A new year’s leap

Reality and the raucous intrusions of breaking news will intrude before long, and often in an extremely unsettling manner. But there is only one moment in the calendar when one can project on empty space the power of possibility, and that is the moment we are now experiencing on the threshold of 2008. In many ways, 2007 provided important portents of what can and should be. It saw India acknowledged as a ‘transforming’ economy with the potential to rival China in terms of growth. The stock markets over the last 12 months registered a 20K performance — an unprecedented rise of 46 per cent. It saw the economy’s orphan — agriculture — register a heartening 4 per cent growth and Indian industry take on the world. For the first time, India was also given the chance to emerge from three decades of international nuclear isolation through the Indo-US nuclear deal. The year proved the resilience of the country’s democratic processes at a juncture when the democracy deficit was made cruelly manifest in many countries in the South Asian region, with the partial exception of Nepal. Above all it was a year when, despite serious terrorist attacks and civil disturbances, the country emerged united.

If 2007 provided hints of future promise, can 2008 see the consolidation, in some areas at least, of this promise? We pose this question with a degree of deliberation. It is unlikely that the next 12 months will not witness serious challenges in a period that leads up to a general election. But in as much as 2007 saw unassailable and irreversible movement forward, there is no reason to think that the next 12 months, if handled with a measure of common sense and consensus, cannot witness life-altering progress. This newspaper has had its share of aspirations. It has, for instance, in these very columns made a passionate argument for taking the Indo-US nuclear deal to its logical culmination, not just because it has the potential to transform the image of India internationally but because it holds the promise of transforming the lives of Indians nationally. It has argued for rational economic reform for more or less the same reasons. Policymaking, like politics, we believe, is the art of the possible and it must always be informed by the possibilities inherent in change.

Therefore, in this year bestowed with an additional day, let us take a leap of faith and keep our compact with the India project.