Decades from now, a scholar poring over archival documents on the Modi era will likely be stunned at the propensity of the Bharatiya Janata Party regimes, at the Centre and in the states, to target Muslims. The long list of incidents manufactured to torment the community will have the scholar wondering about the motivation of these regimes. S/he will ultimately ascribe it to the BJP’s sense of history, a sense which made them believe that Muslim rulers, particularly the Mughals, deployed their unbridled power to do whatever they wished, including subjugate Hindus, convert lakhs of them to Islam and destroy their temples.

This sense of history, the scholar will summarise, spawned in BJP leaders an emperor complex, which first manifested in 2014 and grew thereafter. The emperor complex has leaders mistake the power acquired by winning an electoral majority to be that of an emperor, neither circumscribed by the Constitution nor democratic norms. And just as people become what they hate, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took measures to heap upon Muslims the humiliation that his sense of history made him believe Hindus endured under the Delhi Sultanate and Mughals, the scholar will gravely speculate.