 "2013: The year of the onion")
The Chinese use a set of 12 animals to serially name their years. The current one, ending next February, is the Year of the Snake. Hindu years are also named in a 60-year cycle. The current Shalivahana Saka is called Vijay and the Vikram Samvat Vishwavasu, both drawn from lores of antiquity. A far more appropriate appellation for the Christian Era year ending Wednesday would have been the Year of the Onion. Sheila Dikshit, until recently the long-serving (and suffering?) chief minister of Delhi, would readily agree. So would families of aam aurats from Kanyakumari to Kargil and Dwarka to Dibrugarh.
Our 24x7 news television tries to present the flavour of the day (sometimes running into weeks) valiantly. A very few were pleasant in the last year: the resurgence of a post-Tendulkar young India cricket team which knew no fear, the flawless execution of the Mangalyaan mission, voters turning up in ever larger numbers to exercise their democratic franchise despite attempts at intimidation are the best of these. Some were very insipid - the prolonged silence of the prime minister and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the face of the worsening situation in India and the general mood of despondency. Some were astringent, like the year-end diplomatic furore with the United States. Many were very bad - the floods in Uttarakhand, the steady and unchecked journey of the economy into a morass, the Muzaffarnagar conflagration and its aftermath, poisoning of innocent schoolchildren through their midday meals, increasing intolerance of diverse opinions and lifestyles, unwieldy cities in chaos, falling standards of educational institutions and the students they turned out, are only a few from a long list. Some were viciously rank, the chief amongst which are surely the worsening assaults and harassment of women. These also saw the participation of the creme de la creme of the society, including intrepid media stars, legal luminaries and mythic godmen.
There were also hardy perennials: big ticket corruption and scams and attempts to gloss over them, government spokesmen assuring imminent turnaround of the economy, the Telangana imbroglio (which introduced Seemandhra in the political lexicon), sundry bomb blasts, border incursions and so on. And Narendra Modi and Gujarat were steady fares for slow days, especially after the former became the official flag-bearer of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the 2014 general election.
But despite all this variety, the overwhelming flavour of the year by a wide margin was that of the hitherto lowly allium cepa, the common onion. The bulb, which does not serve any major nutritional or medicinal purpose, nevertheless is claimed to possess some unique economic traits: a 5 per cent reduction in its supply is supposed to cause a 50 per cent increase in its price, and, according to official statistics, while its per capita availability in India increased three-fold in the last decade (faster than the per capita income, which doubled), its price also increased! And it has deadly political effects. Onion prices played a role, albeit minor, in Indira Gandhi's return to power in 1980. They decisively ousted Sushma Swaraj and Sheila Dikshit from their Delhi chief ministerial perches in 1998 and 2013, respectively, with admirable political neutrality.
Just three years ago, a lingering monsoon had caused an alarming, but short-lived, spike in onion prices at the year-end. But the 2013 situation was exceptional, because onions started bringing tears to the consumers' eyes as early as July. The proffered explanation that supplies shrank because of a 2012 drought in Maharashtra, a major contributor to the national onion pool, was not quite convincing because of the rather long delay. Prices of other vegetables too started soaring almost in unison, unlike in earlier years. Food inflation soared to double digits and made a mockery of the soothing official prognostications. No one, and certainly none in the government, had a clue. It seemed prices had a mind of their own, marching relentlessly upward.
Most fresh produce markets had functioned until recently as near text-book examples of perfect competition, benefiting consumers and producers alike. Those structures are now on the verge of collapse. The canny trade has sensed that the government has abandoned any role, except the mantra of foreign direct investment. It has now effectively evolved into loosely connected price-fixing oligopolies around major market centres. What had begun recently as inflation by stealth is now open, aggressive price fixing.
The blighting of household budgets across the length and the breadth of the country only reinforced the popular belief that the government has abandoned common consumers, leaving them to the mercy of collusive traders and farm leader cartels. The resulting anger found a vent in the voting machines, decimating the Congress in state elections.
