Comment

The landslide win of Barack Obama has prompted many people to ask: when will India have its Obama moment?

Mayawati, who thinks she has the first claim to India’s prime ministerial chair, was quick off the mark, “The victory of Obama has proved that people of deprived sections can also reach the pinnacle of power in a democratic set-up.”

True, but not quite true. Like others, she is getting a few issues mixed up here. First, the purpose of democracy is to get people to listen to various viewpoints and then decide who will rule them. They can choose to elect someone from a “deprived section” or they may not. If they don’t, it doesn’t mean Indian democracy is a sham.

Obama did not win merely because he was from a deprived section, but because he appealed to the entire spectrum of Americans — from the deprived to the not-so-deprived.

Second, Obama moments are not one-off events. While breaking the glass ceiling of the US presidency is a huge achievement for African-Americans, it actually has only symbolic value.

Obama is not about to reverse decades of discrimination in eight years, assuming he gets his two terms in office To break glass ceilings more than symbolically, African-Americans have to start achieving more across all spheres — at the workplace, in politics, in society. That is some distance away. In other words, Obama moments are about achievement, not entitlement.

Third, to break glass ceilings anywhere, you have to first break them in your own mind. Obama broke his when he campaigned not as an African-American seeking his quota of success, but as someone who is more competent than the rest.

He bested both Hillary Clinton and John McCain, two formidable challengers, both of whom would have made excellent presidents, too. Obama’s victory was the result of his decision to ask for the top job on the basis of merit.

He did not seek it as compensation for past victimisation of African-Americans. This is a far cry from Mayawati’s constant refrain of being a “Dalit ki beti,” which plays on the Hindu sense of guilt over casteism and untouchability.

Fourth, Obama moments call for a transformation from sectarian politics to something all-inclusive. Even African-Americans did not warm up to Obama before he managed to demonstrate his broader appeal to the White majority.

They knew that an Obama who stands on the race platform is unlikely to do their cause any good. To do anything for African-Americans, Obama has to work with the majority of Americans, and not just his own colour community. Contrast this with how narrow the appeal of our national leaders is: each one banks on caste, community or religious votes, or a combo thereof.

No one, barring possibly the Gandhi family and the Communists, can attract supporters across the spectrum. Today, with the Left losing its moral high ground in the quicksands of Singur and Nandigram, even that is proving untrue.

Mayawati may well make it as prime minister after the next hung parliament, but it will not be the equivalent of an Obama moment in Indian history. In the Indian electoral scene, where single-party domination has ended, it is possible to imagine almost anyone as prime minister in 2009 — Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad, Chandrababu Naidu, Jayalalitha, Sharad Pawar, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Sitaram Yechury, or even Ram Vilas Paswan, not to speak of Manmohan Singh and LK Advani. Mayawati has to jostle with this crowd for attention. Hardly an Obama option here.

The real point is that Obama moments come everywhere in small doses. When a Muslim businessman creates one of India’s most successful technology companies, it’s an Obama moment.

When a Dalit makes it to CEO rank, it is another Obama moment. If Dalits enter the workplace in large numbers without quotas, it’s an Obama revolution. If Mayawati can turn Uttar Pradesh into a well-administered state, she would have proved her point about Dalit competence. Obama moments are about delivering the goods, not symbolism and tokenism alone.
Email:r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net