Now that may be true: the Liberal-Secularist is vehemently opposed to Modi’s RSS-BJP brand of divisive Hindutva politics. However, Modi is not talking about an ideological battle as much as harping needlessly on his impoverished background: of a workhorse versus a prince, a backward caste versus a well-born, rough versus refined. This, of course, is accompanied by whirring images of Modi in tapasya (rigour of austerity and penance), his mother Heeraben living in a hovel, and other such heart-tugging brand persuasions. Of late, Modi has even jocularly said in interviews, given to favourable news organisations, that his only regret as he nears the completion of his term as prime minister is that he could not make the people of Lutyens’ Delhi his own, nor he part of them. At other times, he has hit back, saying that the “Khan Market gang”, another allusion to Power Delhi, cannot dismantle his image because it was not them which created his image, but it was of his own making through 45 years of tapasya.