Politically speaking, 2023 will be the year of waiting. It will be assessed by the ways in which it shapes the parliamentary contest of the year after, in 2024. Some things are already clear, though. The ruling BJP, using resources of party and government, has crafted a dominance fundamentally based on a set of appeals that invite the individual to locate herself in larger projects, and wholes imagined as more than a sum of their parts. On the one hand, in no particular order, the Hindu community, the nation, the civilisational state. The likes of Aatmanirbhar Bharat, Digital India, Start-up India, on the other. Plus, more and more, India-in-the-world. The Modi-led BJP has honed a multivocal pitch that switches from one project and whole to the other with ease, and uses one to prop up the other when it sags. In the new year, the projection of India-in-the-world is likely to grow more insistent — the G20 presidency has come at an opportune time for the party. While foreign policy is still not a bone of electoral contention in this country, the Modi-BJP has had great success in carrying it to voters as an instrument of national pride, a touched-up photo-op that makes India look good to itself.
Of course, there are exclusions in the BJP’s imagined communities — the wholes are also divisive. There are senses in which its projects overpromise and flatter to deceive. It will be the task of the Opposition parties to highlight those areas that the BJP’s hand-held spotlight does not show. But the parties of the Opposition will have to do more than just that if they have to prove to the voter that they are counting on more than rote anti-incumbency. They must also come up with an affirmative agenda that creates larger spaces and claims larger wholes. If they want to take on the BJP, they must be more agile, recover a will-to-win. But most of all, they must fight the narrowing of their platforms and resist shrinking into corners of their own making. As they do this, they will confront a large question: Should they fight the BJP on terms set by the BJP? Or can they summon the political grammar and organisational nerve to shift the contest’s terrain in 2023? The question in the year ahead will also be: Where will Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra reach? Can it arrive at the heart of Congress, or close to it?
