A pyrrhic victory, a glorious loss;
Rise of a leader, infants lost;
Judicial activism, a ‘case’ gone wrong;
End of an era ... the list is long.
Sounds almost like a rhyming couplet, huh! But that by and large sums up India’s travails in 2017.
It has turned out to be a year when ‘genesis’ and ‘resurgence’ are intricately intertwined with a ‘withering away’, even as one gets ready to soak up the whiff of fresh ink and paper from the glossy new desk calendar at the workstation.
For the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), this has turned out to be quite a roller-coaster of a year. A thumping win in Uttar Pradesh once again highlighted the near-invincibility of the prime minister-BJP president duo. The Narendra Modi-Amit Shah combine once again delivered a knockout punch to the rivals as BJP came back to power in India’s largest and most populous state, winning a whopping 312 seats in the 403-member assembly. By recruiting 18 million primary members to the party in UP and throwing the hegemony of cast-politics out of the window, Shah once again proved his political acumen and a near-flawless stature as an election strategist.
But just when political pundits were busy wondering whether the UP win was a pointer to a walkover of sorts for BJP in the 2019 General Elections, Modi’s home state Gujarat sprang up an electoral surprise — and a born-again opposition leader! What was supposed to be a cake-walk for the saffron brigade, turned out to be a tooth-and-nail contest that went ‘right down to the wire’! BJP pulled it off by the skin of the teeth, but it was a pyrrhic victory as a resurgent Congress under a rejuvenated Rahul Gandhi put the ruling party on notice: ‘No match is over until the last ball is bowled and no election is decided until the last ballot is counted. Bring on 2019!’
The rise of a gung-ho, firebrand Rahul — who also took over as Congress president from his mother Sonia Gandhi, barely hours before the Gujarat results were out — has really been ‘The Story of The Year’.
As Rahul started his innings as the fifth Nehru-Gandhi scion to be at the helm of Congress affairs, it marked the end of an era as Sonia handed over the mantle to her son after having served as the party president for 19 years — the longest in the 132-year history of India’s oldest political outfit. It’s simply amazing, when one comes to think about Sonia’s journey as a politician: From being the coy bahu (daughter-in-law) at the Gandhi household to freeing herself of the ‘albatross’ of her foreign origin ... Sonia’s has been a remarkable story.
While Modi, Shah, Rahul, Sonia and Jayalalitha comprised the business-end of a power play, two rank outsiders who emerged as dramatis personae quite surprisingly were Yogi Adityanath and Ramnath Kovind. Adityanath, a firebrand right-wing nationalist, being catapulted as the Chief Minister of UP and Kovind, a Dalit (backward caste) entering Rashtrapati Bhavan (the presidential palace) as its latest resident were mostly the result of the same laboratory experiment — catalysing and balancing a religion and caste-based effervescence.
Some positive vibes
Even as the corridors of power were abuzz with hectic parleys and machinations, there was some extremely disturbing news on the front pages. The deaths of 1,317 infants at BRD Medical College and Hospital in Gorakhpur, yet again exposed the poor state of affairs at most government-run hospitals and the shocking tales of inadequacies that characterise the health sector in general in the world’s second-most populous nation.
Though the health sector presented a gloomy picture on many occasions, India’s otherwise phenomenal march in the field of science and technology continued in right earnest. Indian Space Research Organisation posted a new world record, launching and successfully placing into orbit 104 satellites in one go from the launch pad at Sriharikota. Likewise, India jumping 30 places in the Ease of Doing Business rankings and Moody’s Investor Services upwardly revising the country’s ranking for the first time in 14 years were the other major takeaways from the year that was.
Along with these positive vibes emanating from science, technology and commerce, judicial activism was also front and centre in Indian social life as the Supreme Court came out with three epoch-making verdicts that promised to change the nation’s socio-cultural demographics for all the right reasons: Upholding the Right to Privacy as a Fundamental Right — and thereby protecting the sexual orientation of people, scrapping the practice of triple talaq (divorce), and granting the transgender community equal privileges over Fundamental Rights.
And talking about the judiciary, there was shock and bewilderment as former Union minister A. Raja and his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party colleague Kanimozhi were acquitted by the court in what was reported to be a trillion rupee 2G telecom licence allocation scam, after the federal investigative agency failed to come up with sufficient evidence against the duo. A ‘case’ gone wrong or a ‘scam’ that never was? Your guess is as good as mine!
The raging debate over a blanket implementation of Aadhar (India’s unique identification programme) and an aggressive Goods and Services Tax regime are issues that promise to spill over to the New Near. And so is the Rahul-Modi slugfest ...
But there will be 365 days to chew on those. For now, I am turning the television off and putting the papers by. It’s time to catch some real fireworks.
You can follow Sanjib Kumar Das on Twitter: @moumiayush.
