Farewell, false year.

Byline: F.S. Aijazuddin

THE year 2019 should never have been born. It began with a false hope of change and ended with a solar eclipse. In between, it saw floods in Venice, bush fires across Australia, earthquakes in Peru, riots in Hong Kong. Will 2020 be another year of turmoil or one with a balanced vision, as its numerals imply?

Two predictions will govern this fresh year: Movement and Migration. In the US, President Trump (a pinching impeachment notwithstanding) will rearrange the furniture in the White House for a second five-year occupancy. In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, having successfully quit Europe, intends to make 10 Downing Street his home until 2024. In Europe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will spend her final year (she retires in 2021) buttressing the frail credentials of her chosen successor Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer. French President Macron must quell domestic insurrections before he can claim pre-eminence in a fragmenting European Union. And both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping still have 'miles to go' before they sleep.

In neighbouring India, Prime Minister Modi and his sub-ego Home Minister Amit Shah will pursue their pogroms against Indian Muslims. Their savagely truncated Bhagavad Gita is M.S. Gowalkar's We or our Nationhood Defined (1939) which offered, as they do, a stark choice to Indian non-Hindus: 'There are only two courses open to these foreign elements, either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and quit the country at the sweet will of the national race.'

Would Gowalkar, one wonders, have accepted two Congress leaders - the Italian-born Mrs Sonia Gandhi or British-born Dr Shashi Tharoor - as being Indian enough?

Will 2020 be the year Shahbaz Sharif claims the PM's slot?

Minorities, Gowalkar argued, must merge with the Hindu race, 'or stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment - not even citizens' rights'.

A recent equally influential Hindutva ideologue Pandit D.D. Upadhyaya attacked the Indian constitution itself, dismissing it as a foreign hybrid: 'The founding fathers of the Republic of India were largely Anglophile Indians schooled in Western systems of thought; their work revealed no Indianness [.] Thus, our constitution, like an English child born in India, has...