Gaza continues to be pounded. At home, Manipur hasn’t been at peace since May, the Ram Janmabhoomi project nears its completion, the BJP flexed its electoral muscle in three key states and Indian cricket faced some heart-breaking moments. 2024 is pregnant with intriguing possibilities
By Vikram Kilpady
The year 2023 was a year like no other. Imagine the odds on a wager that Henry Kissinger and Silvio Berlusconi will exit the same year, if you were into betting and other soul-vacuuming practices. This is not some ornery one-off bet on who will face India in the World Cup 2023 finals, yes, you, like most of us, would have bet India would win, trouncing Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, England and Pakistan along the way. But the dew and the pitch conspired at the Narendra Modi stadium for the Aussies to lift the trophy for the sixth time.
That numbing defeat on the pitch was soon forgotten. The pro-incumbency wave swept through Madhya Pradesh electing the BJP back to power despite Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s perceived jaded leadership. Chouhan himself thought up very attractive schemes, doles to women, to be re-elected, which did the trick and flummoxed the smarmy Congress, which was imagining victory on a campaign that was far from decisive. The Congress paid for the perils of overconfidence in the face of what looked like a possible return to power in Bhopal. Leaving room for the BJP to wrest the poll narrative back.
The Congress’ ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, a line parroted by every columnist worth his/her salt and sugar-free, was starker in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. The corruption charges against its CM Bhupesh Baghel, aka the Mahadev betting app saga, again proved that tribals or non-tribals, people don’t like politicians who bet or rub shoulders with those who make money in betting apps. Ashok Gehlot’s quiet confidence was passed on as the Rajasthan voter stuck to his tradition of waving governments out after five years. As one columnist noted why has no one studied why the voter in Rajasthan does this? Are politicians so bad at not delivering the bare minimum from their manifestos made ahead of elections, forcing the voter to switch government the next election? This is for the think-tanks to study and posit if all elections have failed voters in that state. All three states that the BJP won saw new chief ministers, including a first-time MLA. A tribal leader in Chhattisgarh, an OBC leader in Madhya Pradesh and a Brahmin leader, the first time MLA, in Rajasthan. A coalition of castes to beat the Congress’ Getafix potion of the OBC caste census.
The central leadership in the BJP, which just means Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, didn’t go with the big claimants in the respective states. They were possibly bored with the likes of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Vasundhara Raje and Raman Singh, who has made it to the Speaker of the Chhattisgarh Assembly. The hat-trick for the BJP in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh has left 2024 pregnant with the possibility of another hat-trick, that of the Modi government winning its third consecutive Lok Sabha election. A possibility Modi himself wondered about in his speech at the victory celebrations at the new BJP headquarters. The naysayers on social media were not convinced with the hat-trick of 2024. The electronic voting machine was the culprit, they said. A WhatsApp post, which went viral then, wondered if the EVMs were being manipulated by the Chandrayaan 3 lander from the distant South Pole of the moon.
The Congress won Telangana with a simple majority. The Bharat Rashtra Samithi ended up hurt by its own hubris to branch out as a national party overlooking the immediate bond they had with the people of Telangana. Though the Congress win was handsome, the media resurrected PK to rain down on the victory parade. He said it was an easy victory and people of Telangana wanted change and chose the Congress. What he didn’t dwell on was the enormous waves of people who came to support Rahul Gandhi on his Bharat Jodo Yatra through the state, on how the BJP failed in converting all the hype of winning a second southern state. Earlier in the year, Karnataka said bye to Basavaraj Bommai of the BJP and voted in the Congress under Siddaramaiah with campaign overseer DK Shivakumar settling for Deputy CM.
In neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, like in Delhi, jail politics was the name of the game. The YSRCP government of Jagan Mohan Reddy rounded up rival Telugu Desam Party chief N Chandrababu Naidu and put him in jail for 53 days. The Andhra Pradesh High Court granted him bail on health grounds. In Delhi, the liquor scam case proceedings saw the arrests of Aam Aadmi Party Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh, who joins his former colleague Manish Sisodia in jail. Another AAP minister, Satyendar Jain, is also in Tihar.
Rahul Gandhi lost his Lok Sabha membership from Wayanad after being sentenced to two years for his comment made against PM Modi during the 2019 campaign. The case filed against him by a Gujarat BJP MLA, also a Modi, centered on Rahul’s comment wondering if all people named Modi are thieves. The Supreme Court had to step in and the Wayanad MP returned to the House.
Gay and lesbian couples placed high hopes on the apex court in the same sex marriage case only for it not to accord legal recognition to such unions. Appeals have been filed against the verdict. The Court did say society was being banal for not letting such couples get on with their lives.
Similarly, the Article 370 petitioners found themselves at a loss for words or emotion when the verdict came out. The special status enjoyed by Jammu and Kashmir all these years and snatched away in 2019 was not special, the Court said, ending the autonomy debate. It’s not just another state now, it’s a union territory. Yes, the Court did say statehood should be given back and the elections to the assembly be held soon.
As you go through this article, the bombed-out structures of Gaza are being razed by Israel’s bulldozers in its final push to erase that Palestinian stronghold. Israeli influencers mocked the Gazans’ loss of power and water after troops had cut supplies. Hospitals were bombed killing more innocents. The world wept with the children of Gaza, protesters in New York, Amsterdam, London placed dolls pushing for a ceasefire; Germany outlawed pro-Gaza protests, wanting to be on the right side of Israel (you know why). India initially did the terrorists-must-pay line and later woke up to its decades strong stand of supporting Palestine. The Palestinian Authority, the ageing camp of the late Yasser Arafat, cut a sorry figure in all this bloodshed as did America. Europe howled and fumed but like Shakespeare said in Macbeth, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.
The other theatre of war, Ukraine, went about its business—killing. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenaries of the Wagner Group, died in a plane crash in August 2023, two months after ordering his mercenaries to march on Moscow after criticising the Russian defence ministry. Reddit has a joke on how Russian President Vladimir Putin called Prigozhin’s family to grieve the mercenary leader’s death only to find he was alive then because of the multiple time zones Russia has.
In the age of OTT apps, there is only so much that one can consume of writers of today. Content from the previous millennia still holds sway, case in point being Friends and Sex and The City, another favourite, The X Files, tried a comeback, but Gen Z was way too evolved for Agents Mulder and Scully. Matthew Perry, a key ingredient of Friends as Chandler Bing, died this year in October.
They say there is light at the end of the tunnel, which was the case for the 41 workers trapped in Uttarkashi, but here we hurtle down a longer dark tunnel in the glare of bright LED lamps which kind of leave the light firmly in the meh zone. Virality is a key product of the mobile internet era, “Just looking like a wow” was a dress material seller’s sales pitch. The year 2023 went just looking like a wow, and wonder of wonders, Dawood Ibrahim returned to news TV in a starring role again!
The year 2024 has elections to the Lok Sabha. Given the invincibility of Modi and co, a hat-trick can’t be easily ruled out. All this is already playing on the TV as anchor upon anchor extol the beauty of the Ayodhya temple which will be inaugurated this month. A polarisation project will come to an end, the others in Kashi and Mathura are on the stove too for a later use-by date.
Will India’s voters remember that Manipur has still not returned to normalcy from the ethnic clashes that began in May 2023? Or the Balasore train collision? Maybe they won’t. Nobody held Kissinger guilty for all the damage in Vietnam and elsewhere. And he died a calm death. Unlike the very fleeting nature of human life in Gaza.