Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has been using Twitter to either question or mock or offer gratuitous advice to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for over five years. Yet it is only now that he seems to have got under Modi's skin, evident from his government's decision to investigate the trusts linked to the Nehru-Gandhi family. It is an axiom that anyone who succeeds in nettling Modi has sleuths knocking at his or her doors.

It is, therefore, bewildering why the commentariat, including those who worry over authoritarianism shadowing Indian democracy, sounds exasperated at "Gandhi's obsession" with Modi. Every political person is doomed to obsess about Modi, for he looms large over Indian polity. He personifies his government and his party, of which the most telling illustration was a Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson failing to name the Union labour minister in a TV debate, that too during the recent exodus of daily labourers from cities.