There is no defence against genius, we can only gawp at it. Virat Kohli can lift the run rate from 5.7 to 8 in six overs. Nobody can stop him. Virat Modi has brought the rate down from 8 to 5.7 in six straight quarters of decline and nobody can stop him either.

Indeed this stellar economic performance has secured him more endorsements than even Kohli has. The latest coming from the new head of the National Institution for Transforming India (transforming India into what exactly, has someone asked?) Aayog, who is predicting world-beating growth in the current quarter.

We shall see, though reports of the GST execution being a total shambles — ‘good governance’ at work, no doubt — does not inspire similar confidence. But who needs performance when one has genius? One imagines that at his meetings, the table-thumpers begin screaming ‘wah-wah Modi saheb!’ before the next transformational idea is even fully pronounced.

Now as a Gujarati I always knew the promise of sabka saath came with terms and conditions. Few Indians are innocent enough to believe that something calling itself Hindutva will be suitable for consumption by all Indians.

But the sabka vikas bit most Indians swallowed. It is not easy to deny that Modi believed, and got the rest of us to believe, that he had what nobody else had: the secrets to making India a great economic power.

And here we are then, at 5.7% growth, produced by something the BJP president calls ‘technical reasons’ (is incompetence a technical reason? Must check).

The point is this: at a moment in time when numbers have spoken the truth and the data has stripped bare the performance, will the halo of genius evaporate?

It would in a polity where economic performance is the standard by which the electorate measures its leaders.

Speaking in the United States, Congress princeling Rahul Gandhi said the UPA government had fallen because of its inability to deliver meaningful employment to Indians. He said: “Those same people who got angry with us because we couldn’t deliver on those 30,000 jobs a day are going to get angry with Mr Modi.”

Are they? Gandhi said “there is anger building up in India” and that “the main issue with Mr Modi is that he diverts that issue and points the finger elsewhere instead of saying ‘we have a problem’.”

No, the main issue is the ability of Modi to win despite performing as demonstrably shoddily as he has, both in Delhi and Amdavad before that. Patidar anger which exploded in July 2015 was built up over years of frustration.

The demand for reservation in government jobs from a very proud and self-sufficient community came because of the inability of the ‘Gujarat Model’ (now showing in theatres nationwide) to deliver private sector jobs of any colour, white or blue.

But through all these years the Patidars queued up to vote for Modi. In 2014, if I remember it right, the BJP crossed 50% vote share for the first time. So, no, the main issue is not that Modiji changes the subject: he will do what he must to win. The main issue is the inability of the opposition to strip Modi of that veneer of genius.

But perhaps we are at a moment when there is some sort of national realisation that the shiny new thing we bought in 2014 isn’t doing all we were told it would do.

That the lack of performance — barely a thing has been left un-botched — will result in a stripping away of the emperor’s suit and boot. Will it?

We will know presently. Gujarat is on the cusp of elections. The list of Gujarati communities angry with the BJP is ominously long. The Patidars have rampaged, Gujarati Dalits have mobilised against Hindutva after the barbarism in Una, and even the famously easygoing merchants of Surat gave up their baporiyu to march against GST. If anger in the electorate at government incompetence and collusion be the key, then surely the BJP is finished. Is it?

If I were a betting man (and I no longer am, authorities please note) my bet would be: no. It is not and it will win.

What do we vote for? This is a fundamental question that nobody can answer for the whole, only for the self and that also requiring an

honesty that many will confess to not having. About the whole we can only conjecture. My guess is that most of us vote on faith, not performance. We see evidence of this elsewhere, in the peculiarities of our religion. India is the poorest nation on earth if we measure nations by absolute numbers of the poor. Indians have been destitute for millennia but has their faith diminished?

No. The faith is in the deity, and not in its effectiveness. Idolatrous societies do not blame the deity for not delivering.