SET FOR A POLL VAULT

To succeed in the electoral arena, a party needs three things – narrative, organisation and leadership. For the BJP all three appear sorted; for the Opposition, all remain works in progress

- Dhrubo Jyoti

The year before general elections is always politically fraught-parties try out narratives and dust off issues to see what's clicking with the public; the government makes a push on schemes that it thinks are working and applies salve to what it feels are festering public grievances; the Opposition sharpens its attacks on what it feels are the government's weak flanks and dusts off its organisational lethargy to hit the ground. And in this melee, voters get a glimpse of what issues will frame their political choices in the world's largest democratic exercise.

2023 was all this and more. The BJP maintained its dominance in the Hindi heartland even as chinks in its electoral armour helped the Opposition south of the Vindhyas. Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushed for a reinvigorated narrative of a developed India by 2047Viksit Bharat - as the core of his messaging appeal for 2024. The Opposition made its most serious effort yet at forging a common platform to take on the BJP behemoth. And it started testing out an alternative narrative of social justice centered around the promise of a caste census, and consequent hike in reservations for marginalised groups, though its electoral salience remained unproven.

But if all this action in the electoral arena underlined the resilience of the Indian democratic experience, sobering checks were offered from other arenas - the impasse in Parliament and deepening fault lines between the government and Opposition ensuring that important bills were passed with little discussion, the political and administrative failure to douse the simmering fires in Manipur that claimed 187 lives and displaced a generation of people, and the sheer apathy that allowed the climate crisis to inundate our cities, trigger tragedies in the mountains, and shroud our Capital in noxious blankets of smoke.