Best of BS Opinion: The core must evolve before the moment passes

Timing is often the difference between renewal and decline. Reform done late delivers less than reform done in time. A government that waits too long to rethink policy runs into fiscal exhaustion. A political party that abandons its own strengths allows rivals to occupy that space. A brand that survives for decades does so not by freezing itself in the past, but by refreshing its meaning without losing its core.

 

R Jagannathan’s column, “Reform delayed is reform denied”, makes the argument most directly. India, he writes, has repeatedly missed reform buses — from manufacturing and labour to land, agriculture, education and health. The country liberalised only after an external crisis in 1991 — and even then it did not fully free factor markets or reform social sectors. The result was that India skipped much of the manufacturing revolution and moved into services, where state-created barriers were fewer. His warning is that delayed reform does not merely postpone gains; it changes the nature of what is still possible. Deregulation today remains necessary, but it will not create the same kind of manufacturing jobs that might have emerged three decades ago. The urgent reform space now lies in education, health and agriculture, where change must be explained to citizens rather than attempted by stealth.

 

 

Aditi Phadnis’ column, “Incumbency and its enemies”, takes the question of renewal to Himachal Pradesh. The Congress government under Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu faces fiscal stress, shrinking expenditure and growing restlessness ahead of next year’s Assembly election. The BJP  may have an advantage, especially after urban local-body results, but its leaders have not offered a clearly articulated alternative vision for the state. The column’s larger point is that anti-incumbency is not only about dissatisfaction with the ruling party. It is also about whether either side can bring fresh thinking to a state caught in recurring fiscal constraints.

 

Sandeep Goyal’s piece on “25 years of A R Rahman’s Airtel jingle” offers the more successful version of renewal. The tune has survived because Airtel kept the core notes but changed the context. It moved across caller tunes, campaigns, orchestral versions, regional adaptations and newer digital settings without losing its identity. The lesson is simple but hard to execute: Not everything should live unchanged for 25 years. Longevity comes from consistency plus evolution, not endless reinvention or lifeless repetition.

 

Shekhar Gupta’s “How Congress lost nationalism” applies that lesson to national politics. He argues that the Congress has ceded the language of nationalism to the BJP despite its own long history of hard national-security decisions under leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri to Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and P V Narasimha Rao. The party’s challenge is not to imitate Hindutva, but to rediscover a credible nationalist vocabulary that distinguishes the armed forces from the government of the day and offers voters a clear alternative.

 

Renewal, as we see across these pieces, rarely waits for those who postpone it. Whether in reform, politics or branding, the core must evolve before the moment passes.