Britain at the end of 1978 was not a pretty picture. The country had been brought to its knees because of strikes called by powerful trade unions. Garbage piled up in central London. The trains were not moving. Even the dead were not spared as the gravediggers stayed away from work. Those cold months of strife came to be described as a Shakespearean winter of discontent.

The immediate cause of the strikes was the decision of the Labour government headed by James Callaghan to restrict pay increases in an attempt to control inflation through the sort of wage-and-price controls that were then fashionable. Britain had a few years earlier even approached the International Monetary Fund for help. The economy was in tatters. The country was described as the sick man of Europe.

The stage was set for Margaret Thatcher to aim a wrecking ball at the old political consensus. Her Conservative Party went to the polls in the summer of 1979 on the back of widespread public revulsion against the unions. She won. Thatcher then began to take apart the social democratic consensus that had served Britain so well since 1945 but which had outlived its utility. She backed a brutal monetary compression to slay the inflation dragon; she took on the unions in a fight that culminated in a famous clash with the powerful miners; she began to aggressively privatize companies; she opened up the financial sector in what has come to be known as the Big Bang.

Is India near a Thatcher moment right now, waiting for a political innovator to change the game?

The second Manmohan Singh government has created a bubbling pot of discontent since 2009 with its many failures. Persistently high inflation has eaten into purchasing power. Declining economic growth has reduced opportunities. Corruption has angered many citizens. The past five years have not been without their achievements, if one looks at the various indicators of human development, but there is still a palpable sense that a golden opportunity has been missed by the current government.

How Indians react to these disappointments will only be revealed when they trudge to the voting booths in the summer to take part in the next general election.

Political experts believe that the Congress will lose ground in the elections. The way it was trounced in the recent state elections is only an advance warning. The massive crowds at the rallies addressed by Gujarat chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi also suggest a groundswell of support for him, at least in the cities. But political prognosis has always been a hazardous task in India, especially so many months ahead of an election.

The big question is whether India is approaching a political inflection point similar to the one seen in Britain in 1979, a desi Thatcher moment. Will the next government try to correct the situation while staying on the old path, or will it try to take India down a new course?

There is no doubt that Modi is trying to craft a new political narrative that seeks to replace the one that the Congress has propagated over many decades. His statements on the role of government and governance are perhaps the most radical ones heard in Indian politics since the heyday of the Swatantra Party. Modi has also tried hard to build a new political narrative using a diverse cast of leaders from Vallabhbhai Patel to Shyamji Krishna Varma, though these attempts have been marred by factual errors that would make a college student cringe.

The other alternative narrative is being built by Arvind Kejriwal, of replacing traditional politics with a new politics based on the power of the people—lokniti, instead of rajniti. Some of his themes hark back to the hopes of partyless democracy from men such as M.K. Gandhi, M.N. Roy and Jayaprakash Narayan. Kejriwal also has shades of the old-style populist in him, as is evident in the promises of goodies in the manifesto of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). But its stunning success in New Delhi is another warning that patience is running thin with politics as usual.

The Congress is in a bind. It owns the current political narrative, based on its unique interpretations of inclusion, secularism and national interest. It cannot turn its back on its own heritage, given its dynastic structure; the fundamental hypocrisy of a dynast calling for a new meritocratic politics is too evident to ignore. But some recent statements by Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi show signs of a belated realization that India needs economic reforms if it is to succeed as a nation. They are a far cry from inane statements of yore about how poverty is a state of mind or on the higher escape velocity for the Dalit community.

The barons of Congress socialism, Lohiate caste politics and regional power brokers are still a powerful force in Indian politics. But the beauty of revolutions or inflection points is that they are fundamentally unpredictable. The combination of an economic downturn, voter angst and new political narratives offer a sliver of hope that India could be tantalizingly close to a Thatcher moment.

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