2010-19 THE BREAKAWAY DECADE

THE OLD ORDER YIELDED TO A RADICALLY NEW AND UNSETTLING REALITY

- Raj Chengappa

A DECADE IS BUT A human construct. It was conceived primarily to measure a period of time rather than define a span of human existence. As the English author Rose Macaulay observed, “Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.”

Yet, if a week is a long time in politics (and, as we saw in Maharashtra recently, a night can be even longer), the passage of 10 years in the life of an individual, state or nation is often witness to dramatic changes. The heroes of one decade can end up as villains of the next—and vice versa—as has happened in India. In the previous decade, Manmohan Singh and the Congress-led UPA-I government were judged by the electorate as deserving enough of a second term in 2009. Yet, from the beginning of this decade, his government went steadily downhill. By January 2014, at the fag end of his second term, Manmohan, sensing the humiliating whipping UPA-II would get in the general election that year, said, “I do not believe that I have been a weak prime minister. I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me....”

Manmohan may have to wait for a decade or more before his reign is looked upon more kindly. Recent memory is always a harsher judge. Yet, some decades stand out more than others and come to be regarded as epochal. It is not often that Richard M. Nixon is cited for anything but Watergate and his ignominious exit from the US presidency, but he did make this perspicacious observation: “Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.”