Interest group politics drives the Kolis, an upwardly mobile OBC rural group, to feel threatened. Their man seems too aggressively urban and industrial. They see their future as being threatened. So what we have is a combination of rebels and dissenters and assorted injured.

What accelerates this process is the politics of misbehaviour. Modi has no way of coping with dissent except through elimination. Here come his final opposition — the critics at the national level of the BJP who feel and realise that dissenters can run away with local machines. Rajnath Singh insists that Modi negotiate with his Party Rebels.

What follows is the politics of surrogate celebration. A Congress coming alive as a ventriloquist’s opposition. There is a sadness here. It is not value or vision that drives the Congress. It is the cracks in the House that Modi built. It is an irony of democracy that the dissent within the dominant party teaches the opposition to believe in itself.

The coming defeat of Modi is difficult to time. Do the electoral numbers of the Patels, the Kolis, plus the Old Congress frame of tribes, Muslims and dalits spell an impending defeat? Or is defeat a two stage process? The first and internal one is the one we are witnessing. The second and external impact may be more gradual. Then, Modi might be damaged, ego hurt but will survive. Or will democracy punish him in its one-eyed way, not for the violence of the riots but for insulting his own party? Oddly in politics bad manners might be more self-defeating than murder. Such is the irony of electoral democracy and we must be grateful for it.

... contd.