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 Come now and let us reason together.” Whether or not one believes in a Lord or His words, this simple biblical injunction from the book of Isaiah, with its reference to both reason and reciprocity, is as good as any a description of what genuine leadership in democracy should seek to inculcate. Barack Obama’s justly celebrated Philadelphia speech on race relations in America was remarkable less for what it said about race than for what it implied about genuine leadership. The context was this. Senator Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, had made incendiary statements about race in America. But rather than take an easy way out, Obama criticised the pastor’s specific comments, yet did not disown a man who had an extraordinary influence on his life. He used the occasion to have a frank conversation, not just about race relations but deep-seated fears and apprehensions. The speech was a reminder of all that politics in India has come to lack.

What was remarkable about the speech was the dignity it granted its audience. It assumed that its audience was capable of exercising a moral delicacy and making fine distinctions. It strove for clarity, rather than simplicity, because in the end clarity is more accessible than feigned simplicity. I happened to be rereading Jawaharlal Nehru’s speeches. He did often worry about our penchant for being emotional, woolly-minded and given to simple abstractions. But he seldom infantilised his audience. He made errors of judgment. But his reasoning was never abridged by a slogan, his understanding of complex causes never distorted by the desire to simply blame someone, and self-reflection went hand in hand with historical reflection.

Obama also did something remarkable. He took on the whole history of race relations, yet was not trapped in it. He referred to history in order to overcome it, he transcended tradition without making all of tradition despicable, and openly talked about conflict in order to find a way out of it. Just try and remember the last time any leader in India deigned to have a frank conversation about caste that managed to simultaneously do four things: do sincere justice to the enormity of the indignity caste still imposes on Indian society, give an account of the complex changes that have modified the forms of caste conflict, candidly discuss the interventions that might genuinely help overcome the deprivations of caste rather than pretend to do so, and find a discourse that does not confuse raw power play with justice.

The fact that a prominent farmers leader can still use a caste slur, the fact that it took the threat of 10,000 armed personnel to make him apologise is a symptom of a society whose leaders have closed off all spaces to overcome the past. Our politicians are interested more in opportunistically using the currency of indignity and oppression than in overcoming it. They have cheapened it by eliding the relevant distinction between all kinds groups. The very simplistic manner in which they have dealt with the burden of caste has, in turn, produced a corrosive scepticism that makes any constructive conversation about caste impossible. It lets both perpetrators off the hook and offers no solace to victims. And so the politics of recrimination will continue. Apologies are usually a means of overcoming the past. I doubt if Tikait’s will be an instrument of healing the rift between Scheduled Castes and Jats. It is more likely to be another moment in the raw power play to which we seem condemned by our politicians not speaking the truth about caste and the means to overcome it. Is it because we cannot handle the truth or because our politicians refuse to speak it?

Obama’s speech was also remarkable because it exemplified the virtue of loyalty. This is not an uncritical loyalty, but it is a loyalty that acknowledged that one ought not to abandon those with whom one has deep and irrevocable connections for the sake of political expediency. It condemned serious mistakes in people close to him without disowning the debts he owed to those relationships. But underlying it was the thought that his audience was capable of a kind of maturity. Again, with due deference to the difference in context and the stakes, this was in sharp contrast with Advani’s attempt to both justify the NDA’s decision on Kandahar and distance himself from his close associates. His revelations appeared not so much in the service of truth but as an attempt to hedge his bets. He was not so much trusting the people, but attempting to play both sides of the argument.

It is corrosive for democratic politics to assume that it can, in the long run, do without a culture of articulacy. Our politics is now beset by two corrosive sins: a culture of avoidance, where those in leadership positions shy away from confronting difficult issues; and a culture of simple-mindedness, where attributing blame passes off as causal analysis, no matter what the issue: communalism, caste, foreign policy, inflation. Both sides of the biblical injunction, reason and togetherness, are important for democratic politics. Reason, because a politics that resists an understanding of the complex forces that shape society is a politics bound for self-destruction. Being argumentative is not the same thing as engaging in reason. Togetherness, because, in a society devoid of any sense of itself as sharing the same fate, citizens will not think it important to care for or justify their positions to each other.

There is a growing distrust of politicians, not simply because they are venial or small-minded. It stems from the fact that they are increasingly heaping the worst indignity on the citizens by infantilising them, as if what we deserve is not reasoned argument, but silence, baby talk, amusing diversions with occasional dollops of noblesse oblige on part of politicians. Politicians and administrators will unconsciously still invoke the thought that the people do not have the capacity to understand; or that people are interested more in spectacle than debate, or that people are so trapped by their identities that they cannot move beyond them. A politics where politicians infantilise the public on principle will produce a citizenry that is insolent in practice.