The Lok Sabha election begins on Thursday. The campaign rhetoric is plunging but that's natural because Prime Minister Narendra Modi has centralised his campaign, his tenure, his governance, his party, and his leadership of the nation: it's all about himself. That's the way of populists and authoritarians (remember "Indira is India"). No point in complaining now. Unfortunately for Modi, he cannot contest all 543 Lok Sabha seats. Also unfortunately for Modi, like Gulliver in Lilliput, he has to fight a posse of state leaders, be it Mamata Banerjee in Bengal or Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav, the former chief ministers of UP who held a joint rally on Sunday, or Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra, who is suddenly saying that the opposition is in with a chance.

Also unfortunately for Modi, he peaked in 2014. Even if the NDA wins 30 out of Maharashtra's 48 seats, it's still a drop from last time's tally of 42. Even if the BJP emerges the single largest party in UP, it might still be 40 seats down from 2014. No wonder the opposition has stuck to quietly pinning him down in each state without much all-India fanfare. "Didi" has told voters to vote for India's first Bengali PM; K Chandrashekhar Rao, who swept the Telengana assembly election in December, has spoken of forming a new national party; and Naveen Patnaik has released an exercise video in which his energy eerily matches that of Modi's from his yoga video last year.