The current upsurge in the BJP fortunes is really a measure of the general antipathy to the government. In a zero-sum game of elections, that automatically means gains for the other player, mostly BJP. The trend might well accelerate, making a Modi wave a self-fulfiling (but inaccurate) prophecy. Inflation is killing not just consumer aspirations, but the Congress' prospects as well. In 2004, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) lost despite its good economic copy book because of Modi, while 10 years later, the same Modi could claim victory because of UPA's abysmal economic record. What an irony that would be!
Start with the Indian polity. The ruling UPA dispensation lost vital allies during the year. This peeling of its layers of "friends" showed the Congress to be at its core. And not much effort is required to peel the Congress onion either, to show that its core comprises the Gandhi mother and son duo. When that is peeled, Rahul Gandhi emerges as the key entity. His resistible (but unresisted) rise in the party climaxed last January after the Jaipur meeting with his anointment as Congress vice-president. This was expected to rejuvenate the grand old party. He certainly flexed his muscles and demonstrated that even his supposedly impromptu, but well-orchestrated, remarks carried more weight than the combined resolve of the party's 'core' group and the Union cabinet when he rubbished the ordinance to save tainted Parliamentarians.
But what does Rahul Gandhi stand for? The "sipahi" of the Niyamgiri tribes who would protect their rights also assuages India Inc by axing an overzealous environment minister? The carefully cultivated "outsider" image and the famous remark of power being poison are no bars to becoming the final arbiter in all party decisions. And yet all this cuts no ice with the Hindi heartland electorate. So what do we get when we peel the final layer of this onion? The first tranche of Wikileaks cables cited an American diplomat describing the "young" Congress leader as an "empty suit."
Across the political divide, the onion peels the same way. Take the case of NDA. The June departure of Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) meant that the alliance was essentially BJP. It also witnessed a resistible (but feebly resisted) rise of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as its prime-ministerial candidate. His oratorical bombast has attracted large crowds, but when layers of that rhetoric are peeled, surprisingly little of value emerges as yet. The electorate may display an ABC (anybody but Congress) mood, but BJP must realise that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander as well. To win in 2014, empty slogans must be replaced by strategies to protect the voters' pocket books.
As in case of every electoral upset, 2013 also produced Messiahs with halos, namely the Aam Aadmi Party warriors in Delhi. Even if the anomaly of calling the second-place finishers the winners of a contest is ignored for the nonce, it would require suspension of disbelief of high order to hail the advent of those promising instant salvation from corrupt machine politics as game changers. VP Singh and Jayaprakash Narayan died bitter, frustrated men, realising that onions of idealism do not necessarily possess solid cores.
Politicians of all hues are discredited as never before. That is not necessarily undeserved or unwelcome. But in the bargain, the entire political process is devalued and rendered beyond repair. The debasement of all democratic institutions that has occurred in the last 10 years just got accelerated. That is the legacy of the year past.
Two years ago, the world was agog with excitement at what it called the Arab Spring. Tyrannical regimes collapsed like houses of cards in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Stirrings of popular and widespread dissent were felt all across North Africa and West Asia. What now prevails is an absence of democracy as before, often bordering on the chaotic. Syria shows that the world is far from rid of Arab despots. Jihadists may be in retreat, but are not exactly down and out. Fundamentalism is very much alive and possibly even on the ascendant, from Algeria to Indonesia.
The Chinese went through their decennial change of leadership. The new generation, stripped of all its modern trappings, is committed to the real meaning of the name of its country, the Middle Kingdom, the centre of the universe. It pursues Sinocentrism as relentlessly as any emperor of yore. The present North Korean regime revealed itself to be as murderous and insular as those of the senior Kims, despite the outward appearance of a youthful new leader. An ageing Europe lurched from one economic bailout to another, and Russia continued in its autocratic ways under its current Tsar, Vladimir Putin.
So, the world is not just the humanity's oyster but also a gigantic onion with infinitely peelable layers.
This simile with onions must end on a positive note. Physicists have laboured for many decades to strip away layers of matter to get at its core. This year, by confirming the existence of the long-hypothesised so-called God particle, the Higgs boson, and conferring the physics Nobel on Peter Higgs and François Englert, the world confirmed that the ultimate gravitas, the weight, lies at the core of the peeled onion of matter.
