To understand why the Narendra Modi regime and its saffronised nomenklatura find itself in a Trumpian pickle, one needs to recall the evening of May 10, when foreign secretary Vikram Misri announced the cease-fire between India and Pakistan. For the next three days, a professional diplomat was subjected to vicious attacks from the troll-farms, financed and protected by the ruling establishment. This was no knee-jerk reaction. Even at that critical moment in national security, someone atop Raisina Hill was ensuring that no blame or responsibility accrued to the prime minister. Someone was astute enough to realise that “blame” had to be directed away from the South Block crowd for letting Islamabad off the hook precisely at a time when the country had been led to believe that it was on “bended knees.” It has been noted the Union foreign minister S. Jaishankar, himself an IFS officer, did not speak a word in public in Mistri’s defence; as a neo-saffron apparatchik, the foreign minister could not be unaware that the digital hordes threatening molestation and worse to the family of his own principal diplomat had a patron in high places in New Delhi. For ten years, a strategic use of this digital mob has been part of the ruling establishment’s tool-kit. The new normal in Naya Bharat is that it is morally acceptable and politically smart to unleash these cyber marauders against anyone, at home or abroad, who would dare to chip at the aura of invincibility so assiduously manufactured around the prime minister. This has been an essential tool in the control and command politics since 2014. The four-day ‘war’ with Pakistan – its need, beginning, handling, and abrupt ending – has brought into sharp focus this obsessive preoccupation with protecting one man’s reputation and image, at any strategic or economic cost to the nation. This preoccupation has been cynically seized upon by business houses, clever bureaucrats, ambitious generals and shrewd NRIs to sing hosannas to the prime minister and elevate him to the status of a Vishwaguru. In the process, we have self-inflicted institutional decay and professional complacency in the conduct of our affairs, at home and abroad. We may be in thrall of the prime minister but the foreigner is not easily taken in. He can see through the games the Modi regime has played all these years at home; the foreigner pretends to go along, as long he can sell his shabby wares, to be paid for by the Indian tax-payer. The Trump administration has shrewdly zeroed in on this vulnerability. After all, the key element in this manufactured aura of invincibility was the perception that the diaspora in the United States was at the beck and call of the New Delhi-based neo-Chankayas. Back home, the carefully collected crowds of NRIs, courtesy the Gandhinagar-centered religious cults, was flaunted as proof of a globally popular leader; and, in Washington, the same crowd was cited as Prime Minister Modi’s clout to make a difference in American presidential contests. The auto-rickshaw driver at Delhi railway station and the (Indian) taxi-driver at JFK airport were both in awe and agreement: Prime Minister Modi has elevated India to new heights of prestige and izzat. The ruling elites at home basked in the glory of this sleight of hand and felt themselves empowered, asserting that they were entitled to a seat at the global high table. Back in North America, the NRI crowd neatly shoehorned its communal anxieties into the saffron prejudices. Washington indulged us in our new rulers’ fancies and delusions; extracting concessions and working alliances in exchange for photo-ops.This carefully crafted apple-cart of pretensions and postures is now threatened by a Trump crowd that is prepared to play rough with our ‘sensitivities.’ The Modi government is not the first Indian government to rudely realise that the Americans are not enamoured by our ‘strategic autonomy.’ The cocksure Trump White House, however, has no qualms in introducing an ‘adversarial’ element in its dealings with Modi’s Naya Bharat. This public spat with President Trump has created a potentially debilitating vulnerability for the ruling regime at home. The perception of Washington’s ‘protection’ and ‘patronage’ has been crucial in keeping the Modi coalition intact. The ruling regime successfully manufactured an impression that it had created a convergence of (official and unofficial) interests and (legal and quasi-legal) impulses between the Modi regime and the Washington establishment. This impression was subtly used to intimidate allies and opponents, in and out of the BJP; it was the most efficacious element in the “invincibility” aura stratagem. In the months to come, the Modi regime will find itself having to reassure the various elements in its coalition. First and foremost, the crony capitalist friends who are not unaware of the Americans’ ability to breach off-shore banking secrecy protocols. The Gujarat Lobby – the pharmaceutical industry, the gem and diamond traders, the sea-food exporters, etc. The nomenklatura who want to ensure American visas, safe jobs and academic placements for sons and daughters. The young unemployed man from Mehsana who dreams of making it good in the United States. The NRI crowd that comes out to cheer the prime minister when he lands in America is scared because more than half of them have dodgy ‘papers’ and would not like a visit from the immigration inspectors of a vindictive Trump White House. The RSS’s much-flaunted presence in the US can be made to feel the heat. The “Hindus for Trump” crowd at home that thinks the United States subscribes to its anti-Muslim, anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan sentiments will be at a loss for what to make of the Modi-Trump breach. Keeping these disparate elements of the Modi coalition intact will demand a new kind of deftness. Each component of the Modi crowd would demand to be firewalled from this downslide in the prime minister’s relationship with the ruling establishment in America. Of course, the prime minister has the option to reinvent himself as a later day Indira Gandhi who stood up to those two evil men – Nixon and Kissinger – sitting in White House. He could market himself as the man who refused to barter away Indian strategic autonomy. That would mean returning to a kind of secular nationalism, speaking out against Israeli atrocities in Gaza, standing up in defence of Iran and its nuclear rights, and much more. Easier said than done. The rub: all this involves a jettisoning of the seductive lure of the “American connection”. Yet, without that sense of connectedness, the whole political economy of the Modi project gets undone. No acche din ahead – neither for the prime minister nor Bharat that is India. Harish Khare is a former editor-in-chief of The Tribune.