For all the demonstrable faults and failures of the Narendra Modi regime, the broad national narrative refuses to reveal any clues of weariness or desire for change.

If Thursday’s outcome were meant to be a preview of 2024, the die is indelibly cast: India is turning a deep saffron that imitates the hues and haranguing of Hindu rashtra, the Congress continues to pale perilously. Its footprint has never been more anaemic.

Modi’s BJP could barely have expected to swim so sturdily against the tide of accumulated performance deficits. That it has done so is probably on account of multiple factors. The unmatched resources at the party’s command and its elaborate and hyper-engaged election machinery are only two, and arguably not the most critical, factors.

What bears more heavily on such verdicts is the rank absence of a match to Modi or the BJP, and the desire to continue buying into Moditva, even at some expense and degrees of difficulty, until the cult’s project of a majoritarian India has de facto been achieved.

Make no mistake, this BJP campaign, as many others over the past decade, was framed on the exclusion and othering of minorities with the express purpose of aligning majoritarian sentiment to the larger objectives of Hindutva.

Yogi Adityanath, the first Uttar Pradesh chief minister to retain power in three decades, spoke of the politics of 80:20; Modi himself latched on to the Ahmedabad blast verdict and likened cycles, the election symbol of the Samajwadi Party, to terrorism.

The political meaning of Modi — or Yogi — does not need explicit stating to the devout; they represent a militant Hindutva politics and aspiration without having to be spelled out to the devout, or to their adversaries. Post-victory, Adityanath signed off his thanksgiving tweets with an exclamatory “Jai Shri Ram!”

It is probably a thing to keep in mind that Adityanath retains Uttar Pradesh upon five years of consistent — and outspoken — baiting and berating of minorities. His sectarian mien and politics he has worn as a badge of honour, and Uttar Pradesh has rewarded him for it.

In effect, the BJP scored a perfect four in four — it was never a contender in Punjab, swept by Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP, which claimed it would now become the “natural and national” opposition to the BJP instead of the Congress. The AAP and the Congress have two state governments each. The key difference is that the Congress is clearly on the downslide and the AAP’s spirits are ascendant.

Questions will arise afresh about the leadership, or the lack of it, of Rahul Gandhi, and indeed the Nehru-Gandhis. The Congress continues to course down in astonishing fashion. The word coming from its uncrowned — and would-be crowned — leader is a numbing repetition of the past: “The Congress respects the verdict of the people, “Rahul Gandhi said. “We will learn lessons.”

But the moment belongs to Modi and the BJP, and their mesmerising ability to defy governance failures and excesses to extract electoral victories. In 2017, the BJP took Uttar Pradesh on the back of widespread distress and disaffection caused by the demonetisation.

It has regained power now in the face of disastrous Covid mismanagement last summer, rising inflation and unemployment, and an angry farmer revolt that forced the Centre to step back on unpopular agrarian laws.

One of the remarkable things about Thursday’s verdict is that the BJP has done well in areas where farmer anger was most prominent.

It has largely held off the challenge from Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtriya Lok Dal in western Uttar Pradesh’s Jat belt, and it has taken all eight Assembly seats in Lakhimpur Kheri, where farm protesters were allegedly driven over and killed by local BJP toughs belonging to the camp of junior Union home minister Ajay Mishra Teni.

The Kheri verdict may, in fact, be metaphoric of how Modi remains unaffected by the worst acts of commission and omission; Kheri may provide to us clues to why Modi and his acolytes might feel encouraged to press on with the re-fashioning of India into a majoritarian state that will be a fuller mockery of the Constitution and its enshrined values.