January 2, 2026 07:10 AM IST First published on: Jan 2, 2026 at 07:10 AM ISTIn a world marked by turbulence and fragmentation, India appears, at least for now, remarkably stable. At a time when many political systems look brittle, India stands out for the consolidation of power, increasingly veering towards authoritarianism under the BJP. Its economy has shown surface resilience in the face of external shocks. It remains culturally inventive, dynamic and creative. Yet as India enters the new year, the most consequential contest it faces is not between parties, personalities, or even ideologies. It is between the allure of fantasy and the discipline of reality.This contest will shape our politics, our international standing, our economic choices, and the texture of our moral life. Ironically, India’s surface stability may be making it more vulnerable to political fantasy. Denials of discontent, institutional failure, and simmering social turbulence are masked by a deceptive calm.AdvertisementPolitics, of course, thrives on fantasy. Successful politics requires narratives of hope and pride, not merely critique. Collective fantasies can bind societies together. But fantasy, in the present context, refers to something more corrosive: A mendacious evasion of reality, a preference for emotionally gratifying stories over hard facts, for moral self-congratulation over diagnosis, for symbolic victories over substantive achievement.Reality, by contrast, is not cynicism. It is the willingness to see the world as it is, confront it in all its starkness, and act intelligently within its constraints. It was once said that religion was the opium of the masses. Yet even religious fantasy rarely confused the real world with an imagined heaven. Our contemporary political fantasy is more dangerous: It eclipses reality altogether, often confusing heaven and hell.India’s public life is now saturated with fantasies of civilisational redemption. We are told that historical anxieties can be healed by deepening communal antagonism, as if recasting contemporary politics as an epic struggle between Hindus and Muslims were the path to renewal. In this imagination, politics becomes myth, victimhood becomes virtue, and the past substitutes for the future. Crude civilisational self-assertion converts complex social and political failures into moral dramas with ready villains, offering emotional satisfaction in place of institutional work. What is lost is the harder task of building a shared civic future that can accommodate difference without turning conflict into destiny.AdvertisementAlongside this runs a parallel fantasy of effortless power and transformation. The rhetoric of vishwaguru suggests that international stature can be conjured through spectacle and self-belief. Operation Sindoor last year offered a reality check about India’s diminished global political leverage, whatever the military facts on the ground. Great-power status cannot be attained without a massive expansion of India’s material imprint on the global economy. Four per cent of global trade will not suffice. There have been economic reforms, prompted in part by the recognition that the two dominant powers of our age, the United States and China, are structurally hostile to India’s interests. India has undoubtedly made progress on several fronts. But we enter fantasy land when this progress is not measured against the scale of the challenges ahead.Growth numbers, for instance, conceal the stagnation of private investment. Denial persists in the belief that growth can be willed into existence by confidence alone, bypassing education, skills, competition, massive investments in research and development, and a single-minded pursuit of technological leadership. “Viksit Bharat”, like “Swachh Bharat”, risks becoming aspiration without strategy. Above all, there is a refusal to confront the everyday evidence of failure: The foulest air, polluted rivers, degraded cities, and precarious work cannot be reconciled with claims of Incredible India or an economic renaissance.This contest between fantasy and reality also plays out in democratic life. Fantasy politics thrives on permanent mobilisation, on turning every disagreement into an existential battle. It reduces citizenship to spectatorship, where applause replaces participation and loyalty substitutes for judgment. A reality-based democracy would be quieter, more institutional, more oriented toward problem-solving. The fantasy that we are the “mother of all democracies” collides with the erosion of civil liberties, assaults on federalism, declining judicial independence, media capture, and the waning credibility of institutions such as the Election Commission. Yet dwelling in fantasy is a bipartisan temptation. If the government prefers that we inhabit fantasy land, the Opposition too readily obliges. The Congress party remains trapped in its own unreality, responding to imaginary social and institutional conditions that no longer exist, and failing to repair itself even in the face of an existential crisis.Fantasy, then, is not merely an error; it is a mode of staging power. India today illustrates what Bruno Maçães has described as the attempt to make imagination precede reality. Power is exercised through the construction of civilisational and geopolitical worlds that citizens are invited to inhabit before their material foundations exist. The rhetoric of vishwaguru and the staging of politics as epic drama are not simply ideological gestures; they are efforts to perform great-power status into being. But every constructed world eventually collides with what resists construction: Energy, technology, demography, ecology. In India’s case, that resistance takes the form of uneven human capital, structural underemployment, low productivity, shallow institutional depth, ecological degradation, and limited leverage in global production networks. If technology is going to define the future, India is nowhere in the race.most readIndia faces a difficult moment in its neighbourhood, in global geopolitics, and in the scale of its domestic challenges. The question for the year ahead is whether sober realism will guide action, or whether, adapting Orwell’s phrase, we will continue to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. That the rest of the world is also in the grip of fantasies of its own should not be a source of comfort. It makes the price of inhabiting delusions higher. As Bhartrihari warned, “Thirst is never quenched by the water of a mirage; it only intensifies suffering.”One can only hope that India does not spend another year chasing illusions. Happy New Year.The writer is a contributing editor at The Indian Express