For a government that promises the country a future of pacific uniformity, it's downfall lies in its inability to recognise that the bridge that always burns behind us is time.

Meanwhile, a year of bumps, bumptiousness and coccyxdinitis is tagging us, and its epilogue was the anniversary fantandum at New Delhi's ASI-protected Hauz Khas (for which historical artisanry - that, unlike governments, can never be remodelled - was vandalised). The highlight of the celebration, a narrative drama of Indian (sic) civilisation, was an imposing exercise in intellectual infirmity. Everything was bracketed between the Mahabharata and the Lahore jamboree, and Nehru's "Tryst with Destiny" speech - inarguably one of the finest pieces of statehood wind ever trumpeted - featured as a tiny punctuation burp.

Then again, civilisation (however much we may cavil at the Western semiotic bias of the noun) is for the civilised. People-burning - brides, widows, witches or Christians - is not civilised. It is of no prudential import that the Prime Minister revoked his offer to make next year the Year of Christ and converted it, incomprehensibly, into the Year of Sanskrit, or that the government hasn't said a word with regard to Mother Teresa's offtrack sanctification (when governments the world over inundate the eminently businesslike Vatican with missives whenever one of their own is being tested in the spiritual forensic lab for the halo), or that the global Christian fraternity is in a brown fug over what it perceives - and who is to blame them? - as barbarians ramming the Pearly Gates, or that we have been placed behind a diplomatic flyscreen by a world that sees Kosovo and Kashmir in the same light. Join the UN Security Council or the Nuclear 5? Like inviting Hannibal the Cannibal to your coronation dinner. Our boorishness is compounded in throwing open the issue to "national debate", as if offal to swine: but there's little that the ghost of Staines and those of his little sons can do against the spectre of the Bajrang Dal. Savonarola is in bliss.

The simplest of thesauruses has these synonyms for "revoke": repeal, cancel, annul, abolish, nullify, withdraw, retract, recant, rescind….The litany of the coalition government's "rollbacks", past, present and future, embraces all of them, like a Mae West with a pinhole in it: the economic boasting and proposals, the telephone hike, the Southern belle jar, the cases against her, the spat with the President's office, the Central government's celebrations for the end of the millennium (rescinded because only the Gregorian calendar says it is)…and, believe me, Clinton's final gift to America before his term is over: our ratification of the CTBT.

I can't think of another government in the political history of the world that was reduced into a vegetative state by a vegetable (except for, well, the Irish potato famine, and that went on to create the New World that is holding the CTBT out at us). There is any amount of vilification that onions attract, all odious: stripped like onions, not knowing their onions, onion tears…By a quirk of semantics, or perhaps because all cliches are innately just, they seem to fit the present government like a widow's veil.

After all is said and done, the only possible future the BJP can ensure itself is funereal. Will it stretch out its full term? Bets off. Will Vajpayee have a future? I am reminded of the words of William Inge: "Experience proves that none is so cruel as the disillusioned sentimentalist." Will the BJP have a future? Undoubtedly. Political reprehensibility has its role in the study of comparative ethics. Will Jayalalitha have a role in India's future? Remember Mae West with a pinhole…?

As for the other accomplishments - this government is using events thusly to cattleprod India into a strange new millennium: the previous one.