Include me out

This US election has gripped the globe like never before, and Barack Obama’s victory is being treated as a world historic event and a Rorschach test — read into it what you will. The question being asked in India is: Who would a homegrown Obama be? The comparison does no favours to contenders, but it does show up the nature of our democracy, and its particular limitations.

While his race certainly mattered and the symbolic achievement of his victory must never be airbrushed out of the narrative, Obama was simply the Democrats’ best choice. His victory owes as much to his tremendous leadership skills, his luck, his resume, his team and running mate, a politically advantageous economic climate (to put it mildly) and his own “I’m the answer, what’s the question” chutzpah that won so much of his variegated support and so infuriated his opponents. But politicians like Mayawati, representing the opening up of the political power structure to long disadvantaged groups, do not seem to be able to transcend identity politics, and are forced to keep identification with narrowly defined vote banks. Mayawati may have expanded BSP’s support, but its creation myth and its radical appeal rest on it not being a mainstream umbrella party. So can the Congress and the BJP produce an Obama? Both remain stuck in a rut of patronage politics, where change takes years to ripple through. Rahul Gandhi might intermittently make vague pledges to restructure opportunities in the party; when tickets are announced, the sway of the geezers is unchallenged. Maybe a presidential system allows a single individual to embody the aspirations of a party in a way that parliamentary structures don’t permit, but what are the chances of a ground-level referendum generating a Dalit or Muslim contender at the helm of affairs of either party, even if s/he was fitted out with all the qualifications of an Obama?

Barack Obama might have been planning his presidency all his life, but he captured the national imagination as late as 2004, with his rousing speech at the Democratic

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Convention. Four years later, he is president. When he announced his candidacy, he was dismissed as the stuff of mere dreams but he swiftly and competently took over the

Democratic apparatus, infusing it with his own unprecedented grassroots support and prising open the Clintons’ grip on the party. If such a meteoric rise could occur in India, it would be change we’d have a hard time believing.