It was not in Sanskrit that India endorsed the arrival of the BJP as a party of governance. It arrived in Delhi not in a chariot adorned with comic-book mythology. The triumph of the BJP as the single largest party was the culmination of degeneration elsewhere in the political market. The Congress, like the Liberal Democrats of Japan, was decaying with the memories of power, with the self-repudiation leadership. The Janata Dal, with its social therapy subordinated to personal egos, was falling to the third force of irrelevance. A BJP-led coalition in power marked the right turn in Indian politics. That human face, like a Dubcek from the parivar, was also the most popular face. But there was no romance of the arrival. Those who received the mandate failed to realise its historic resonance. There was no end-of-the-era glow in their eyes, no word ofchange in their vocabulary. The acts of the coalition, with India's most popular politician as its manager, ranged from the banal to the bizarre.

The BJP's most significant national statement was singularly bombastic. A nuclear policy based on national assertion and international responsibility exhibited political maturity. The funny thing was that nuclear India could not manage its vegetable markets. Symbols and gestures are not substitutes for good governance. And nationalism is not a one-way ticket to some civilisational Ruritania. In 1998, someone fantasised about the Sanskritisation of the Indian tongue. Tradition and civilisation acquired an unfamiliar accent. The culture cop has no place in a nation confident of its own heritage. But we saw the arbiters of culture and morality reducing the idea of India to an idea of paranoia. After all, who was telling us that the end of Indian tradition could begin in the darkness of a movie hall, that Deepa Mehta could start a sexual revolution that would makeIndian manhood hopelessly redundant? As the sobering centre of the right remained rather stagnant, the mad periphery continued to invent enemies.

Who were the enemies? Alfred Nobel and other lesser missionaries. True, the enemy is an abiding motif in the mythology of hate. A regulatory diet of `the enemy' keeps even the Khomeinist with a trishul in a permanent state of vigil. In such a scenario a burning church is a civilisational triumph over the aliens. In India 1998, churches burned to illuminate the politics of hate. The torchbearers of civilisation wanted to regain the ancient land. The self-chosen cultural cleanser was the most active personality of the year. In terms of political culture, the technology that activated his mind mocked the technology that activated the bomb in Pokharan. One India leapt forward with the immense confidence of a modern nation. It wanted to declare its power and celebrate its scientific talent. It struck a fine balance between power and responsibility. The other Indiasought out the Great Yesterday, which in the hallucinations of the so-called civilisational man looked so archaic, so ancient, so exclusive.

The Great Yesterday had another manifestation. The Congress party thinks it is India's natural party of governance. In 1998 the party realised that it was not biologically or intellectually capable of managing the future of India. Sonia Gandhi, for long the extra-constitutional Mother India, found herself soaring above the dead minds of India's GOP. Political necrophilia collaborated with intimations of morality to turn the first widow into the supreme leader. It was the triumph of the dynastic impulse. The year legitimised the inevitability of a Gandhi in the Congress. The term `end of the Congress century' was quite popular some time ago. Mrs Gandhi had arrived, and afterlife was a possibility. Perhaps, Sonia Gandhi was not the singular source of the Congress regeneration. The overstretched pause of the BJP leadership also provided life-saving energy to the otherparty. The result was not so bad: the first note of a bipartisan polity.

Of course, there were moments of pure joy. The batsman dazzled the nation. And the economist received a Nobel Prize. The sportsman and the professor gave moments of pride, and pleasure. So the spectacular was not purely political. There was entertainment too, mostly from the Dravidian vaudeville. Though the silky kitsch from Chennai was not universally entertaining. But the missionary zeal of the Nobel Prize was fantastic.

``India is an ethnographic and historical museum. But it is a living museum, one in which the most modern modernity co-exists with archaicisms that have survived for millennia,'' wrote a highly impressionistic Octavio Paz. In this museum, exhibits are always jostling for space. We saw their madness, their passion, their power to influence and instigate. We saw the spectacular and the pathetic, the modern and the archaic. The year 1998 only reasserted the magnificence and the madness of that museum. Even in the yearof unreason, the Indian who lives outside the make-believe of the reality managers could declare his active autonomy. He refused to be taken for granted. He may not have come out of this year of national redefinitions unscarred. His perseverance has not yet abandoned hope. So our goodbye to 1998 is also a salutation to the Indians who keep the museum as a great idea of survival. What a year! Well, we survived it.