The plot against India

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Editor's note: Life is mostly grief and labour.Two things get you through.Chortling when it hits your neighbour,Whingeing when it’s you. Kingsley Amis could have been writing about our prime minister and his party. Seven years of indifference on their part to the suffering of Indians—from the casualties of demonetization and bigotry to the victims of the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic—dissolved last week in a display of self-pity. Consider the sequence of events. Narendra Modi arrived in Punjab to lavish largesse on its people. His party’s yearlong effort to sully protestors from the state as a sinister fifth column had boomeranged. So, after an ignominious retreat, the prime minister emerged just in time for the elections, bearing gifts worth Rs 42,000 crore: roads, colleges, hospitals and a research centre. His underlings heightened expectations by promising to put on a rally worthy of a party that is apparently “no longer the second fiddle” in Punjab. The prime minister departed Delhi hoping to be greeted by parades of grateful Punjabis. He descended in Bathinda to be told that the sun was not shining. …