IT IS EASY for politicians to forget amid the trappings of power that they are public servants. But not for Narendra Modi. India’s prime minister has always insisted that the government exists to serve. When he rose to national office in 2014, he declared that he was not the country’s prime minister but its “chief servant”. Since then “the Modi government has been synonymous with service, not power,” the home minister declared recently. The chief servant, he added, “works 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the people”.