On August 21, the guard of honour deployed to offer the 21-gun salute to former Bihar Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra at his funeral failed to fire even one round. An account of the incident in Hindi by journalist Navin Kumar promptly went viral on social media. The funeral was held in Bihar’s Supaul.

“The way that these policemen picked up their rifles and pointed it in the air threateningly, it looked like they are standing in Shopian (in Kashmir) and not Supaul,” the journalist said during his two-minute monologue.

Astoundingly, the cartridges in the rifles had expired back in 1999, the Hindi news website Jagran reported. The ones intended to be used in Supaul were manufactured in 1996 and had a life of three years only.