Comment

The US presidential race has thrown up something very significant. For the first time ever, there is an Afro-American as the official presidential nominee; a woman had almost made it. The significance lies not in the fact that a minority candidate is suddenly so close to occupying the Oval Office, but because of the manner in which he has made it. He did it the normal way. No one did him a favour by showing him the gates to the White House.

So what’s the big deal? Indians may ask smugly. Till last year, members of three different minority communities — Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, and Abdul Kalam — held the three most powerful posts in the country. Women have held the top posts in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka many times — so we are one-up on the West.

Or are we? In my view, it is a complete misreading of reality. The women, men and others who made it to the top in the Indian sub-continent were holding office largely because they were parts of dynasties, or because they were placed there as a form of tokenism. The many Muslim presidents of India were offered the jobs not because everybody thought they were qualified for it, but because the parties in power wanted to make a political statement by putting them there. This is not to say they were not qualified — Zakir Hussain and Abdul Kalam were achievers in their own right — but they were not chosen for that reason.

But Obama signals the real coming of age of the US electorate. It has taken the US almost 150 years after the abolition of slavery to consider electing an Afro-Asian as president. But the event denotes true progress in terms of equality. In all societies, there is a wide gap — running into generations, not years — between the legal adoption of an emancipatory idea and its widespread acceptance by the population. Obama’s election is an indication that Americans are now willing to cross that Rubicon as a nation and not just through the statute book.

To cross the race bar, America had to dump its first potential woman candidate for president — my preferred choice. But rest assured, Hillary’s defeat will spur a million American women to aim for the sky. I am willing to bet that the next decade will definitely produce a woman president.

So what’s the lesson in all this for India? Three things. One, our political parties, corporate organisations and people must look beyond tokenism and work towards empowering the traditionally disadvantaged. Two, and this is where I disagree with people who want to reach equality through quotas — we need an enabling environment for all people to develop to their fullest and not soul-killing, paternalistic legislation. The poor, the discriminated and the disadvantaged don’t need favours; they only need the handicaps to growth removed. I have been a vociferous opponent of the UPA government’s attempts to curry favour with Muslims by attempting quota-like initiatives. Muslims will actually lose from this attempt to give them a crutch when they can walk. A half-century of quotas for the SC/ST has done little to improve their status. Few upper class people think that Dalits deserve the jobs they get, and discrimination is getting further aggravated by intellectual contempt for them. Obama will become president because the American people think he is the right man for the job, not because people want to see an Afro-American in the White House. The best, and only, way to help the underprivileged is to invest in their education and careers; gifting them jobs they are not yet fit for is demeaning and counter-productive.

Three, we need not be too hard on ourselves for failing to eradicate caste or gender prejudices. If America took 150 years to accept an Afro-Asian president, India will leave the worst aspects of caste and religious bigotry behind sooner than you think. We should have our first Dalit head of government within the next 10 years. And it need not be Mayawati.

Email: r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net