Battered by covid-19, Narendra Modi is humiliated by Indian voters

IN THE HOME state of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, a person too clever by half is said to have won the house, but lost Gujarat. Through March and April, political pundits voiced the Gujarati proverb as a warning. So fiercely were Mr Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) fighting to win elections in another state, West Bengal, that they risked losing a bigger prize. Focused obsessively on the campaign through eight rounds of voting that ended on April 29th, they failed to pay attention as India’s second wave of covid-19 grew from a worrying swell into a tidal wave—the biggest cataclysm to have struck the country in living memory. What good would it be if Mr Modi unseated Mamata Banerjee, the obstreperous opposition leader in West Bengal, if his apparent lack of interest in the mounting body-count from the pandemic shook the whole country’s confidence in his leadership.

The country’s confidence is indeed being shaken. Every day sees grisly new records, either in the number of new infections of covid-19, or in the number of deaths from it. Debilitating shortages of oxygen and hospital beds appear to be spreading as the second wave washes across new regions. Frantic relatives of ailing patients have to hunt and beg for life-saving treatment—often unsuccessfully. On May 1st alone official records show 3,689 deaths, and that is almost certainly a woeful undercount.