The golden rule is: Never try to assess the long-term significance of an event just when it happens. It takes time for the consequences to form, and the closer you are to when something happens, the more likely it is that you will misread those consequences.
So, I might be compiling this list too soon, but these, to me, were the most politically significant events of 2025.
Operation Sindoor
By a long way, Operation Sindoor is the most significant event of the year for several reasons. First, because it was set off by a bloody terrorist attack—the kind we believed would no longer be attempted. Two, because we did what we usually do in these situations. We exercised our right to self-defence and bombed terror factories in Pakistan.
Only, this time, not everything went according to plan. While our strikes were successful and terror compounds were destroyed, we found ourselves fighting a new kind of war waged mainly with missiles and drones. Our traditional strengths—the Army and the Navy—were hardly relied on. So, some of our advantages were nullified. Even then, we still won. But we were handicapped by the loss of some Air Force planes and by the intervention of Donald Trump.
Most defence experts reckon that if the war had gone on a day longer, we would have wreaked serious damage on Pakistan. Because we were stopped too early, Pakistan was able to claim some kind of victory and hide behind Trump’ s goodwill.
There will be many long-term consequences from Operation Sindoor. For a start, it’s not clear how much it has deterred Pakistan. Moreover, it introduced a new kind of war that we need to clearly establish our superiority in.
And as long as Donald Trump plays fairy godmother to Pakistan, we have to learn how to operate in a different global environment.
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The Modi-Trump relationship
People forget now how well Narendra Modi and Barack Obama got along. In many ways, it was Obama who introduced Modi to the global community and worked to erase memories of the awkwardness created when the US initially refused Modi a visa.
Instead, the Hindutva faithful quickly embraced Donald Trump and treated him like the Great White Sahib, mainly because he had called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, which endeared him to the bigots among Modi’s supporters.
Worse still, the government’s pet channels created a mythology about how much Trump respected Modi and how the chemistry between them was so intense that China and Pakistan were frightened of this new alliance.
All of this was highly overstated and often entirely fictional. But what’s worrying is that our foreign policy establishment clearly bought into the myth.
When Trump emerged as a pal and protector of Pakistan, there was genuine shock, surprise and horror in Delhi. Since then, the US has consistently discriminated against India’s interests, and we have had no choice but to remain patient.
And patience might help: Trump has been known to overturn policies on a whim. But till that happens, we are in very dangerous waters.
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The Assembly election victories
When the BJP failed to get an overall majority at the last General Election, the Opposition claimed that the Modi era was ending. It’s clear now that this was way too premature. All the available electoral evidence suggests that the opposite is true. The Opposition lost two states it should have won (Haryana and Maharashtra), and in Bihar, where the BJP coalition was reported to be in trouble, it actually won by a landslide.
This has enormous consequences because the sense that Narendra Modi will be here forever changes many attitudes. Civil servants, judges, police, journalists, and media barons take the line that if this is the future, then they might as well cheer it along. And so the Centre’s job becomes even easier; nobody objects to anything any longer.
The Election Commission
When the history of this era is written, it will be remembered as the first time the Election Commission became embroiled in so many controversies. It began to be seen less as a Constitutional body and more as a political body. Certainly, the current Chief Election Commissioner does not have the stature or respect that most of his predecessors commanded.
It could well be, as the government claims, that losers tend to blame the referee and that the Opposition’s complaints are unfounded.
But it will take a while for the Commission’s reputation to recover.
Also read: India wasn’t always like this. Things have never been as bad as they are today
Welfare schemes
Though we don’t often see it that way, the Modi regime is the most welfare-oriented government that India has ever seen. BJP state governments have regularised handouts to women and disadvantaged sections so completely that I doubt if any future governments will have the will to stop them.
There is a curious backstory here. In 2004, when the UPA came to power, Sonia Gandhi argued that the market was not an efficient means of transferring the gains of liberalisation to the poor. She persuaded Manmohan Singh to institute schemes (of which NREGA was the most famous)that directly transferred money to the poor.
At the time, these moves were not popular. The BJP opposed some of them. Pink papers wrote long articles on how direct transfers to the poor distorted the system.
Modi has been smart enough to grab the welfare idea and run with it, vastly expanding its scope from the UPA’s version.
It helps the BJP win elections, and given the current mood of the media, the pink papers no longer oppose the schemes. Instead, they call them masterstrokes.
The Middle Class
The middle class was Narendra Modi’s original constituency. The BJP still has its support, but discontentment and disillusionment are growing. The major issue is that the middle class believed that Modi would put them at the centre of New India as the engine of growth. Along with Modi, they would turn India into a superpower.
Modi still values his middle class support, but he has accepted the inevitable: The middle class does not win you elections, so it’s better to focus on the poor, who are more grateful for everything you give them.
The other advantage of focusing on the poor is that they have low expectations. The middle class, Modi supporters will tell you, want too much: Lower taxes, for instance, a halt to the decline of the plummeting rupee, etc.
This is only partly true. The main reason for middle class anger is not taxation. It is poor governance. They object to high taxes only because, every day, the papers are full of stories about lavish weddings thrown by politicians and the hundreds of crores discovered in the homes of mid to low-level bureaucrats.
The middle class had signed up for a clean India. But that’s not what they got. They signed up for a ‘minimum government’. But in fact, rarely has there been more of an Inspector Raj—with corrupt and arrogant officers holding decent people to ransom.
And governance is at a low. The government allowed a single airline to operate 65 per cent of India’s flights. When that airline refused to hire enough pilots, making a collapse inevitable, nobody in government noticed. Passengers went through hell, but no senior functionary has been sacked or held accountable.
It’s unfair to blame Delhi’s pollution problem on a single government. But what is indisputable is that when the air is poisoning the lungs of our children, we expect more from the BJP, which runs the central and state governments and the municipality. When we get no action, it leads us to wonder: Are these people not concerned? Or are they just duffers who don’t know what to do?
The future
I don’t think Narendra Modi is going anywhere. And in the next year, he should finally restore some normalcy to India-US relations, put Pakistan back where it belongs, re-arm our Armed Forces and try to pay a little more attention to domestic governance. Those are the obvious things to do.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)