2023: Challenges and opportunities

While the year’s high point will be the G20 presidency, domestic politics, geopolitics, and climate will also need adequate attention

After two years of pandemic-induced worry, India stepped into 2023 over the weekend with relative gusto. Despite soaring infections in China and some travel restrictions, the risk of another major outbreak in India remains low — a fact that must come as relief in a year as important to the national calendar as 2023.

Internally, assembly elections in nine states will dominate domestic politics and set the momentum for the general elections in 2024. (PTI)

The new year will be marked by India’s most important international assignment in three decades - the presidency of the G20 – which will require deft handling of a fast-changing international order and careful balancing of opposing power blocs. India’s South-first agenda, and its avowed focus on questions of development and humanitarian progress instead of power politics, will hinge on how it will manage global tensions and unpredictable turns on the Eurasian battlefield, and their ripple effect on global supply chains and energy markets. That India will need to simultaneously manage China on two major global platforms, while continuing to defend its interests and territorial integrity against Beijing’s belligerence, may prove to be a stress test for its multi-aligned diplomatic strategy and overshadow its traditional challenges in managing an unpredictable Pakistan, which will go to the polls this year.

Internally, assembly elections in nine states will dominate domestic politics and set the momentum for the general elections in 2024. The eventual victors of these individual contests are important, of course, but no less crucial will be the agenda that these elections set – the 2018 round of elections, for example, told us that agrarian distress, a churn within Dalit and backward communities and concern about jobs were on the voter’s mind, and these issues shaped the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. This will also be the final glimpse of a yet-unborn Opposition strategy to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral juggernaut.

But while these contests on the electoral and geopolitical fields are important, they may pale in front of the challenges that 2023 will pose on the environmental and social fronts. 2022 gave India a taste of an unstable world where climate shocks can not only kill people but also shrivel crops, devastate food security and throw national planning off kilter. With the world still too myopic to make tough but fair choices, and no clear pathway for climate finance or technology swap, India may find itself in increasingly difficult positions on mitigating or adapting to the climate crisis. And, the 75th year of Independence will also need the authorities to act in fair and rational ways to contain elements that fan majoritarianism and seek to deepen social cleavages. India will need to resolve issues of dipping women’s labour force participation and a burgeoning generation of young people who are not gainfully employed. Doing so will take might and commitment, without distractions created for sectarian or political ends.