Narendra Modi’s first-term prime ministership began in a flurry of activity. Foreign policy was a priority. Fixing the broken economy was another. But there was a complication. Though the Congress had plunged from 206 Lok Sabha seats in the 2009 general election to 44 seats in 2014, it had left behind an ecosystem of loyalists across the bureaucratic spectrum. The ecosystem had been carefully built over decades of dominant Congress rule. Between 1947 and 2014, the Congress had been in power at the Centre for 55 out of 67 post-independence years. Its loyalists included Left-leaning academics, historians, activists, bureaucrats, lawyers…