“Within a span of 15 months, our government has presented a textbook lesson in misgovernance,” wrote political scientist Suhas Palshikar in the Indian Express. First, there was a heavy-handed and somewhat ineffective lockdown that proved ruinous for the country’s economy. Then, Palshikar noted, the government struggled to provide adequate economic relief to a beleaguered country, failed to bolster critical health-care infrastructure and dawdled in its vaccine rollout. “The pandemic was not going to be an easy affair, it was bound to be an ordeal for any government and ‘mistakes’ were bound to happen,” he wrote, gesturing to the BJP’s initial bravado. “But precisely because of that, wisdom was in not claiming wisdom.”