2018 was the year the worm turned, and finally found its voice

It's what worms will do when you step on them

Well, compatriots, it’s the last weekend of the year. I recently had lunch with friends who were full of irritating optimism about New Year-iness, which they described as ‘a reset button’. I would love to partake in this kind of twaddle, but I’m too busy having my usual Monday morning feeling. Post-November, it is true, feels like an effortless slither down the last bit of the mountain of the year, but that joyride finishes—usually face first—in the narrow ditch we know as the night of December 31. When I wake up on the first day of January, I see not a shiny, happy new year, but the first step of a very long uphill trek over the next mountain. It’s less Usain Bolt at the starting blocks, more Sisyphus eyeing the boulder.

I may be a grinch, but one thing does makes me sort of happy: 2018 was the year the worm turned. The big worms, the humble worms, the ratty worms, and the low worms. It’s what happens when you step on living things—the meekest, most powerless of them will turn, if only in self-preservation. And there is nobody that the BJP hasn’t stepped on.

It promised actions of scale and grandeur that would impact the life of every Indian, and came up only with policies that hammer every Indian into the dust. From the catastrophic one-man decision that was demonetisation, to the blow-in-the-wind regulations of the GST, to the unholy mess that is Aadhaar, to the recently announced intention of empowering various security and finance agencies to snoop on India’s computers and phones, it has only encroached on the liberty and rights of every single member of the public. Those members of the public who have to holler to be heard—farmers, for example, or students, or women, or minorities—are ignored or trash-talked, or intimidated.

The BJP has wasted its term equating might with right and empowering the oligarchy. It equates support and respect with blind compliance, and criticism with ‘negativity’ at best and treason at worst. ‘Support’ and ‘respect’ have only been tatty veils hiding a host of misdemeanours from the wasteful (think Statue of Unity) to the criminal (think riots and vandalism encouraged over cows, as in Bulandshahr, or over movies like Padmaavat, and on college campuses). Under cover of ardent support for the armed forces, Narendra Modi wangled a defence deal for Anil Ambani, an act so left-field that it took even cabinet ministers by surprise and necessitated a comet tail of ludicrous behaviour including evasion by the defence minister, and risible ‘typos’ submitted by the government in court.

The BJP has done its best to dress up majoritarianism as unity, persecute critics and dissidents, and defend lynchings and lawlessness. It has planted poisonous weeds that have taken over our educational, cultural, and administrative systems. Today, even the working of the judiciary is in some question, as the four judges’ press conference showed, as are the verdicts on the Loya and Rafale cases.

The leadership tries to pass off talk as action, public relations as reality, fabulism as vision, lies as truth, and leaders as messiahs—and people aren’t buying it anymore. Despite most of the media’s contemptible abasement before the government and its breathless amplification of fake news, the winds have changed. Even the media is having to take the change seriously; Rahul Gandhi is on the cover of India Today’s forthcoming January 2019 issue. There are only so many ‘secret plots’ to kill the Prime Minister that you can ‘uncover’, only so many ISIS modules armed with hydraulic tractor jacks and Diwali bombs that you can bust, before people walk away in disgust—or worse, laughing.

And so, after two and a half years of embarrassing fawning over Mr Modi, followed by six months of discontented rumbling, 2018 has been all about a tidal wave of public scorn. Never has India seen as strong-arming, weak-minded, and small-hearted a government as this, and people are calling it out. Three major electoral defeats in three heartland states say that what the BJP thought it could take for granted it cannot—just as what the UPA thought it could take for granted it could not. Governments are not elected to step on us, but to serve us. And so the worm turns.

So there might be some excitement to look forward to in 2019, best summed up by that WhatsApp forward of a software screen showing ‘Uninstalling Narendra Modi’, with the caption, ‘Please be patient, your country will be restored soon.’ Nobody can possibly know how next year’s election will pan out, but that’s the thing about the Sisyphean boulder—even if the government falls, we’ll have to start watching the next one like a hawk all over again.

Happy 2019, I think.