Our 24x7 news television tries to present the flavour of the day (sometimes running into weeks) valiantly. A very few were pleasant in the last year: the resurgence of a post-Tendulkar young India cricket team which knew no fear, the flawless execution of the Mangalyaan mission, voters turning up in ever larger numbers to exercise their democratic franchise despite attempts at intimidation are the best of these. Some were very insipid - the prolonged silence of the prime minister and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the face of the worsening situation in India and the general mood of despondency. Some were astringent, like the year-end diplomatic furore with the United States. Many were very bad - the floods in Uttarakhand, the steady and unchecked journey of the economy into a morass, the Muzaffarnagar conflagration and its aftermath, poisoning of innocent schoolchildren through their midday meals, increasing intolerance of diverse opinions and lifestyles, unwieldy cities in chaos, falling standards of educational institutions and the students they turned out, are only a few from a long list. Some were viciously rank, the chief amongst which are surely the worsening assaults and harassment of women. These also saw the participation of the creme de la creme of the society, including intrepid media stars, legal luminaries and mythic godmen.
There were also hardy perennials: big ticket corruption and scams and attempts to gloss over them, government spokesmen assuring imminent turnaround of the economy, the Telangana imbroglio (which introduced Seemandhra in the political lexicon), sundry bomb blasts, border incursions and so on. And Narendra Modi and Gujarat were steady fares for slow days, especially after the former became the official flag-bearer of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the 2014 general election.
But despite all this variety, the overwhelming flavour of the year by a wide margin was that of the hitherto lowly allium cepa, the common onion. The bulb, which does not serve any major nutritional or medicinal purpose, nevertheless is claimed to possess some unique economic traits: a 5 per cent reduction in its supply is supposed to cause a 50 per cent increase in its price, and, according to official statistics, while its per capita availability in India increased three-fold in the last decade (faster than the per capita income, which doubled), its price also increased! And it has deadly political effects. Onion prices played a role, albeit minor, in Indira Gandhi's return to power in 1980. They decisively ousted Sushma Swaraj and Sheila Dikshit from their Delhi chief ministerial perches in 1998 and 2013, respectively, with admirable political neutrality.
Just three years ago, a lingering monsoon had caused an alarming, but short-lived, spike in onion prices at the year-end. But the 2013 situation was exceptional, because onions started bringing tears to the consumers' eyes as early as July. The proffered explanation that supplies shrank because of a 2012 drought in Maharashtra, a major contributor to the national onion pool, was not quite convincing because of the rather long delay. Prices of other vegetables too started soaring almost in unison, unlike in earlier years. Food inflation soared to double digits and made a mockery of the soothing official prognostications. No one, and certainly none in the government, had a clue. It seemed prices had a mind of their own, marching relentlessly upward.
Most fresh produce markets had functioned until recently as near text-book examples of perfect competition, benefiting consumers and producers alike. Those structures are now on the verge of collapse. The canny trade has sensed that the government has abandoned any role, except the mantra of foreign direct investment. It has now effectively evolved into loosely connected price-fixing oligopolies around major market centres. What had begun recently as inflation by stealth is now open, aggressive price fixing.
The blighting of household budgets across the length and the breadth of the country only reinforced the popular belief that the government has abandoned common consumers, leaving them to the mercy of collusive traders and farm leader cartels. The resulting anger found a vent in the voting machines, decimating the Congress in state elections.
The current upsurge in the BJP fortunes is really a measure of the general antipathy to the government. In a zero-sum game of elections, that automatically means gains for the other player, mostly BJP. The trend might well accelerate, making a Modi wave a self-fulfiling (but inaccurate) prophecy. Inflation is killing not just consumer aspirations, but the Congress' prospects as well. In 2004, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) lost despite its good economic copy book because of Modi, while 10 years later, the same Modi could claim victory because of UPA's abysmal economic record. What an irony that would be!
* * *
But that is only a part of the reason why onion characterises the year about to end. Onion is a perfect metaphor for the serious unravelling of issues and events that occurred across the globe over the year.Start with the Indian polity. The ruling UPA dispensation lost vital allies during the year. This peeling of its layers of "friends" showed the Congress to be at its core. And not much effort is required to peel the Congress onion either, to show that its core comprises the Gandhi mother and son duo. When that is peeled, Rahul Gandhi emerges as the key entity. His resistible (but unresisted) rise in the party climaxed last January after the Jaipur meeting with his anointment as Congress vice-president. This was expected to rejuvenate the grand old party. He certainly flexed his muscles and demonstrated that even his supposedly impromptu, but well-orchestrated, remarks carried more weight than the combined resolve of the party's 'core' group and the Union cabinet when he rubbished the ordinance to save tainted Parliamentarians.
