Misdirection has its own pitfalls. In a recent speech, the prime minister ironically exhorted protesters against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, especially the Congress and its allies, to protest against the atrocities perpetrated by Pakistan on religious minorities. In the context of the countrywide anti-CAA protests, references to Pakistan are beginning to sound a little hollow. Whipping up nationalistic fervour repeatedly has doubtless helped the Bharatiya Janata Party right up to the 2019 elections, but today most segments of the country’s population are conscious of multiple crises. Pakistan may lose some of its hostile attraction; it may even begin to seem a little distant from immediate troubles. The West Bengal chief minister has summed up Narendra Modi’s ‘there comes the Pakistan bogey’ chant by asking him, rhetorically, why all of his responses to questions about subjects ranging from joblessness to citizenship send the questioners off to Pakistan.

Mr Modi and the BJP are now absorbed in creating waves of sympathy for the minorities who have left Pakistan as refugees. The pretence is that the anti-CAA protesters want to reject them. The prime minister quietly left out Afghanistan and Bangladesh in the speech, and the CAA has never mentioned other neighbouring countries from which the refugees are Muslim. It is precisely this discrimination that the anti-CAA protesters are rejecting, for it goes against humanity and the secular principles of the Constitution. Mr Modi is crying ‘wolf’ loudly to muffle the people’s demand that if refugees escaping religious persecution are to be given citizenship then all faiths should be included: Muslims cannot be left out. But the world is not fooled. The former national security adviser, Shivshankar Menon, for example, said that India’s recent domestic policies, especially the measures in Kashmir and the CAA, have resulted in it being perceived globally as hyphenated with Pakistan as “a religiously driven and intolerant state”. Mr Menon expatiated on the negative effects of this on foreign affairs, and the possibility that India may have violated international law. Adversaries now have a platform from which to attack India, a platform created by the sectarian and divisive goals pursued by the BJP. But if Mr Modi refuses to step out of his web of misdirection in response to his people’s articulated distress, will the warnings of Mr Menon and others like him make any difference?