MUMBAI, India -- They zip through toll plazas in dedicated lanes. They enjoy special access to tickets on overcrowded trains. And they're notorious for showing up late to commercial flights, making regular passengers wait.
Being an Indian government official of even moderate standing carries seemingly endless perks and privileges. But no symbol of India's "VIP culture" is as ubiquitous -- or as maddening -- as the flashing red light.
Restricted in Western countries mostly to police cars, fire engines and ambulances, the red beacons have been a benefit of Indian officialdom, used by dozens of categories of officeholders and dignitaries to bypass the country's notorious traffic jams.
Now, they'll be stuck on the roads like everyone else.
Saying that "every Indian is a VIP," Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently banned nonemergency vehicles from using the flashing lights, striking a blow against an official culture in which India's masses follow countless rules while the powerful write their own.
"These symbols are out of touch with the spirit of new India," Modi said in a Twitter post.
The lal batti, or red light, was an all-too-familiar irritation on the clogged roads of New Delhi and Mumbai, where motorists often were stuck for no reason, or ordered to pull over by a police officer for several minutes -- only to see a shiny car whiz past with a flashing red, blue or amber light affixed to its roof.
While a few state governments had already taken similar action, the ban went into effect nationally May 1 and even applies to Modi, top officials in his Cabinet and the heads of state governments. Law enforcement and emergency vehicles will still use them.
Government rules spelled out more than 40 categories of dignitaries who were entitled to use different types and colors of beacons, from the president and prime minister down to state-level legislators and university vice chancellors.
Although meant to be used only in discharging government duties, the detachable lights have been spotted on the cars of officials' relatives. In 2013, India's Supreme Court -- whose justices also were entitled to the beacons -- complained that they were being given to "all and sundry" officials, even heads of village-level governments.
For Modi's conservative government, which is cozy with big business and has loosened restrictions on corporate political donations, banning the lal batti was an easy populist move.
Praising the decision, the Indian Express newspaper described the red light as an "obscene" vestige of British rule that "perpetuated, in democratic India, the segregation of the ruler and the ruled, which was a hallmark of colonial power." Several officials made a show of removing the lights from their cars after the government order.
But eliminating the beacons will not end a VIP culture that manifests itself in countless ways in a country of 1.3 billion people, where everyone is looking for a way to rise above the crowds, hassles and endless red tape.
In March, Ravindra Gaikwad, a legislator in Mumbai, assaulted an Air India employee for giving him an economy-class ticket on a two-hour commercial flight to New Delhi. (The aircraft did not have a business-class cabin.)
Gaikwad later said that he had slapped the employee with his slipper 25 times. Air India banned him for several days before the government ordered the company to allow him to fly again.
In June 2015, an Air India flight from Mumbai to New York was delayed for more than 90 minutes, reportedly because a member of a government delegation forgot to bring his U.S. visa. Officials denied the mistake, blaming technical reasons for the delay.
In July 2015, M.K. Stalin, a politician in the southern city of Chennai, formerly Madras, marred the opening of a new metro line by slapping a passenger who refused to make way. As the video went viral, Stalin said the contact was "unintentional."
Indian law allows more than 30 categories of VIPs to bypass preflight security checks at commercial airports. For years, they included a businessman whose main qualification was that he married into India's most famous political family.
Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi, was the only person on the "no-frisk" list who was mentioned by name, which only made his inclusion all the more galling to most Indians. That changed in 2015, when Modi's government amended the list and dropped Vadra -- although he is still exempt when traveling with his wife, who is on a list of people granted special protection.
No one knows exactly how many ailing Indians have died because ambulances were stuck in traffic, but news media have documented several cases that resulted from VIP convoys blocking the roads.
In 2010, an 8-year-old boy died in the northern city of Kanpur after his parents could not take him to the hospital because of roadblocks put in place for a visit by Manmohan Singh, then the prime minister. It was one of three deaths over a 13-month span blamed on road closings for Singh's motorcades.
In April in New Delhi, an ambulance carrying a wounded child was stuck behind a barricade for several minutes while a VIP convoy rolled through. A witness live-streamed the incident on Facebook; his video has been viewed more than 1 million times.
One day in September 2015, mourners in the northern city of Chandigarh trying to cremate their dead were told to wait. Modi was in town and the outdoor cremation ground had been converted into a temporary parking lot for his rally.
An official told them to put off the last rites "for a few hours," until Modi had left town.
SundayMonday on 05/07/2017