child Day, also featured the photographs of WCD Minister Krishna Tirath, cricketers Kapil Dev, Veerender Sehwag and Sarod exponent Amjad Ali Khan besides the picture of the former Pak official, who was on Sunday identified as Tanvir Ahmed Mahmood.

‘Shameful’, is too mean a word to describe this horrendous mistake which is causing a huge embarrassment to India at a critical time of frosty ties with Pakistan. But trying to defend the mistake, WCD Minister Krishna Tirath proved herself ‘shameless’. In a highly disgraceful manner, she asked everyone to bother more about the message in advertisement rather than the wrong picture.
Let’s all pray and hope that, to prove her point and justify the message argument, Mrs Tirath will not be seen rubbing her shoulders next time with the likes of Osama bin Laden and mafia don Dawood Ibrahim! One can understand if Mrs Tirath was a little too worried about her chair but by talking non-sense to cover up a senseless act, she has only made her position even more precarious.

Same ministries and their rulers are never careless when it comes to conveniently ignoring leaders of previous governments even when they deserved a mention in the newspaper advertisements. Where did the same guarded guarded approach go while dealing with this advertisement? Well, it might be too big a question to deal with for the WCD minister for whom it is just the message that matters and nothing else, not even national pride