Now, even when the economy is stagnating, he has romped home to victory at the national level with a higher percentage of votes than in the last general election, that of 2014. Even in the previous contest, Modi was fortunate in facing an opponent afflicted with policy paralysis because of divergent economic ideas at the top between the then prime minister and the party president. Modi, in contrast, presented himself as a man with clear-cut ideas and had little difficulty, therefore, in winning.

However, even as his opponents remained in disarray, Modi was unable to move forward on the economic front as rapidly as he may have expected. His latest success was based, therefore, on two approaches. One was to play the “modern-day Nero” again by banking on the communally divisive sentiments whipped up by his acolytes like Amit Shah and Yogi Adityanath, and the other was to push forward his micro-economic policies — cooking gas at subsidized rates, houses with toilets and bank balances for the less privileged, electrification, health insurance et al — in the absence of macro-economic development.

The result has been that the growth rate has fallen below six per cent and unemployment has reached a 45-year high. Since cooking gas and toilets alone cannot take the country forward, there is need for what the Niti Aayog vice-chairman has called “big bang” reforms, a phrase that was bandied about during Modi’s first term although nothing came of it.

Yet, reforms of that nature are necessary to tackle the problem of high unemployment among the educated youth even as infrastructure projects such as highway construction have been providing jobs at the lower levels. But big-ticket reforms are unlikely as long as communal tension discourages both domestic and foreign investment on a large scale.

It is apparently to dispel the prevailing fear among the Muslims that Modi has decided to reach out to them with his promise of earning their vishwas or trust. Up until now, his slogan had been sabkasaath, sabkavikas or development for all. But since this assertion had failed to reassure the Muslims considering that large sections of them continue to live in fear, as former vice-president Hamid Ansari once said, Modi has turned to securing their trust as well.

But will he succeed when it is unlikely that Amit Shah’s description of the illegal Muslim immigrants as “termites”, or Yogi Adityanath’s division of the Indian citizens into “BajrangBalis”for Hindus and “Alis” for Muslims will be forgotten in a hurry?

Moreover, if Amit Shah tries to emulate his hero, Vallabhbhai Patel, by incorporating the “princely state” of Kashmir into the Indian Union by initiating steps to scrap Articles 370 and 35A to fulfil the Sangh Parivar’s longstanding desire to do so, the Muslims of Kashmir and in the rest of India will not be delighted. Nor will the left-liberals who are usually equated with anti-nationals by the Parivar.

True, Amit Shah has ticked off his deputy, the minister of state for home, G. Kishan Reddy, for describing Hyderabad as a terror haven. It was a similar description of the city by saffronites at the time of the PhD scholar Rohith Vemula’s suicide in 2016, which led to Smriti Irani’s removal from the human resource development ministry.

It is possible, therefore, that Amit Shah is becoming alive to his new responsibilities where he has to be more careful with his choice of words (and of those of his minions) than when he was the BJP chief.

His use of the word, termites, for instance, for the Bangladeshi immigrants had aroused the ire of the US State department although it had been laughed off by Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, with a reiteration of her country’s longstanding position that there are no Bangladeshis living illegally in India.

But unless there is a dramatic change in Amit Shah’s attitude, among other things, on Kashmir and the citizenship bill with its focus on the “Indic” religions of Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism to the exclusion of Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and others, the new home minister may well prove to be the Achilles heel where Modi’s “sadbhavna” outreach to the Muslims is concerned in keeping with his goodwill fasts in Gujarat in 2012-13 to earn the confidence of the Muslims.

In any event, Modi’s latest mellow attitude is the result of the electoral tide turning in the BJP’s favour. Any reversal of the party’s fortune is bound to make the party and the Parivar resort to their customary vicious communal propaganda again to retrieve their position.(IPA Service)