The educated, culturally-inclined bhadralok class has always been critical of her but it is furious now.

Mahabali’s tale is quite similar to the Greek one of Prosperine who is permitted to come once a year from the underworld to see her mother Ceres, the goddess of corn and harvest.

If the ED’s depredations had effectively got the INDIA parties to unite before the elections, it were the constant fulminations in the Rajya Sabha that acted as the Fevicol in holding the opposition even closer together.

The conclusion that emerges is that public enthusiasm and opposition unity are not enough to combat such an incorrigibly authoritarian ruler, who controls the levers of power once again.

He wrote some 70 books, mostly in English, on the history of Kolkata and the social life of the colonial masters – including their internecine quarrels – and their view of the colonised ‘native’.

If pushed to a corner, Modi is likely to inflict new elections on a tired and financially depleted opposition, mainly because he has unending resources and still controls many of the levers of the narrative.

Diehard religious rightist forces in India are capable of doing anything to ensure the prime minister is not dethroned.

His relentless quest to piggy-back on Hindi hegemony can sway and distract, but his limitations are what Modi cannot paper over.

While there are irregularities in the movement of cash across the political spectrum, India's investigating agencies are focussing only on those who oppose the regime.

It began with his programme of introducing Hindi film music over Radio Ceylon in August 1952. India had emerged as one nation from 14 British Indian provinces and 565 kingdoms or different princely states only five years earlier.

An opposition MP reflects on the chaos and repression in the House as the BJP government scrambles to prevent the Opposition from having its say.

The four prongs of Modi’s messaging and oratory are emotions, hyperbole, sarcasm and personal attacks on opponents. His modus operandi ensures that even emotional outbursts are planned, calibrated and targeted. But calls for a caste census are a huge challenge.

There is a cold, corporate sense of distancing in the new parliament building that even the imperial old parliament never conveyed. It carried an aura and a gravitas that this one can hardly acquire.

The prime minister’s fixation is with unflinching personal loyalty from bureaucrats – a trait that both the law and centuries of experience discourage.

On the eve of Independence, the RSS's mouthpiece, Organiser, had declared that the national flag would never be respected by the Hindus.

According to the Reserve Bank of India, banks in India lost Rs 12,50,553 crore during the nine-year Modi government. Never before in Indian history had banks lost such a gigantic amount without a whisper of a scam or any public debate of consequence.

We have it in writing from the Finance Ministry that the sum total of the irrecoverable losses made by banks over the eight years and nine months of Modi’s tenure so far comes to a whopping Rs 12,09,606 crore. Why are regulators asleep at the wheel?

Modi desperately needs some leader of  the democratic world whose eyes do not remind him constantly of his human rights record – past, present or threatened.

While private refiners gained the most from the deeply-discounted imports of Russian crude, the public sector imported mainly at war-affected high international prices.

Narendra Modi has held the opposition together in Delhi, most inadvertently, and facilitated new alliances, understandings and hopes.