Dear Modi voter, I’ve been thinking of you these seven months. How is it going? Actually I know how it’s going. What I meant to ask is—are you happy? Is it all better now? No, and perhaps I’ll tell you why later. But let’s talk about how you feel.

I understand the unease of no excitement, and it is called ennui. You’re feeling it now, aren’t you?

Yes, and it is going to be a long five years while you wait for the magic to come. There you will be, sitting through the whole of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, when what you really wanted was to skip to Ode To Joy in the final movement. Or, if you incline to low culture, it is like waiting for the slog overs to begin—with Rahul Dravid at bat.

Well, and sorry to ruin the suspense of this movie, but no thundering climax is coming. No sixers will be hit in the last overs. Some of us are still being entertained though, deriving pleasure from your distress. The Germans, twisted race, have a word for that sentiment and I feel it coursing through me now—a certain sense of Amit Shahdenfreude.

So tell me, are the women of Delhi (that matter which so upset you) safer? How, since this be the season of cheer, did your stocking finish up with a lump of coal?

It is because you were promised outrageous things by those who inflated Narendra Modi’s abilities.

Most cruel and most idiotic was the line that Modi would rid us of a culture of “entitlement". This is an argument plagiarized from a nation, the US, where it may or may not actually apply. It certainly does not apply in a nation that is, by any honest measure, 50% poor and 50% illiterate.

So, no, things will not change.

Meanwhile, like Canute, this king will try and fail to stop the irritating waves that his ministers keep sending his way. There is in reality only one problem Modi has, and it is that the media has turned. It is bored of its shiny new toy and no longer gasps with delight at discovering its new features. Admittedly, this is the fault of the media. It is turned on by individual events—one rape, one idiot minister’s comments, one anything else—and each of these is worth the news cycle for two full days, and can halt Parliament.

That has got the master jerking his knee (and getting it wrong) at every outrage from Uber ban to Haryana bus scuffle. This will continue into 2019, I guarantee you. These days what I like most of all is to pour a tall cool one and watch Arnab’s serial. I whisper “I told you so" to experts bewildered that Modi is refusing to deliver their magnificent predictions.

I think it was unwise of them, and of you, Modi voter, to have set great store by the genius of one man. Madhu Kishwar, now shorn of illusion, justifies matters to herself thus in a Scroll interview: “Look, I still stand by my commendation of the Gujarat government. It was the absolute truth. He got rewarded for his work in Gujarat, he is now the prime minister."

Is it possible—give this a thought Ms Kishwar—that credit for the relative prosperity (and it is relative) of Gujaratis accrues to them and their fine mercantile culture and not to the genius of one man? If so, then no action replays should have been expected in Delhi.

Our problems are not, to play my old and broken record again, those of government, but of society. I think Swachh Bharat is a very fine thing. But it is not the government’s job to effect behavioural change. I do not mean this in the sense of propriety. I mean in the sense of capacity.

Modi has got fundamental things wrong. Who will deny that even in his supposed area of mastery—development—he is out of his depth? Make in India (all logo and no strategy) is already being written off by those who matter. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth till March is expected to be under 6%. What? After all the great announcements? After the lowest oil prices in a decade? Would it have been different under someone else? No.

Like Netaji (few Indian heroes survive close inspection by those who actually bother to read and not merely prostrate), he will be revealed as all talk and no fight. But there’s no relenting on the banal wordplay, the latest being his pronouncement that drugs are “a malaise-filled 3D—darkness, destruction and devastation". Clearly the sentiment of someone who has never enjoyed a toke, of course, but is this sort of juvenile reduction still arousing you? It isn’t me, but then it never has, as readers will know.

Entering my seventh year of moaning in Mint Lounge about how our culture and not our politician is responsible for our lot, I can hardly begin blaming Modi today for not taking this chosen people to the promised land.

I don’t blame him. I blame you. Merry Christmas!

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