India, Dec. 29 -- Not much hope was held for 2025, the 12th year of Mr Narendra Modi's powerfully personalised prime ministership, and the 100th year of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, his alma mater as a cadre before he was sent to Gujarat as the unelected Chief Minister in 2001.

A decade earlier, in 2014, Mr Modi had led the Bharatiya Janata Party to a momentous victory riding the crest of an election campaign the likes of which had never been seen in the country in its acrid, xenophobic targeted hate. He made a hat-trick last year, in targeted venom against all real and imagined foes of the RSS-BJP in their march towards a Hindu Rashtra, the goal set for them by the founding fathers a hundred years ago.

That had set a template for c...