THE DECADE THAT WAS

THE OLD ORDER YIELDED TO A RADICALLY NEW AND UNSETTLING REALITY

A look at the turbulent years of 2010-19 as an old order yielded to a radically altered and unsettling reality

ADECADE IS BUT A human construct. It was conceived primarily to measure a period of time rather than define a span of human existence. As the English author Rose Macaulay observed, “Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.”

Yet, if a week is a long time in politics (and, as we saw in Maharashtra recently, a night can be even longer), the passage of 10 years in the life of an individual, state or nation is often witness to dramatic changes. The heroes of one decade can end up as villains of the next—and vice versa—as has happened in India. In the previous decade, Manmohan Singh and the Congress-led UPA-I government were judged by the electorate as deserving enough of a second term in 2009. Yet, from the beginning of this decade, his government went steadily downhill. By January 2014, at the fag end of his second term, Manmohan, sensing the humiliating whipping UPA-II would get in the general election that year, said, “I do not believe that I have been a weak prime minister. I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me .... ”

Manmohan may have to wait for a decade or more before his reign is looked upon more kindly. Recent memory is always a harsher judge. Yet, some decades stand out more than others and come to be regarded as epochal. It is not often that Richard M. Nixon is cited for anything but Watergate and his ignominious exit from the US presidency, but he did make this perspicacious observation: “Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.”

There was one such moment in the decade spanning 2010-2019 that saw the political narrative in the country undergo a significant, some would even say revolutionary, transformation. The ramifications of that development are bound to shape the coming decade and the ones to follow. The fall of Manmohan in the middle of the decade saw the extraordinary rise of Narendra Modi. A man who, ironically, had been reviled just the decade before as a ‘hero of hatred’. By 2012, however, he had emerged as the frontrunner to replace Manmohan as the prime minister. And Modi rode to power not only on the chariot of Hindutva but by promising to rev up the engine of the economy which had stalled because of the follies of the second UPA government. With his unmatched oratory, catchy slogans and remarkable ability to grandstand, Modi promised a radical departure. It was his lure of ‘achhe din’ rather than ‘Jai Shri Ram’ that won him his first term.

In his first term, Modi sheathed the iron fist of Hindu nationalism with a velvet glove of development and positioned himself as a messiah of the downtrodden. He was lauded for his well-meaning schemes for the poor, whether it was providing toilets, gas cylinders or housing for all. His ambitious move to rid corruption by demonetising high-value notes was less successful while his decision to implement the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was done in by poor roll-out. On foreign policy, Modi fared far better. He showed audacity and a willingness to do the unpredictable. The prime minister cleared a surgical strike across the LoC in 2016 and three years later followed it up with ordering an air strike in Balakot inside Pakistan territory in retaliation to the terror attack in Pulwama two weeks earlier. In doing so, Modi set a new paradigm in how India dealt with its hostile neighbour.

The first six months of his second term began with a bang. Rather than deal with the alarming slowdown in the economy, Modi focused his government’s energies more on realising the Hindutva agenda. This included doing away with the special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 and bifurcating the state into Union territories.

THE HEROES OF ONE DECADE CAN BECOME VILLAINS OF THE NEXT. MANMOHAN WAS ELECTED IN 2009 FOR A SECOND TERM. BY 2014, THE UPA WAS WIPED OUT

The Supreme Court proved helpful, agreeing to speed up the 30-year-old Ram Janmabhoomi case by holding daily hearings. To the delight of the Sangh parivar, the court allowed the building of a Ram temple on the site where the Babri Masjid once stood before it was demolished in 1992, while allotting a five-acre plot for the mosque elsewhere. Most recently, the Modi government has rammed through the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill in Parliament. The legislation permits non-Muslim refugees from three Islamic neighbouring countries—Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh—to seek Indian citizenship. Home minister Amit Shah also promised to conduct a National Register of Citizens across the country by 2024 to identify illegal immigrants and take action against them. The Opposition saw both these moves as a concerted effort to target the Muslim community, decrying them as attempts towards a Second Partition, and the creation of a Hindu rashtra.

The rise of Modi as India’s strongman would mirror a global trend. Whether it was Donald Trump in the United States, Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia or a host of leaders in other countries, they all captured or held on to power by projecting themselves as champions of muscular and xenophobic nationalism. The process of globalisation that dominated the previous decade was reversed, as rising protectionism and insularity became the new normal. Dr Zhivago author Boris Pasternak, who endured the repression of the Soviet regime, was analysing such a phenomenon when he wrote: “No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres are history’s organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.”

Yet, Pasternak could never have visualised that more than individuals, it would be the technology humans invented that would spark an even greater revolution within a decade. It would change forever the way we communicated with each other, performed at work, designed homes, decided the cars we drove, ran governments, watched sport and even played politics. The seeds of the transmutation were sown in the previous decade. But it was 2010-19 that saw the exponential and explosive growth of palm-held technology. Today, there are as many mobile phone subscriptions as people in India. With bandwidth becoming, as Bill Gates had predicted, almost infinite, entertainment has undergone one of those prince-into-frog mutations. The silver screen and home theatre systems have given way to movies being streamed on tiny phone screens. However, with the omnipresence of technology has come the concomitant danger of intrusions into individual privacy apart from repressive surveillance of citizens by governments.

There were other downsides in the decade gone by. We collectively hung our heads in shame at the brutal rape and murder of Nirbhaya in the capital in 2012 and for similarly horrific crimes against an eight-year-old girl in Kathua in 2018 and a young veterinarian in Hyderabad just days ago. Women’s safety remains a prime concern at the end of the decade as it was at its beginning.

Meanwhile, the intoxication of power saw Hindu fundamentalist vigilantes indulging in their version of justice by lynching people they suspected of selling beef. The independence of the judiciary and the media came under increasing threat as a powerful Centre and many state governments turned authoritarian in their dealings and became intolerant of criticism. Internationally, too, there was much to be concerned about. For one, the Paris Agreement on climate change has unravelled, pushing the world nearer to the brink of an ecological disaster.

For all these reasons outlined above, india today editors decided to term 2010-19 the ‘breakaway decade’ where the old order yielded to a radically new, but not necessarily peaceful or comfortable, reality. As we step into the new decade, will it be one of confrontation and contention or of cooperation and peaceful coexistence? In making that decision, we should remember what astronomer Carl Sagan said: “The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.” Let’s not then snuff out our brief existence in the universe through our follies but invest in a vision of making 2020 and beyond a period that brings everlasting good for humanity.

AS WE STEP INTO THE NEW DECADE, WILL IT BE ONE OF CONFRONTATION AND CONTENTION OR OF COOPERATION AND PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE?