Singh is not unduly worried over the bullet or the occult. “But I have faith in higher force. I believe it was my destiny to be PM. I have the courage of conviction,” PM said. The BJP took these words and turned them around. “The Prime Minister must acknowledge that the BJP also had a role in shaping his destiny. Had we not vehemently opposed the first choice of the Congress, Dr Manmohan Singh as the second preference would have never made to office,” said Jaitley.

However, humour cannot redeem political discourse from the new low it has been pulled down to. “Black magic and occult practices have always been part of political intrigue. But nobody ever spoke about it on record as the Prime Minister did. Fernandes’s statement is unprecedented. I cannot recollect anything similar,” says political commentator Inder Malhotra.

Malhotra says the closest situation he can recall is Charan Singh writing to prime minister Morarji Desai in the late ‘70s that H K L Bahuguna was a KGB agent. Bahuguna replied that Charan Singh was a “madman.” There were “uncharitable” remarks about Raj Narain and Jagjivan Ram but only in private, never on record.

The bitter tussle for power between the Congress and BJP and Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origins have added new opportunities for innovative abuse. The late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan’s alleged comparison between Monica Lewinsky and Sonia Gandhi created a controversy. Although the BJP was furious when Sonia Gandhi called Vajpayee government nikamma, the party returned the compliment by calling Manmohan Singh a nikamma PM when the Volcker controversy flared up.