The other was when the prime minister made the equally preposterous charge against a one-time Congress minister and all-time gadfly, Mani Shankar Aiyar, of organizing a “supari” operation with Modi as a target, again with mythical Pakistani collaborators, which meant removing the Indian prime minister from the scene.

When these “unsubstantiated and unbelievable” allegations, to quote BJP MP Shatrughan Sinha, were being made, they were believed to be the BJP’s wild reactions to ground reports of a fateful decline in its popularity in Gujarat. It is now obvious that if these were indeed a panicky reaction from a party scared of losing its bastion, they were unwarranted because the exit polls have given the BJP a comfortable, though not overwhelming, victory.

Even then, it is clear that the BJP’s seemingly overweening confidence is not rock solid since it tends to freak out at the slightest sign of trouble. This tendency would not have appeared to be so deeply prevalent in the party if a smaller fry had accused Manmohan Singh of a subversive act or about Aiyar hiring a hit-man. But for the prime minister to make accusations of this nature is suggestive of paranoia.

After becoming the prime minister, Modi has mellowed down considerably. He no longer accuses of Muslims of violating family planning norms by producing 25 children with their four wives – hum panch, hamare pachees, as he once said so eloquently in Gujarat. Nor does the “modern-day Nero” of 2002, to quote the Supreme Court, describe refugee camps for Muslims as child-producing factories.

It is strange, therefore, that he should have been so concerned about a possible setback that he palpably lost his cool. The tension may have been high because he is the only effective campaigner in the one-man, presidential party. The others are not of much use. Hence, the relentless focus on the Congress although the latter has been out of power in Gujarat for two decades and is not in the best of health in the rest of the country.

The focus was on the Nehru-Gandhi family as well with Modi comparing Rahul with Aurangzeb, the BJP’s perennial enemy, and a party spokesman bringing in Babur, the villain who built the Babri masjid, and Alauddin Khilji (!), the saffron camp’s latest pet hate in the wake of the Padmavati controversy.

It is possible that there will be more such bitter invectives next year when the BJP will face far more serious challenges than what it did in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. There is little doubt that the BJP survived the anti-incumbency scare in Gujarat because it is Modi’s home province. It would have been unrealistic to expect that the people of the state would go against a Gujarati prime minister.

Besides, two decades of saffron rule in a state once proudly touted by the BJP as a laboratory for experiments in Hindutva have had such a deep polarizing effect with the ghettoization of Muslims that it would take a superhuman political effort to shake its rule. In the matter of the grip of anti-minority politics on the state, Gujarat can be said to be completely different from the rest of the country. It is obvious that the Hindutva experiment has been eminently successful.

It will not be the same, however, in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan in 2018 where the anti-incumbency factor is expected to hurt the BJP much more than it did in Gujarat. It may well be, therefore, that the BJP will launch an equally vitriolic campaign as it did in Gujarat because any setbacks in the three states along with almost certain defeats in Karnataka and Tripura will send an extremely disheartening message to the BJP and RSS cadres before the following year’s general election.

The BJP’s nervousness may be all the greater if Rahul Gandhi learns the right lessons from his inability to make anything more than a marginal impact on Gujarat. One of these is that “soft” Hindutva does not work. As Arun Jaitley said, why should anyone vote for a clone when the real thing is available.

The Congress president might have made a greater impression on even a communalized state if he had visited the places of worship of all religions rather than only to temples, which ran the risk of being interpreted as no more than a tactical move to rob the BJP of a political point.

If, in contrast, he had visited mosques, churches and gurdwaras as well – and not in such large numbers but occasionally – he might have flummoxed the BJP, which cannot conceive of such syncretism. (IPA Service)