From depressing 2016 to schizophrenic 2017

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, thus spake George Santayana philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist. As we gaze into the crystal ball, read the tea leaves, shuffle the tarot cards, dust the ancient astrological charts trying to find the polestar of 2017, perhaps the best template would be to look back at 2016 — given that India’s two fundamental challenges remain Pakistani terror and the perilous state of the Indian economy. Both are symbiotically intertwined.

The previous year started badly with an attack on an Air Force base in Pathankot, coming as it did one week after the Prime Minister of India made an unscheduled stopover in Lahore to wish Nawaz Sharif on his birthday. The deep state in Pakistan did not want to be on the same page as the civilian government.

As someone who was extremely critical of the Prime Minister’s Kabul-Lahore-New Delhi itinerary for a variety of reasons it must be said in retrospect that Narendra Modi made an audacious and a bold move, perhaps with the right intent but one that was destined to fail.

Unlike President Ashraf Ghani who tried to stoop to conquer by going to the General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi to call on Pakistani Army Chief Gen. Raheel Sharif in November 2014, no Indian PM can ever dream of calling on an Army Chief of any nation, much less Pakistan, even if the Pakistani civilian government would facilitate and encourage such an interaction. It could just be another matter if the Pakistani Army Chief came calling on the Indian PM either in Islamabad or New Delhi.

That anyway seems to be a surreal fantasy given that Gen. Pervez Musharraf refused to receive Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee when he travelled to Lahore in March 1998 and, if reports are to be believed, the Pakistan military even refused to accord a guard of honour to Mr Modi when he landed in Lahore on Christmas day in 2015.

Therein lies the conundrum till the GHQ is not on board there can never be peace in the region. The relationship with Pakistan, therefore, would continue to be in a free-fall for the foreseeable future, at least through the next year.

Nine months later another attack by uniform-less state actors from Pakistan at an Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir invited retaliation from the Indian side in the form of “surgical strikes”. Stripped of diplomatic gibberish, what it meant was that the Narendra Modi government had effected a paradigm shift in response to cross-border terror.

This was not the first time border action teams had gone across and annihilated Pakistani border posts or ostensible terrorist launchpads but what was a first was the public ownership of such actions. This cross-border publicly owned-up action by the BJP-NDA government left a number of questions unanswered. If this was intended to bring about a behavioural change in the Pakistani establishment, clearly that does not seem to have happened. Though there have not been other attacks as lethal as the one in Uri in the past four months, there has been no let-up in the efforts by the proxies of Pakistan.

From a strategic perspective, has the government now taken a decision that a conventional tactical response would be the sine qua non to any major terrorist outrage emanating from Pakistan? If that is the case then we may be looking at an escalatory spiral in 2017 for the Pakistani deep state is sure to test out this new threshold. An armed conflict with Pakistan, the nature and intensity of which may be hard to predict, in 2017 should not be treated as strictly off the table. It is thus clear that India’s albatross around the neck and its Achilles heal are both hyper-engaged.

Let’s turn to the domestic front, and Mr Modi’s demonetisation move on November 8, 2016. How the three objectives put forth — unearthing black money, exorcising counterfeit currency and circumscribing terrorist financing — can be achieved by a currency swap defies imagination.

The fact that Mr Modi was able to carry off the greatest pain that has been caused to every single individual since the Partition of India should be a cause for reflection for the Opposition. Why did the people of India not rise up like the populace of Venezuela, specially when the trench between the illusion that the Prime Minister has been trying to create and the reality is so wide?

There are two apposite storylines that have run through human civilisation since times immemorial — the inclusive chronicle, which anchors the liberal, democratic construct, and the stentorian patriarch, who believes in the dictum spare the rod and spoil the child. Mr Modi has been pushing the latter narrative for the past 30-odd months — the strict father who administers bitter medicine to his children and coerces them to believe it is for their own good.

After 10 years of a soft-touch UPA rule, where the government had a very benign presence and everybody had a virtual free run in terms of experimenting with innovative forms of creativity, grotesque varieties of criticism and unsubstantiated forms of calumny, it almost seems as if the nation is thrusting for the whiplashes that Mr Modi is administering.

Extrapolated over the year ahead it means that Mr Modi would be emboldened to take more rash and whimsical decisions, to say the least. As the pressure on the economy grows as a consequence of the implications of demonetisation playing out, one can surely expect more strikes of the Tughlaqi variety on bank lockers and even legitimately acquired property.

The failure of the political Opposition to organise any street protests of any significance, let alone the television spectacles that were witnessed in 2011, would ensure that the totalitarian, despotic and populist attempt to morph from a corporate clone to a babbling socialist tilting at the windmills a rib-tickling version of Che Guvera would only exacerbate. 2016 was just a baby step in trying to anchor the discourse 90 degrees to the right. This year will see this come to fruition with the flower of divisiveness in full bloom. If 2016 was depressing, 2017 could be schizophrenic.