WHEN the ruling establishment, ensconced at the Centre for a little over 12 years, manages to even partially stave off challenges with optics, rhetoric and institutional ballast, the Oppositions pushback gets inversely weakened. The BJP-led NDA coalition faced its first major trial from a nascent, non-political entity, and not an Opposition party — it found itself at sixes and sevens because an emerging demography outside the circumference of the constituents it had cultivated threw endless dares.