Ashwatthama hato! (Ashwatthama is dead!)

But of course Ashwatthama isn’t dead. And of course the pronouncement of Ashwatthama’s death by Yudhishthir was no lie.

There is truth, and then there are aspects of it. There is truth, and there is the subterfuge of it masquerading in its shadow.

Truth: Narendra Modi is the only Indian other than Jawaharlal Nehru to have won a third consecutive term as prime minister.

Aspect of that Truth: Narendra Modi did not actually win a third term in office on his own; unlike Nehru, Modi fell thirty seats short of a majority in the Lok Sabha in 2024 and hobbled to power on the crutches of allies.

Subterfuge lurking in the shadows of that Truth: among all of India’s prime ministers other than Chandra Shekhar, who sneaked into South Block through the backdoor and remained in office for a trice, Narendra Modi has returned with the lowest personal margin of victory — 13.49% as opposed to such prime ministerial highs as 72.18% (Rajiv Gandhi, 1984) and his own 2019 surge of 45.22% over the nearest Varanasi rival.

What a fall; even the gods may be a little mortified at the quality of messengers they put out to the world.

But not their self-appointed, unaccredited messenger himself. Narendra Modi — and here is what is emerging as the key and sobering message of what has transpired since he took office a third time — has swaggered past this summer’s ignominious electoral setback as if it were no more than a passing bump on the road beyond which he can continue to barrel on untrammelled as potentate of what he has come to deem his sultanate.

He has been cut to size by the electorate in a fashion that would have left anyone with declared ambitions of majesty a little, if not deeply, ruffled. But there isn’t the faintest sign that such radical reduction of stature by the voter has affected Modi’s demeanour.

When he arrived at the BJP headquarters in Delhi on the evening of June 4 — his majority lost, his alliance halted short of 300, and his adversaries suddenly swollen in ranks — he arrived in a shower of rose petals and golden confetti, waving to the skies, triumphal, as if he had just returned, not wounded from the battlefield, but having made another consummate conquest. He spoke not with humility at this diminished mandate, issued not a passing nod to the sobering message Indians had sent him; he bragged at length about making history. He laid out his swearing-in like a star-lit extravaganza. When he went to Varanasi for the first time after returning to office, he behaved not as if the city had knocked and dented his crown but as if it had studded more jewels into it. Like a certain emperor and his deceptive delusions with apparel, Modi is able to stay astonishingly cocooned in his DIY phantasms of absolute ubermanship.

It should be clear to anyone who can tell chalk from cheese that it will take more than merely an electoral setback to persuade Modi away from his L’Etat, c’est moi — I am the State — understanding of the world around him. It will take more than just the enhanced acreage of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and town criers heralding the return of liberal pluralism to rein in Modi’s authoritarian unilateralism. What precisely that may require is moot, but it will be far more than the sum of the remarkable turn at the hustings. Halting the march towards cultist majoritarianism will, at the very least, have to remain a consistent work in progress; celebratory bugling over change had better remain in the wings.

What do we have to even mildly suggest to us that the widespread expression of disapproval by the electorate — of person and policy, of a drift towards possible absolutism that the binned ‘abki baar 400 paar’ cry underlined — has made a difference where it should have?

As this gets written, the nation — its youth and its future — grapples with the new government’s inaugural shame, a scandal, and a failure of monumental proportions, such that we are not sure how wide or deep the larceny and bungling by the custodians of higher education will eventually cut. You’d expect that a government on crutches, propped in office by numbers that allies bring, would be called urgently to account. Their feeble claim on the Speaker has been rebuffed; Om Birla stays the Treasury’s pick for boss of the Lok Sabha. We don’t see Modi’s key allies raise a little finger.

N. Chandrababu Naidu of Andhra Pradesh and Nitish Kumar of Bihar (partly the scene of the paper leak crime) have been remarkably quiet. We didn’t see those allies seek their proverbial pound of flesh in the new government. Modi retained, as if seated on abundance of his own, all the big and key ministries. Naidu and Nitish seem pleased enough with crumbs off the Delhi table as long as they are thrown provincial packages, as long as they are secure in their respective fiefs.

Arvind Kejriwal, the jailed Delhi chief minister, gets relief from a local court but before he can be let out, the Enforcement Directorate successfully fast-tracks a plea to keep him behind bars. As if to signal to the constituency of critics that nothing’s changed, the slashed voter approval be damned, files a decade-and-a-half old were pulled out in the lieutenant-governor’s office in Delhi and sanction issued for the prosecution of the writer-activist, Arundhati Roy, under provisions of the UAPA. Another French journalist found his work permissions terminated. Odisha, newly grabbed by the BJP, was given as chief minister one Mohan Charan Majhi who has been campaigning for the release of Dara Singh, serving a life term for the gruesome murder of the missionary, Graham Staines, and his boys. In the first few days of Majhi’s term, parts of Odisha convulsed with sectarian violence. And bulldozers continued to wreak havoc in marked-out neighbourhoods of Uttar Pradesh; no lessons learnt from the electoral debacle by Chief Minister Adityanath, who fashions himself as Modi’s successor as prime minister.

Ashwatthama hato!

True. But Ashwatthama is alive.

Such is the truth, and such the masquerade of its subterfuge.

sankarshan.thakur@abp.in