For the better part of almost a decade and a half, the BJP has operated on an assumption that would have made even Louis XIV blush with embarrassment. The State was Narendra Modi and Narendra Modi was the State. The distinction between the government, the party and the man gradually became so blurred that questioning one was construed as blasphemy against all three. That arrangement worked spectacularly well all this while. Until a bunch of children refused to cooperate.

History has an incurable habit of mocking power. The Bastille was not demolished by constitutional lawyers. Rosa Parks did not possess a television network, nor did Gandhi have an IT Cell. The Berlin Wall did not collapse because television propagandists finally ran out of adjectives while screaming themselves hoarse every evening. Power almost always collapses first in the imagination of ordinary people before it collapses anywhere else.

That is why the CJP movement deserves to be examined far more seriously than the government would like and, ironically, far more seriously than some of its own supporters have managed to do. I have my reservations about some of the personalities who first emerged as its public faces. Charisma is not character and public adulation is no substitute for political wisdom. Every movement eventually discovers that heroes are frequently the weakest link in history.

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Fortunately, history has another delightful habit. Sometimes it simply discards its heroes and keeps the movement. And that, I suspect, is precisely what has happened here. The establishment, I feel, made a fatal miscalculation by assuming that if a few faces could be discredited, the movement would quietly dissolve into the digital ether from which it emerged. Instead, it has behaved like mercury. Strike it with a hammer and it merely becomes a hundred smaller droplets.

The BJP has spent years perfecting political centralisation. Every campaign had one face, every achievement one author, and every election became one man’s plebiscite. It is a remarkably efficient model until the day one discovers that decentralised dissent is immune to centralised authority. Who exactly........

© Mathrubhumi English