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The shameless celebration on Wednesday (June 10) projecting Narendra Modi as the ‘longest serving elected uninterrupted prime minister’ raised chuckles among those who know the truth. Prime Minister Modi — and the servile leaders in his party and the larger National Democratic Alliance (NDA) conglomeration — tried to project that he has crossed the milestone set by India’s iconic first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in terms of longevity in the high office.

By discounting the almost five years that Nehru was the prime minister of independent India before the first general election was held in 1952 on the basis of the newly adopted constitution of India, the leaders of the entire NDA block have shown that they are not in a position to differentiate between reality and illusion.

Let us remember that members of the Constituent Assembly of India, no less, had elected Nehru as the prime minister; after all, the Constituent assembly — with its members elected by the members of the popularly elected Provincial Legislative Assemblies — was as much a representative body as there could be in the given circumstances.

If Modi and company reject the Constituent Assembly’s mandate as not representative enough, then that amounts to their questioning the legitimacy of the constitution itself, as this sacred document of independent India was framed and adopted by the same Constituent Assembly.

Clearly, the spectacle that........

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