1.2 Billion Indians Hit by Leadership Outage

Bikas Das/Associated Press

Stranded passengers waited for trains on a platform in Kolkata, Tuesday.

Paul Beckett, who wrote the political commentary below, is the WSJ’s South Asia bureau chief. He occasionally dabbles in satire. Follow him on Twitter @paulwsj.
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.
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.

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