But what does Rahul Gandhi stand for? The "sipahi" of the Niyamgiri tribes who would protect their rights also assuages India Inc by axing an overzealous environment minister? The carefully cultivated "outsider" image and the famous remark of power being poison are no bars to becoming the final arbiter in all party decisions. And yet all this cuts no ice with the Hindi heartland electorate. So what do we get when we peel the final layer of this onion? The first tranche of Wikileaks cables cited an American diplomat describing the "young" Congress leader as an "empty suit."
Across the political divide, the onion peels the same way. Take the case of NDA. The June departure of Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) meant that the alliance was essentially BJP. It also witnessed a resistible (but feebly resisted) rise of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as its prime-ministerial candidate. His oratorical bombast has attracted large crowds, but when layers of that rhetoric are peeled, surprisingly little of value emerges as yet. The electorate may display an ABC (anybody but Congress) mood, but BJP must realise that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander as well. To win in 2014, empty slogans must be replaced by strategies to protect the voters' pocket books.
As in case of every electoral upset, 2013 also produced Messiahs with halos, namely the Aam Aadmi Party warriors in Delhi. Even if the anomaly of calling the second-place finishers the winners of a contest is ignored for the nonce, it would require suspension of disbelief of high order to hail the advent of those promising instant salvation from corrupt machine politics as game changers. VP Singh and Jayaprakash Narayan died bitter, frustrated men, realising that onions of idealism do not necessarily possess solid cores.
Politicians of all hues are discredited as never before. That is not necessarily undeserved or unwelcome. But in the bargain, the entire political process is devalued and rendered beyond repair. The debasement of all democratic institutions that has occurred in the last 10 years just got accelerated. That is the legacy of the year past.
* * *
The process of hype giving way to harsher underlying realities was not confined to India alone. In the recent past, no one came to office with greater universal goodwill than Barack Obama. His putative status as a transformational leader met with the stamp of approval of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in his very first year in office. Five years later, the sheen is considerably tarnished by his not being able to overcome the ever-obstreperous House of Representatives on fundamentals of governing such as budgets, his increasing isolation from even his basic constituency and, above all, his administration's covert complicity in the extensive invasion of privacy at home and abroad by the various undercover organisations of the American administration. Perhaps the burden of expectations was excessive, but the fact remains that shorn of the earlier aura, the Obama presidency just about manages an average rating, reflected in his own personal approval now close to that of his unlamented predecessor, George W Bush.Two years ago, the world was agog with excitement at what it called the Arab Spring. Tyrannical regimes collapsed like houses of cards in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Stirrings of popular and widespread dissent were felt all across North Africa and West Asia. What now prevails is an absence of democracy as before, often bordering on the chaotic. Syria shows that the world is far from rid of Arab despots. Jihadists may be in retreat, but are not exactly down and out. Fundamentalism is very much alive and possibly even on the ascendant, from Algeria to Indonesia.
The Chinese went through their decennial change of leadership. The new generation, stripped of all its modern trappings, is committed to the real meaning of the name of its country, the Middle Kingdom, the centre of the universe. It pursues Sinocentrism as relentlessly as any emperor of yore. The present North Korean regime revealed itself to be as murderous and insular as those of the senior Kims, despite the outward appearance of a youthful new leader. An ageing Europe lurched from one economic bailout to another, and Russia continued in its autocratic ways under its current Tsar, Vladimir Putin.
So, the world is not just the humanity's oyster but also a gigantic onion with infinitely peelable layers.
* * *
This simile with onions must end on a positive note. Physicists have laboured for many decades to strip away layers of matter to get at its core. This year, by confirming the existence of the long-hypothesised so-called God particle, the Higgs boson, and conferring the physics Nobel on Peter Higgs and François Englert, the world confirmed that the ultimate gravitas, the weight, lies at the core of the peeled onion of matter.