2026 New Year Issue: Editor’s Note
A NATION IS MORE THAN THE COLLECTIVE PARANOIA OF THOSE WHO HAVE FAILED TO READ ITS cultural and political impulses. It is less than the fantasised greatness retailed on the stump by those who claim to have been granted its ownership. And it is never what has been presented, in a stream of semi-consciousness, as a wretched place without freedom or justice by those who portray themselves as the last custodians of national honour. Every nation, in its evolutionary story that reveals the best and worst of political traits, is subjected to these struggles in reducing an idea they cannot comprehend to the size of their desperation.
Rahul Gandhi in Berlin, speaking to a young audience at the Hertie School, painted an India gasping for freedom under authoritarianism. His words, as reported: “What the BJP is proposing essentially is the elimination of the Constitution. Elimination of the idea of equality between states, elimination of the idea of equality between languages and religions, elimination of the idea of the central core of the Constitution, which is that every individual will have the same value.” These words could have been spoken by the last fighter for truth in a country where the pillars of civil society are being demolished in a systematic dismantling of democracy. He could have been a marked dissident daring the evil state from beyond the border, appealing directly to the global conscience, and a living reminder that a nation is only as good as its most courageous interpreter.
Rahul Gandhi was none of that. At best he was a political tourist taking a respite from the humiliations of losing one battle after another despite being an aimless, graceless flame thrower in a democracy with which he could not make a decent conversation. What he could afford was the construction of a bogeyman, an enemy personifying the temptations of totalitarianism. It is not dissent as what one of the world’s most philosophical dissidents had said was “living in truth” but a feeble attempt in replacing argument with alarmism. Bad storytellers make up a context to suit a false text. That is exactly what Rahul Gandhi has done in Berlin.
This note has no intention of being entirely devoted to India’s leader of opposition, who is undoubtedly in search of a context where he can place himself as the last conscience keeper. He is not alone as a bad storyteller, though he has the advantage of having nothing at stake except his words. Their narrative exaggerations, especially in Western democracies, are getting increasingly incompatible with popular attitudes, and their isolation is certain to influence the future of ideologies. What was launched as freedom projects with such revolutionary verve has become unsustainable; and yesterday’s liberators are struggling to postpone redundancy. If impatience is what makes democracy the natural system of governance, it is the ideological waywardness, and rejection of ideas, by its exhausted benefactors that defeats democracy.
Look around and we cannot miss them. The spirit of Brexit, when the English broke out of their much-appreciated placidness to “take back control”, is absent from mainstream conservatism. The subversive has already stolen the slogan and, as argued elsewhere in these pages by our London contributor, is most likely to win the next election—and set off another “liberation movement” by another redeemer with all the answers. And across the Atlantic, where Donald Trump descended from the golden tower to save America from the entitled left and the ossified right, today he seems to be not worthy of the resentment he had tapped into. The mission to make America great again, according to opinion polls, has become a chaotic project in mythmaking. In Europe, the outsider who once wanted to build a new renaissance model, with France as its headquarters, was seen as the Gallic Grandeur after De Gaulle; survival is an everyday test for Macron today. His great European conversation, for unity, too, has run its course. And elsewhere on the continent, the alternative is invariably hard right, a distilled version of the old right. The national conversation remains a permanent astonishment in places where impatience for authentic politics grows faster. It is not about controlling the conversation; it is about the winners renewing the story with fresh words of freedom. Losers are on the rise.
That may explain why Rahul Gandhi in Berlin sounded like a dissident from the wrong country. He may still tell a receptive audience that Indian democracy is shrinking, and it is bad news for democracy everywhere. The truth is that India is perhaps the only democracy, impatient and unforgiving, testing the political imagination—and indulging the winner much to the dismay of those who choose to dismiss the new rather than interpret it. And meaningful change in a democracy as volatile as India requires maximisation of power, which is not autocracy if the institutions of civil society are still intact. They are falling apart only in the delusions of those who have lost the race for political authenticity. And power is maximised, as Narendra Modi has consistently shown, through a relentless national conversation in which the most shared motifs are not borrowed but mined from cultural memory. To keep pace with the impatience of a democracy as ruthless as India, it takes not controlled conversation but an expansion of it. Nations are won that way. Let the following pages add to the spirit.
Happy Holidays.