I first met Narendra Modi in his office in 2002.

Three of us had been dispatched by the Editors Guild of India to see if there was media bias in reporting the riots in Gujarat. Of course there was. I was 32 and much younger than the other two editors, BG Verghese and Dileep Padgaonkar, in the committee. But all three of us were moved, saddened and upset by the conduct of Gujarat’s media.

We were not impressed by the chief minister’s performance (he summoned what seemed like his entire secretariat and sat them down in rows in front of us to answer the detail of our questions). In turn, he didn’t seem to particularly like us, especially Padgaonkar whose paper he had a gripe with. When I say us, I will exclude myself. Me Modi took a liking to. He spoke to me in Gujarati, took me to the side and, holding my hand, began swinging it in the fashion of Indian men walking together. “Saurabh bhai saffron”, he said with a chuckle (pronouncing saffron as rhyming not with “run” but with “brawn”). “Aakar bhai red.” His reference was to my former colleague Saurabh Shah, editor of Gujarati Mid-Day, who had been fired after writing a fiery defense of Gujarati behaviour after Godhra, justifying collective punishment.

Why Modi thought I was Communist I do not know, and perhaps for him red stood for all liberals (though again, I did not and do not consider myself particularly liberal). But the point is that he knew, or thought he knew, that I was against what he stood for – and Modi was fine with that. It wasn’t personal.

The second time I met him, I unthinkingly took along a friend, Aadil Bhoja with me, without informing Modi’s office I was bringing company. The chief minister was alone when we were shown in, and as I introduced Aadil to him, Modi stiffened. “Aadil etle…?” (Aadil is…?) he asked.

“Parsi”, said Aadil, immediately relaxing Modi who spouted something about how nice Parsis were and how fond he was of them. This time, I spent longer with Modi, interviewing him and reading to him some of Wali Muhammad Wali’s poetry. Wali was one of the first poets to have composed ghazals in Urdu and a fierce Gujarati patriot according to his poems Dar firaq e Gujarat and Taarif e shehr Surat (On Separation From Gujarat and In Praise Of Surat City). Gujaratis demolished Wali’s little shrine outside the police commissioner’s office during the riots, and the municipality tarred the road over it. Today nothing remains.

Modi was bored by my reading of Dar firaq e Gujarat – my fault no doubt – but promised to do something for Wali’s shrine (he didn’t).

Anyway, over the years, even when I sent someone else to interview him, he has always asked about me. He has been thuggish in his use of the Gujarat police against those he sees as his enemies, true, but his personal conduct is always polite.

So it is strange for me to see how angry those who think themselves his supporters are with me for what I write about Modi. It has become impossible to address his performance without being subject to abuse and hate and name-calling. To some extent this has become normal in India, even for those not writing about Modi. I have stopped reading the Comments sections generally because there is rarely anything illuminating. But on the subject of Modi it has become vicious.

One can no longer even translate his writing, as I have both his prose and his poetry (and quite competently I think), without being maligned. The Bharatiya Janata Party says it has 2000 “volunteers” running their online campaign and it is certain some of these (going by the general quality of spelling and writing) are deployed to carpet-bomb articles on Modi.

But I think there is something else going on. That in the happy traditions of the East, Modi’s charisma, not so much his performance, has spontaneously raised an army of believers. His relationship with them, more properly theirs with him, is messianic. There is a sense of religious outrage and blasphemy in the anger that makes people apoplectic where Modi is written about. It is not unlike one of the silly cults that southern filmstars generate. Silly – but with real passion, real love and real hate.

They seem to be personally offended that their deity’s divinity is questioned.

I fear that shortly after May 16, this lot, or at least the thinking ones among them, will have to go through the anguish of realising that their hero is but a man as his performance is exposed to national and international scrutiny.

I haven’t met Modi in years but I hope time hasn’t turned him into the sort of figure that this gang thinks he is.