The deranging thing about the ‘normalcy’ that died on the 4th of June, was that the regime’s popularity seemed immune to material and physical suffering. A stagnant agriculture, distressed farmers, massive youth unemployment, the failure to ‘Make in India’, the carnage of Covid, the spectacular failure to even address day-darkening pollution and climate change, none of these seemed to make a blind bit of difference when it came to elections, like the assembly election in Uttar Pradesh (UP) which saw Ajay Bisht, aka Yogi Adityanath, retain his chief ministership with a massive mandate. The occasional Opposition success like the election in Karnataka was invariably overset by serial defeats, as in the assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in December last year.