Santosh Desai in City City Bang Bang - The Times of India, Nov 17
It was almost as if democracy itself heaved a sigh of relief when Obama, armed with a perversely strange name and an eclectic gene pool, won the US elections. The world outside was clear about who the Americans needed to vote for but in spite of commanding leads in the opinion polls, wasn’t confident enough about the ability of the American public to do what the rest of the world believed was the staggeringly obvious thing to do. As it turns out, we needn’t have been anxious. Obama has won convincingly and democracy seems to have been redeemed. Against the run of play, Obama has emerged, a sprig out of season, representing purity and hope in a time of escalating recrimination. And already, we have commentators paying tribute to the American system and bemoaning its Indian counterpart for not producing its own Obama.
Perhaps, a deeper scrutiny is called for here. While there is no doubt that the election of a black man to the highest office in the most powerful country in the world is a momentous event, it would help to ask why exactly is it so? Isn’t this the most basic promise that the idea of democracy holds out for us? That every individual in the system, no matter where he or she comes from, has the same chance of being elected as any other? After two hundred and thirty-odd years of democracy in the US, why is it that an event as ordinary as this, is in truth such a historic one?
And lest we forget, the minority label of black might have won this time, but it did so at the cost of another minority label — Muslim. Obama could win because he convinced America that he was not Muslim and not because it didn’t matter what religion he was. For the world’s most powerful democracy to accept in a matter-offact way that being a Muslim carries with it the automatic presumption of being a terrorist, is a stinging repudiation of all that democracy holds dear.
The problem lies perhaps with the idea of democracy itself. It took such a long time to elect a black man to the highest office because the people empowered with the right to make this choice did so with all their biases intact. We still don’t have a woman US President, for the same reason. Democracy is a noble idea in the hands of people who feel no compulsion to be so. Which is why we had eight years of George W Bush, a man who makes dribbling idiots look like prodigies. And very nearly had a woman who knows foreign policy by looking out of her window become the Vice-President of USA. Which is why, the US will never adopt gun control, in spite of the utter insanity of allowing lethal weaponry in the hands of all its citizens. And why it is possible that more and more American kids will grow up believing that evolution is just a theory on a par with something called Intelligent Design.
In a democracy, who can argue against the limitations that we as a people have in our own ideas of what is good for us? In India, we are seeing how political opportunism wins over democratic principle every time. The Congress does not oppose a Raj Thackeray for political gain, DMK supports the very LTTE that assassinated an Indian PM from the same party that it is now an ally of, the Indian Left pontificates about the freedom of speech but packs off Taslima Nasreen from Kolkata, the BJP tacitly supports acts of violence against Christian clergy — the list is endless. Given the fragmented nature of the Indian polity, it makes little electoral sense to stand on principle. Votes are garnered by a series of compromises knitted together to make a patchwork quilt of power.
Ruling any large collective requires the ability to trade off one group’s interests for another’s and deferring short-term gains for long-term ones. Increasingly, it appears that the process of getting elected substantially reduces one’s ability to make these choices. Democracy without its nobility of purpose is the rule by a crowd which not infrequently, turns into a mob. Obama’s success lies in winning in spite of the electoral process that has come to represent democracy.
He has won in spite of democracy, at least the version of democracy that is being practised today, and not because of it. The individual has won, not the system. It is time to cheer, but it is also time to reflect. In any case, Sarah Palin might well be back in 2012.
