Show up late for a flight in India, like in most countries, and you can expect the plane to depart without you.
But that wasn’t the case for senior government officials in two separate incidents recently in which commercial flights were delayed to accommodate their late arrivals, according to passengers and Indian media reports.
The stories have cast a fresh spotlight on India’s “VIP culture,” a cocoon of comfort that surrounds top officials when they travel by air and road, to the chagrin and often the inconvenience of workaday Indians.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office on Thursday called for a report into the most recent delayed flights, both of which involved Air India, the much-maligned state-run carrier used by government personnel for official travel.