Not many would be sorry to see 2021 nearing the finishing line. Personal milestones aside, it would be marked with a thick, ugly red circle on history’s calendar. The annus horribilis of our nightmarish times—by global consensus at that, a rare feat for our species. Perhaps 2020 could nudge us on the shoulder and ask about its candidacy. But which is to be designated as the truly terrifying part of the nightmare? Its onset, when you switch from normalcy to a surreal miasma, or the climactic terror that chokes you in your slumber? Or wait … have we even reached there yet? Hunted down by letters of the Greek alphabet, like the furies had chased Orestes, we are still running, still falling into bottomless chasms. Are we then hurtling towards something even more terrifying? And is all this only a metaphor for something else that’s mutating around us? Our lives, our modes of livelihood, our societies, our democracies? On that last score too, we seem to have transited from Delta to Omicron … everywhere on the planet.
Flip a coin and let it fall anywhere—say, Afghanistan. Its nascent experiment with civil democracy evaporated in an instant as an openly misogynistic, religious fundamentalist group rode in like an army of locusts. If Kabul unsettled the world with regime change, China did it by offering a disturbing spectre of permanence. If things stay the course, Xi Jinping could well become the New Kangxi Emperor, the longest-serving monarch of history. People, prominent or otherwise, may disappear without a notice in that gated colony of mutant Communism, but Xi is not going anywhere. You can’t blame the WHO for omitting the Greek letter Xi, and jumping straight to Omicron, to christen a world-conquering force … that name is already taken.
Draw the circle in closer. Myanmar’s unsure date with democracy was called off a fortnight before Valentine’s Day, and it was back to doing what it does best—visiting horror on its own people, the non-Buddhist minority in particular, and jailing every democrat in Naypyidaw. Nepal remains in a state of self-experimentation. And in Sri Lanka, it’s the Rajapaksa all the way—president, prime minister, foreign minister, you name it. And so on and so forth.
Democracies, already struggling in a world where consensus is mass-manufactured by online bots, are now explicitly turning into elected monarchies—or worse. Supreme leaders and demagogues preside over the fate and future of people. They wield a sharp, double-edged axe: a nationhood that’s defined in near-ethnic terms, and then married to religion. Loosely speaking, one blade is meant to threaten the outside world, and the other acts as the weapon of mass destruction internally. But they cut both ways. All non-conforming identities—ethnic, religious or gender-based—are to live in constant peril.
Does any of that ring a bell? It is in the nature of circles to close in on us. Still, in India, an immense struggle is on. Alongside elemental forces that would annihilate democracy, an opposite groundswell too is palpably present. The age of obeisance has ebbed away, and protest is now back as a lingua franca. But a stark asymmetry attends to this. If the people in protest come from big voting communities, they are still able to have their way. The farmers on the Delhi border had that going for them.
Students, activists, comedians… they have less luck, they are expendable, and a habitually carceral regime doubles down on them for not shouting the right slogan, not siding with the right policy, not laughing the right laugh, not choosing the right food, not marrying right. Jonathan Swift would have found plenty of dark material in 2021 to write an updated, Indian edition of his Gulliver’s Travels.
Our children can be malnourished and stunted—this is the real pandemic—and an entire future generation of Indians may be housed in the most miserable categories in comparative global charts. But give them eggs, and all hell breaks loose. ‘Religious sentiments’ are like egg shells. There may be no tangible record to prove large-scale conversion, but an anti-conversion bill is on its way to becoming an act. Would Ambedkar have been penalised for helming mass conversions to Buddhism, if he had happened to do it in 2021?
Through the gloom, the real heroes fought the grim fight—scientists, doctors, researchers. Frankly we didn’t know we had so many of them, and all top notch. Asha workers showed us why they were named thus, becoming our frontline antibodies, our vaccine, our oxygen cylinder—at a time when the real thing was nowhere in sight. It’s their collective effort that allowed us, and our economy, to breathe the moment the dark clouds lifted a bit.
The economy is tethered to politics, though. And unlike 2021, the coming year will not just be a year—it will hold a decade within itself. Who wins Uttar Pradesh will largely determine who runs the show after 2024. Which way Punjab, Goa and Uttarakhand go will decide what shape the opposition will take. Speaking of shapes, by the end of 2022, there will be two new ones—a temple and a parliament building. That much is a surety, in a future riddled with greys.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Resident Editor, Karnataka, The New Indian Express
(santwana@newindianexpress.com)