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 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 byproduct 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.
