Dear Express reader, As we head into the new year, what are we carrying with us? Unfortunately, the baggage of 2021 is not bright or shiny, and not providing much light. The pandemic seemed over, until it wasn’t. Omicron threatens to push us again to the ledge just as it was beginning to seem that we could step back, retrieve and restore residues of our less anxious pre-pandemic selves. On Saturday, the prime minister, whose last big public outing was as performer-in-chief of Hindu rituals at the launch of the first phase of the Kashi-Vishwanath corridor project, seized the Omicron opportunity. He took to TV to address a nation that is heading into a crucial round of assembly elections. The state election campaigns, yet to formally begin, may push many of us on the slippery slope towards greater distrust and mutual suspicion, if events in the last few days in election-bound Punjab and Uttarakhand are indication. In Amritsar and Kapurthala, two men were lynched for alleged attempts at sacrilege. While police investigations are on, and the truth will hopefully out, the loud outrage on one crime could not mask the chilling silence on the other. Condemnation of the attempted sacrilege was loud and strong across Punjab, but criticism of the mob taking the law into its own hands was much too muted and belated. Meanwhile, at a “Dharma Sansad” in Haridwar, speaker after speaker raged and ranted on stage against Muslims, making threats, painting rabid spectres and calling for violence, breaching all lines of acceptable discourse in a diverse democracy. Yet again, the silences rang louder. The BJP, which was invoked and addressed from that toxic stage, and which rules at the Centre and in Uttarakhand, has not spoken to distance itself from the call to arms and genocide in Haridwar. The BJP’s refusal to condemn may be strategic, ahead of the UP election. It may be hoping, after all, that the hate speech could help rouse and consolidate its base, which feeds on the majority-under-siege fear and fiction. Whatever the reason for it, as we move into the new year from the old, the party’s silence hangs heavy and leaden. As UP heads for a revival of old spectres in a new election campaign, the minority may not be the only target of a majoritarianism emboldened by silences and complicities of the powerful — a recent journey from Lakhimpur to Gorakhpur brought home to me how the protester is also, increasingly, looked at with suspicion. There is little or no popular outcry against the harsh crackdown of the Yogi Adityanath government on all forms of public dissent, or its determined demonisation of the protester. In the other poll-bound state of Punjab, however, yesterday’s agitator is set to enter tomorrow’s competition for power. The Samyukta Samaj Morcha, a front made of 22 farmer organisations which led the just-concluded year-long farmers’ agitation, has announced that it will be a candidate in the 2022 election. The Balbir Singh Rajewal-led SSM’s participation in polls does not just speak of the difference between UP and Punjab. At the end of a year scarred by campaigns of intolerance, it also points to the cracks through which the light could get in. Despite the political establishment’s best efforts to paint the protester as the Outsider, Enemy and Other, the farm leaders of Punjab have shown, not just in words but also in action, that the one who dissents holds up the other end of democracy’s necessary and legitimate conversation. The protester also has stakes in the system, and what could be a greater expression of that than having a go at winning an election? It doesn't matter if it wins or loses. The Rajewal-led Morcha’s bid for power in a state where it so recently led a street agitation is good news for Punjab and the nation. It is also a hopeful note to end on. See you in the new year, Vandita | 
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