Dear Express Reader A safe, happy and fulfilling new year to you. We step into 2022 with baggage that weighs us down, but up ahead, is the promise of new beginnings. The pandemic continues, but there is hope that new mutation Omicron carries with it intimations of the virus’s endgame. Of course, the “endgame” itself may have to be reviewed. As Rajesh Parikh, director, Medical Research and Honorary Neuropsychiatrist, Jaslok Hospital & Research Centre, Mumbai, wrote on our pages: “… a post-pandemic environment is not likely to be one with ‘zero-Covid’. The challenge then is to define the Covid-19 level that is acceptable for countries in a world that is fundamentally interconnected. The epidemiological characteristics of a pandemic’s end are not universally defined. Prior respiratory pandemics illustrate that ends are usually ambiguous, and that pandemic closure is better viewed as the return of social life rather than the attainment of specific epidemiological goals.” The pandemic’s end, he says, may need to be redefined as a more social, less medical event. It is in politics, most of all, that we continue to redefine and remake ourselves, sometimes in despair and sometimes with hope. This last year has underlined that the danger to democracy does not always come from outside it, it does not always lead to a clear and dramatic confrontation between the good guys and the bad. And that authoritarianism is not inevitably the opposite of democracy. Democracy can be corroded, instead, in bits and pieces, by democratic means. Authoritarianism can grow and flourish within democracy. Democracy is eroded every time the political choice is defined, by the powerful, as one that is between “us” and “them”, between one faith and another, one ascriptive identity vs another. Democratic erosion happens every time a stand-up comic, or activist, or protester is silenced, the law is weaponised to ensure quiescence. And every time Parliament is by-passed on a crucial law and every time the courts defer and delay hearing the bail plea or the habeas corpus case, kick the justice can down the road, make due process the punishment. But then, democracy is reaffirmed, as it was this past year, when farmers make their government listen, and compel it to roll back a law it sought to push through with arrogance, not persuasion. One of the questions in 2022 will be: Will elections in states like Punjab and Uttar Pradesh be more democratic or less? Of course, all free and fair elections are seen to be ipso facto democratic. But if democracy itself is not an unmixed thing, if it can also have authoritarian instincts and characteristics, to answer that question, we will need to look more carefully at the election campaigns. In Punjab, the electoral arena has seldom looked so crowded — the traditionally two-party format has been made more angular with Amarinder Singh’s new outfit (aligned to the BJP which has split with the Akali Dal), and the farmers’ morcha in the political mix. The question, here, will be: Will electoral politics, the contestants in the fray, talk of the agriculture crisis that lay behind one of the most successful farmer mobilisations of recent times, will they offer ideas on the ways out, after the repeal of the laws? Or will the election be dominated by issues, like sacrilege, instead, that make everyone tongue-tied? In UP, that most spectacular election of all, one of the questions will be this: Is the choice going to be painted as an apocalyptic one, between the “saviours” of the “Hindu nation”, and those who are its “enemies” and “others”? In other words, will the choice in 2022 in UP be made on the back of fear and suspicion, insecurity and hate, that crowds out possibilities of debate? It’s now over to 2022. Thanks, Vandita | 
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