To the extent that they have any regional identity, the Gandhis are Gujarati. Why should they hate Gujarat? The family name is Gujarati, coming from the Parsi Feroze Gandhi, and meaning grocer (fun fact: ‘Gandhi’ and ‘Modi’ mean essentially the same thing). When Indira died, my school in Surat, run by the Sir JJ Orphanage, immediately claimed her as one of the community.

Summoning an assembly to mark the tragedy, our deputy headmaster Major (Retd) Bamji, somewhat puzzlingly, informed the school that Indira “lived like and was cremated as a Parsi”. Of this fact, he said, he was very proud.

The prime minister is coming at it from the other end. In a speech this week he said: “The Gandhis do not like Gujarat or Gujaratis.” As proof, he claimed: “Congress governments in the past did not allow completion of the Narmada project, which was originally conceived by Sardar Patel. The family did not like Sardar Patel or Morarji Desai. When Morarji Desai became Prime Minister, the family spread rumours.”

Could he be referring to the same family that called dams India’s modern temples and imposed top-down industrialisation on us? Apparently. And correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t Patel a Congressman, named home minister by Nehru? One would think listening to Modi that the Sardar of Patidars was batting for the other side. But I am sure Modi is familiar with Patel’s views about the RSS and its Swayamsevaks – he observed that they distributed sweets after Gandhi’s assassination and spread “communal poison”. So one is not sure where the prime minister is going with this appropriation. But it is the election silly season, and even those of us who pretend to be neutral can be entertained by Modi taking the Congress to the cleaners. I must confess that while I enjoy Modi, I enjoy him most when he is in full cry, as he was in Gandhinagar, though I should say he is better, much better, in Gujarati than in Hindi.

Writing in Economic Times, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay observed that while speaking of the Goods and Services Tax in his speech to ‘7 lakh party workers’ (Gujarat having become like North Korea), Modi switched to Gujarati. He did this to drive home the point to suffering Gujarati traders that it was not his decision alone to implement GST but also the Congress’s. This is a signal, Mukhopadhyay wrote, that the thing is political trouble. Perhaps, but it will need more talent than the present opposition has to be exploited.

The Congress whines about the misuse of the election commission. Of course the BJP will twist whatever arms it can to win. Modi and Amit Shah know how to use the state and its organs (including the election commission and the judiciary) in a third world society. One can complain against this but it is a cultural problem and there’s no point blaming them.

The interesting thing is that all stops are being pulled. Modi is in Gujarat every week showering gifts (‘jumlon ki baarish’ in the words of Rahul Gandhi’s tweet writer — brilliant line) and his demeanour shows the BJP has a fight on its hands. This has surprised me for three reasons.

First, that the Congress has not won an election in Gujarat, whether Lok Sabha or Vidhan Sabha in 32 years.Second, that in what is a two-party state, the Congress has been stuck in the 33%-37% voteshare range. In three decades, it has not once managed to get those extra five percentage points that will take it to power. Under Modi, the BJP voteshare actually increased.

Third, and most important, recent Gujarati mobilisations against the BJP have all excluded the Congress because of its unpopularity (‘mussalmanon ni party’). The Patidar reservation agitation under Hardik Patel, the Dalit anger after the barbarism in Una under Jignesh Mewani, the OBC counter to the Patidars under Alpesh Thakore, and the march of the merchants of Surat against demonetisation and GST. All these happened spontaneously without political involvement from Congress, which was deliberately kept away.

If anger is debiting the BJP’s books, it is not showing on the credit side in the Congress accounts. So what then is the prime minister worried about?

My guess is: turnout.

In Gurdaspur, one of Punjab’s few Hindu majority constituencies, the BJP got hammered this month on a Lok Sabha seat it has dominated for two decades. One likely reason was that not enough of the achche din customers showed up to vote. In Gujarat also, this is likely to happen.

The BJP’s sterling economic performance at the Centre (there can be few instances in history of such wilful and deliberate damage to an economy) has forced the prime minister to go negative, smearing the already tattered Congress brand as he drags his party once again over the line.