On May 26, the Narendra Modi government completed eight years in power, and three years of its second term. This means that four or five months are all that remain before a series of elections of varying stakes pushes aside other themes to the margin of political gaze. Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh are slated for assembly elections at the end of this year, followed by Karnataka next summer, and Rajasthan, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Mizoram next winter. Beyond the coming autumn, then, a wide array of political actors, journalists and analysts will be too occupied with elections to give due space to other constituents of political discourse.
The squeezed timeframe and the pecking order of themes in political reporting and commentary have gradually come to constitute a new periodicity. There are a slew of factors shaping this reconfiguration.
