Editor’s Note | Vaishna Roy writes: 2023 as the year of challenges

From Shakespearean demagogues to mob-sanctioned savagery, 2023 was a year that tested the soul of the nation. Because when the people become a mob, they do not want good government, all they want, to quote Greenblatt, is “permission to break the rules”, to destroy, to slake their thirst for blood. This exhilarating licence to indulge in the basest instincts of loathing and savagery free from the fear of punishment is what Hobbes predicted when he said that life would rapidly become “nasty, brutish, and short” outside the social contract, a condition that William Golding brought chillingly alive in Lord of the Flies. “When the people become a mob, they do not want good government, all they want, to quote Greenblatt, is ‘permission to break the rules’, to destroy, to slake their thirst for blood. In 2023, that permission was given.” When the equally willing Supreme Court on December 11 upheld the Centre’s roughshod abrogation of Article 370 that gave Jammu and Kashmir special status, it broke a fragile and gossamer thread of promise that holds a multitudinous India together, the belief that each individual identity will be cherished and protected even as it comes together to form the whole.