Foreward

BEGIN WITH THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A WAR, BUT IN THE PARADOX OF THE YEAR, IT IS concealed behind the balaclava, the accessory that adds a darker aura to religious rage. On October 7, they, men who were too scared to show their faces even as their eyes missed nothing in their field of hatred, stormed the border villages of southern Israel and killed, raped, maimed and kidnapped, and their victims ranged from infants to the elderly. Even as a nation that had just experienced a miniature version of the Holocaust was still counting the dead and the missing, from the distant quarters of moral relativism, some saw only the inevitability of revenge by memory in the savagery of radical Islamism. And their legion multiplied in streets and on campuses across the globe as the faces that emerged from the theatre of war were not concealed. They were bare, some lifeless, others the living reminders of a war’s human cost. In the last hours of 2023, political judgment is conditioned by selective morality, and the compass of justice moves in the direction of slogans. Gaza of the mind has altered the conversation; it is about the limits of reciprocal rage and the post-apocalyptic images from the war zone. October 7 has become a distant anomaly in the cycle of retribution; what matters is the Day After, not the Day Before. Morality, 2023 has taught us, can be bought at a bargain price.

To join the fraternity of the dispossessed, to share their sorrow, you need to turn that chapter of history you refuse to accept into useful demonology. As they all become the virtual victims of Israel’s war against Hamas, thereby joining the ranks of Gaza’s homeless, they have given a new definition to homeland itself. Israel, in this telling, is a lie first perpetrated by the Bible and then institutionalised by great powers. And Palestine, an unrealised piece of memory under attack, always. In the most shared moral relativism of 2023, homeland was an idea caught between two versions of struggle. One for preservation, and the other for reclamation.The second full-scale land war of the century has only made these versions divide minds even beyond the Levant.

IT’S HOME AS a cultural inheritance that drives nationalism, which has come to add more passion to the politics of 2023. On the other side of the world, it has become a winning argument, vindicated by the results from Argentina and the Neth­erlands. It has not made liberalism redundant; it has certainly cracked the liberal assumption of the nation as a cultural as well as emotional restriction. And in democracies preparing for elections, it tests leadership. In the US, Trump, despite being the first former president charged for multiple crimes, has shown that punishment only increases popularity. MAGA is sale­able as long as Nation First has emotional appeal to those who feel let down by traditional Republicans and Democrats—or so it seems as the popularity of Trump continues to soar on the eve of what promises to be a clash of gerontocrats. The nation is what makes power increasingly tenuous for the leader, the product of a parliamentary coup rather than a winner of the popular vote, across the Atlantic. The spirit of Brexit is back in Britain where Englishness is once again in the fray, the illegal immigrant being the new usurper of the national idyll. In 2023, the return journey of the nation has quickened its pace.

AND IT MET with least resistance in India. When the nation challenged the creative resources of global leadership, here it further strengthened the leader, and who happens to be, unarguably, the most popular one in a democracy. In his tenth year as prime minister, he remained the prime mover of Indian nationalism. There were any number of noise makers in the world’s most volatile polity, but, in 2023 too, he was the pivot of the conversation that concentrated the mind of India. As usual, those who couldn’t comprehend the enormity of his influence on the popular imagination, beyond the urban echo chambers, continued to reject reality and dismiss the instincts of Indian democracy as illiberal—maybe escapism was easier than asking why. Narendra Modi played the reconciler of tradition and modernisation with the usual panache and the performance became a thriller towards the end of 2023, when the Assembly results from the heartland again brought out the covenant he had forged with India’s poor. And it was a finale worthy of what preceded it: at the international high table, India could take its place without the inhibitions of the Third World, for so long our natural geopolitical identity. The new Wise Man of the East was the perfect host for G20.

Elsewhere in the world, the leader was withering away not because of the limits of democracy but because of its unforgiv­ing impulses. The incompatibility of the nation’s shifting attitudes and the leader’s cultural remoteness provided the political excitement of 2023. It was a different story in India. Modi made the nation a bestseller.

2023 In ReviewBJPgeopoliticsideologyIndian democracyIndian politicsNarendra Modi