And the Winner Will Be Modi

THERE WAS ONLY one honest New Year message: Whoever has made plans for 2024 hasn’t met God.

Atheism won’t make events more predictable. Life is a mystery, death a certainty, separated by the imponderable. Destiny has a set course. To use a simile with a mordant smile, after decades of uphill struggle suddenly the engine tips over downhill gathering speed, missing brakes, losing clutch, wasting fuel at incremental pace. Behind the bright lights, and fireworks singing an ode to cacophony, lie a repetitive saga of bleak departure and the studied nonchalance of those in the long waiting room called life.

An ineffable sadness envelops the last day of a year, for part of you dies with it. Bereavement is the decisive measure of time. Too many numbers stare blankly back from my mobile, of friends now departed from this world of telephones for the wonderland of telepathy. What is left is memory, which like carbon paper fades without being noticed.

Welcome to 2024.

DESPITE THIS SALUTARY admonition, I am confident about one prediction. The new year of India’s political calendar will begin with the results of the General Election of 2024, and the winner will be Narendra Modi. A sense of impending victory is already circling the skies, climbing a rising wind, brewing a storm that could uproot a few established oaks in the electoral forest. Prime Minister Modi will be back in office, powered by two demographics that matter most in our democracy, women and the poor. One awed sceptic, not a Modi fan, told me that support for the prime minister among rural women verged on worship. While psephologists are counting the seats he will win in Uttar Pradesh, my own view is that his victory in Bihar will be even more comprehensive. Get ready for five more years of Prime Minister Modi. Congress, still glued to a dynasty past its sell-by date, could get fewer seats than in 2019. Its superstars are searching for alternative constituencies.

There comes a time when there is nowhere to hide.

BREAD, NOT GENES, wins elections.

The ancients got it right when they equated the birth of another year with agriculture and the sowing season. That is why since antiquity, the calendar has begun from around mid-March, or the seeds were laid for the summer crop. In 46 BCE the imperious Julius Caesar seized the date from nature and shifted it to 1 January, to commemorate Janus, the deity with two faces. The change seems inexplicable, for Roman emperors understood the power of bread. Their credibility rested within the trinity of bread, circus and god; to assuage hunger, alleviate boredom, and calm the dread of death.

The basics have not changed too radically through history’s dramatic journey across the travails of traditional autocracy and modern democracy. No matter what the regime, deny bread and there will be violence. Monarchs who pompously advertised the conceit that their absolute power came from god survived by the sword, not sanctity. Then the guillotine turned up.

King Louis XVI of France ignored the wise aide who said: “Sire, no matter what you do, you will never be loved by them [the people] as long as bread is expensive.” Louis and his queen Marie Antoinette were drunk on diamonds while the poor bought a loaf of bread with the equivalent of a day’s wage after bad weather destroyed the first crop of 1788. In 1789 came the revolution, bearing aloft the guillotine. It seems the citizens mocked the corpse of their deceased king by leaving its mouth open. Every revolution begins in the mind. The French established the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity as the birthright of modernity. Napoleon, the famous unintended by-product of revolution, observed that an army marches on its stomach. So does democracy.

If you want to know the winner of the 2024 elections, look up the Bread Index; or, more accurately, check the name of the man who ensured food for the people.

HOLIDAYS MEAN HOLIDAY reading: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler for restorative nostalgia, complemented by scatters hot nuggets from new books and book reviews. Bettany Hughes’ The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World answers old riddles with fresh research. A visit to Cairo last year rejuvenated my interest in some awkward questions about the pyramid miracle. Did Pharaoh Khufu’s architects construct the Great Pyramid of Giza four thousand years ago without understanding gravity? Or should we believe that Isaac Newton ‘discovered’ gravity in the 17th century after a loose apple fell on his head?

Khufu did not use Israelite slaves as labour, which lays another urban myth to rest. The 20,000 workers who raised massive stones, each weighing between one and 2.5 tonnes, every two or three minutes for 10 hours a day over 24 years were Egyptian peasants and farmers doing statutory state duty in turns. Each building block was balanced on the other using levers at a scientifically precise angle for stability along a slope rising to 481 feet. The Egyptian word for pyramid is mer, or a place of ascension. Khufu believed he was divine. If you have built the Giza pyramid, you may even have logic on your side.

NOW THAT A PRESIDENT of Harvard University has been humbled because of appalling insensitivity towards the Jewish people compounded by infantile plagiarism, is it permissible to accuse the British icon Winston Churchill of both? His racist views on Indians are well known. Less famous is the fact that one of his most brilliant phrases, the iron curtain dividing communist and non-communist Europe, was not original. Twenty eight years before Churchill used it in a speech at Fulton in 1946, it had appeared in a book written by an unknown Russian, Vasily Rozanov. Churchill may not have been always original but at least he was well read. While we are on the subject of misquotation, Voltaire never said: “I disagree with what you have to say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” A biography published in 1904 attributed it to the French philosopher. I rather prefer what Voltaire indisputably did say: “Judge a man by his questions, not his answers.”

WHY DOES THIS paragraph from a powerful British minister never find its way into the history books? According to the year-end issue of Spectator, Viscount Brentford, home secretary between 1924 and 1929, was blunt: “I know it is said at missionary meetings that we conquered India to raise the level of Indians. This is cant. We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Great Britain. We conquered India by the sword and by the sword we should hold it.”

Hence Brentford, the honest imperialist, admired Brigadier General Reginald Dyer for butchering Indians at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919. He visited Amritsar to celebrate the massacre, not condemn it. He helped raise £26,000 for Dyer, equivalent to a million pounds today.

I was reminded of an African proverb: “Unless the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” The lions of Afro-Asia have not yet fully honed their writing skills to the point where they can effectively amend the narrative which lauds European colonialism as more benevolent than punitive.

MY QUOTE OF the year turns to pearls from the past, discovered in 2023. The great filmstar Cary Grant, who rose from the slums of London to the heights of Hollywood, once remarked: “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.” Think about it.

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