I finished writing my book on India this week and thought I should read the newspapers to find out the latest. What have I missed in the time that I’ve been away? The thing that struck me after I read a few dailies was that the news in India has stopped making sense.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 13 out of 33 seats in the by-election and was thought to have lost. The Congress won seven and its spokesmen were parading in triumph. Pyrrhus (from whom Pyrrhic victory) said of his campaign that “if we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we will be ruined". I spent most of Tuesday on television trying, unsuccessfully, in English (CNN-IBN), Hindi (ABP News) and Gujarati (CNBC-Bajar) to convince people this was also the case with the Congress.

The Times Of India reported in its lead story that the “BJP received a sobering reality check on Tuesday when it was roundly defeated in the assembly byelections in the states of UP, Rajasthan and Gujarat".

Er, didn’t the BJP win Gujarat? They got six out of nine. If getting two thirds of the seats is defeat for the Prime Minister, I worry for what we now think about his abilities.

Has even the media begun to believe that it’s all going to be different and new and shiny now? Should I pulp my book whose arguments (exclusive excerpt: “India is such a crappy place") have all been overturned by the Gujarati phenomenon?

Not yet, but then we should give him some time.

The papers in Gujarat were excited about the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit and a PTI report in the Ahmedabad Mirror said that “putting an end to all speculations regarding the menu of the dinner" Modi was hosting, “the state government has said the food will consist of only Gujarati delicacies". I wonder what the speculation consisted of. That the food served in Amdavad would be Japanese?

Rediff said Xi would be “spoilt for choice" because of the “50 shuddh sattvik ethnic items" and “exotic butter milk to wash them down".

The thing would be “completely vegetarian" naturally but it would be “authentic Gujarati food".

When we say “authentic Gujarati" food of course we mean “vegetarian". This is a fraud on the Chinese and a continuation of the fraud on all Indian people as to what constitutes Gujarati food. Jains are less than 1% of Gujarat’s population but are the major representatives of its cuisine. This is because the Gujaratis you know outside of the state are most likely Jain (Shah, Mehta, Sanghvi, etc.) or Bania, who are also oppressively vegetarian and also a tiny group. These are the communities that travel for trade and take their food with them. The other reason is that many Gujaratis bow to the mercantile ethic of these two communities and will accept their superiority culturally.

However, many don’t. The lower caste food of Gujarat is non-vegetarian. Kolis (fishermen), the Khatris of Surat, the Darbars, and the Ghanchis are large communities of meat-eaters.

Narendra Modi is himself vegetarian by choice, because of his family or perhaps because of his decades in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, but his caste is traditionally non-vegetarian. Ghanchis make an excellent pomfret, or paaplet as we call it, for the Gujarati new year.

Even among the vegetarians, my community of the Leuva Patidars has nice, clean food. Unlike the Gujarati food you are likely familiar with, it is not sweet, especially our kadhi, pulses and vegetables. I must hasten to add that I am not vegetarian. In his essay Batein, which I translated as Bombay During The Riots, Saadat Hasan Manto writes of his exasperation at violence springing from the same old things. He says “mandir and masjid—to me only stone. Cow and pig—to me only flesh". To me too. Both.

Patel food is actually superior to and more healthy than the Bania-Jain fare soaked through with oil and sugar that the rest of India considers Gujarati food.

So Mr Xi, I hope you enjoyed your meal, but do not consider it to have been representative.

To stay with the Gujarati theme but to return to the senseless news, Hindustan Times reported that BJP legislators wanted “no Garba-crashing". This interested me.

The report said “BJP lawmaker from Indore Usha Thakur had directed Garba organisers in the city to ensure men who wanted to take part in night-long dance should only be allowed entry after proving their credentials", because she “wanted Muslims barred from Garba venues".

She has “written to Garba organisers, asking them to stop Muslim men from entering the dance venues and seducing women". Comment will only spoil the beauty of this story so let’s move on.

Proving that kooks flock together, BJP MLA from Bhopal Rameshwar Sharma agreed with this prohibition. “I am not opposed to Muslims", he told Hindustan Times, “but if somebody wanted to take part in such festivities, he must come with a sense of faith in our religion."

He has no problem with Muslims as long as they are Hindus.

That day’s paper also carried news of water resources minister Uma Bharati offering her theory for the Kedarnath flooding of June 2013 that killed 1,000 people. The reason was that atheists were doing potty “within the natural boundary formed by the Mandakini and Saraswati rivers which flowed near the shrine in 1882", which had earlier been banned. Bharati said “atheists came here, mainly for business purposes. This resulted in nature’s fury at Kedarnath in 2013".

Bharati’s views no longer surprise me, because she is barely literate (schooled up to class VI) and cannot be expected to know much. What surprised me was the idea that there are atheist businessmen in India. I look forward to seeing what Bharati’s explanation is for the state of the Ganga, of which she has been put in charge by Modi. The same report, incidentally, referred to minister for women and child development Maneka Gandhi’s information that “‘illegal cow slaughter’ was being used to fund Islamic terrorism", conflating the two things that are closest to the hearts of the kooks club.

I hope the foreign correspondents in India are not taking notice of such things because we come across as a nation of people who are totally insane. But this is to hope in vain, of course. I was interviewed a few days ago by National Public Radio on astrology and horoscopes. The American reporter asking the questions was genuinely surprised how so many scientists of India’s space programme (she had visited them) believed in such mumbo jumbo while sending up a mission to Mars.

I told her it was because of bilingualism. The English-medium Indian can look perfectly rationally at Saturn and Mars, and understand them through science. At the same time, he will fear the wrath of Shani and Mangal, which are the same objects but now made different by language. The Hindu’s faith is marked mainly not by idolatry but animism, the idea that life exists in rivers and rocks and things. And not by polytheism (many gods) but pantheism (god is everywhere).

This brings the natural world into the space of religion. It gives the Hindu his ideas about rahu-kalam and such.

He is protected from this malevolence through the magic of incantations, threads on his wrist and safe zones of time.

But I accept that he will be able to convincingly sketch out some sort of logical and “scientific" explanation for this magic, and also that it is for him that our newspapers are written.

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