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.