Dear Express reader, The BJP-led government at the Centre has completed two years of its second term, seven from May 2014, when the BJP swept to power as the first party in three decades to win a majority on its own. It had promised “achhe din”. There are three more years to go for general elections. And yet, if assessments from both supporters and critics have seemed too loud and too certain this week, it is because the last year has looked so dramatic and outcome-altering. Surely, the year of the pandemic will play an outsized role in the scorecard for the BJP and its opponents in 2024. And then, Uttar Pradesh polls are due in a few months, early next year, which will be seen as make or break nationally. The BJP’s opponents have attributed too much coherence and impermeability to the Modi Machine so far, and they may be seeing too much power in the pandemic now. In their view, the Modi government will finally be tripped by a force larger itself. These are politicians and parties that have not done their political homework to meet the Modi challenge on the ground over the past seven years, they have not put in the effort of finding the chinks in the Modi armour and reframing their own language and strategy. Painting the 2024 battle as Modi vs Pandemic allows them to sit back once more, and wait for the gains to come to them. On the other side, the BJP’s supporters exaggerate the conspiracy and influence of the Old Establishment every time things go wrong. In this story, the Left-liberal elites that were ousted and overthrown by the Modi regime in 2014, are always on the look-out to stage a comeback, and they try to make every crisis an opportunity. According to them, the Modi government has performed admirably, including during the pandemic, and all those who point to the missing oxygen cylinders and medicines, the lack of urgency and planning on the vaccines and the undercounting of the dead, are simply being misled by those who have never accepted Modi’s rise to power and never will. Like the opponents of Modi, the Modi-wallahs are dredging up a story that allows them to pass the parcel — to shrug off the responsibility to acknowledge the mistakes the government has made and to evade the urgency of getting down to the corrections they still need to make. Meanwhile, the farmers’ agitation against the Centre’s three farm laws also marked an anniversary this week — it completed six months of its Dilli Chalo campaign, which brought to the capital’s doors a protest that had first stirred in June last year in Punjab. Punjab will also be going to polls next year, and those results will be crucial too. If post-pandemic polls in UP will indicate whether or how politics at the Centre has changed after the public health emergency, the Punjab election will point to the future of political competition in a state where large popular protests have pushed the political party to the sidelines. In Punjab, the farm agitation has rearranged politics-as-usual. Here, the farm unions, which must keep their eye on the people’s mood, are in the lead, and the political party is reduced to watching the unions. Next year’s assembly will be tracked for whether or not this shift in power is here to stay. And for how the political party responds, or fails to, to being by-passed in this manner. Till next Sunday, Vandita | 
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