No one is perfect. Even the Bharatiya Janata Party, so seamless in its operations countrywide, has some shortcomings. One of these is garrulity. Leaders from the party, be they major or minor, must speak up - in order to drown all other voices. So the hullabaloo over the letter written by the archbishop of Delhi archdiocese, Anil Joseph Couto, asking churches based in Delhi to begin a prayer campaign ahead of the 2019 elections, has little to do with dignity. The archbishop wrote that the new government to be formed in 2019 - never suggesting that it would not be headed by Narendra Modi - should be inspired by democratic values. He mentioned the "turbulent political atmosphere" that has hurt the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution and the secular fabric of the nation. Prayers for the country are normal in church, it was said later, before an election. But that did not save the archbishop from the BJP's ire.

Some politicians said the archbishop had attacked democracy and secularism - was his reference to these principles illegitimate because he was speaking to the church? - and that he was supporting a particular Opposition party - the letter never mentions any political party - while it was pointed out that the archbishop was not accountable to anyone but the pope - foreigner - and that he was upset because this government had stopped the flow of foreign funds that allowed the church to convert people. The frank illogic of the first two charges and the frank lowness of the last two charges, however, fade into insignificance when the big guns boom. Rajnath Singh, who claimed he had not seen the letter, said that India was one country in which minorities were safe and there was no discrimination on the basis of caste and community. If he did not know what the archbishop had written, why was he talking at all? Garrulity suggests a lack of confidence, not calm superiority. If all is well, why bother about an archbishop's letter? But the best riposte came from the BJP president. No one should galvanize support on the basis of religion, he said. 'They', the BJP presumably, are against it. Is Hindutva not based on religion then? Or is the State already Hindutva-based, hence all other faiths are 'religions'?