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Rahul Gandhi, for once, has hit the nail on the head: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is no longer capable of running the country. In his familiar bumbling and fumbling ways, however, the Leader of Opposition confuses his message as he says this is because the prime minister is “compromised’. At issue is not the nature of ‘compromise’, if there is any; rather, the question is one of simple competence. To put it bluntly, the crux of the matter is the ruling party’s obsession with Hindutva which, ipso facto, has become an alibi for incompetence and is incapable of translating into good governance.

For over a decade now, many thinking Indians as well as most of those in the Hindutva constituency have allowed themselves to believe that if the Narendra Modi regime is given electoral ‘mandate’ after ‘mandate’, the Indian state’s crisis of governance would get tackled efficiently and competently.

The vast majority of Indians have been made to believe that we have become a ‘hard power’, a ‘muscular nation’, and a ‘developed’ country with the third or fourth – what is one place up or down among friends and sycophants – largest economy in the world. And, those who choose to be Doubting Thomases are told to look around to see how our leaders are being wooed and courted on the global stage. We have been assured on good authority that we are now authorised gurus to the Vishwa (world.)

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

This nicely-painted Potemkin rangoli was rudely unmade by Prime Minister Modi himself when he asked citizens........

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