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“He is incorruptible”; the middle-aged founder of a well-known chartered accountancy firm in Mumbai looked palpably thrilled.

It was another of Mumbai’s social get togethers following a business conference where India’s supposedly best minds exchanged political gossip and fulminated on the state of the nation, including its celebrated potholes.

“He is ushering in changes. He looks like a man on a mission.”, the exuberant gentleman continued, like a rollercoaster on steroids. I saw a Narendra Modi “bhakt” long before that dodgy sobriquet became a national meme. The year was 2004. The Gujarat chief minister had already assiduously created a political narrative about himself, even as an ageing PM Atal Behari Vajpayee was selling the chimera of India Shining.

But I am not easy pickings; we are not an argumentative nation for nothing.

“Do you endorse what happened in Gujarat in 2002? Is that okay? Does that not alone disqualify Modi from holding such an august office?”.

The gentleman was unperturbed. If at all, he seemed stunned at my apparent naivete. He looked at me with a bemused expression of a laboratory scientist who was about to do a surgery on a trapped cockroach: “These things don’t matter. They happen all the time”.

Whataboutery would go on to become India’s favorite sport on prime-time TV to rationalise the worst of shenanigans, corruption, violence, sectarianism and riots.

Fast forward to 2014: Modi was the presumptive prime ministerial candidate of the BJP. He had graduated from being a regional satrap ( as TV anchors brand ambitious provincial........

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