Seize The Moment

Governance  | 12 November 2010  | print

We are not waiting for a Mahatma. There won’t be another. But we need our own version of Barack Obama

All that grumbling about the security surrounding Barack Obama’s visit seems silly now. Was it all worthwhile? Yes; if only for each of these four unique events: Obama’s message at the memorial at the Taj, the visit to Mani Bhavan, the Town Hall style meeting at my old alma mater, St Xavier’s College, and the address to Parliament.

At each, we saw an articulate, intelligent, direct and decent man acutely aware of his own beginnings and progression; a man with cause, commitment and vision. At St Xavier’s, he fielded questions head-on, never falling back on meaningless cant. Some of the questions were very hard: on Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Gandhi. There’s a full transcript online, and it shows even in cold print the warmth and respect with which he addressed his young audience, never once being condescending. Our politicians should learn from this man.

His address to Parliament was the kind of thing that you just have to applaud, even if you take out all the encomia to India (and forget the useless sniping from the moribund BJP and its allies). Perhaps the most dramatic passage is this:

“In your lives, you have overcome odds that might have overwhelmed a lesser country. In just decades, you have achieved progress and development that took other nations centuries. You are now assuming your rightful place as a leader among nations. Your parents and grandparents imagined this. Your children and grandchildren will look back on this. But only this generation of Indians can seize the possibilities of the moment.”

Bundled into this is a recognition of what India’s progression to independence involved, its trajectory since and an acknowledgement India today has an opportunity that no other country does. Therefore: carpe diem. Seize the moment.

But can we? Hours after he left, Maharashtra—fast careening to becoming the most corrupt state in the Republic—had its Chief Minister sacked over the Adarsh scam, and another Maharashtra born-and-bred, Suresh Kalmadi, fired from his Congress party post.

One Chavan is replaced with another Chavan; and they both share at this: both the outgoing Chavan and the incoming Chavan are political inheritors; as is the new Deputy Chief Minister. This is the tragedy of our nation; in a country of over a billion people there is not a single politician of Obama’s age (he turns 50 next August) who reflects and mirrors our views, our thoughts, our aspirations, our ideals, one who shares our dreams.

The old Bombay Rent Act of 1947, a wartime provision intended to temporarily protect tenants and which was continued because it was politically expedient, had a completely bizarre section that effectively allowed a tenant’s family to ‘inherit’ the tenancy, lumping the hapless landlord for eternity with these descendants. That section is now so much an established right that it has infected our thinking. All our prominent GenNext politicians are 5(11)(c) politicians; all have inherited political power. Not one is original or independently qualified. We now no longer even seek originality or independence. Political office is an inheritable tenancy.

Contrast this with the political figures of India at Independence. In his new book, Makers of Modern India, Ramachandra Guha notes that the “leading politicians who made India were also its leading political thinkers”; especially Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar, all of whom were prolific writers. Guha describes Nehru as a thinking politician without parallel, with a “deep interest in history … political ideas and ideologies”. This is certainly true of Obama. It is untrue of any politician in India. Guha provides a stunning illustration. In 1958, E.M. Forster concluded that if Voltaire was to be reborn and write a letter on the fate of mankind, the only head of state to whom such a letter could be written was Nehru. This feeling was shared at a far more intimate and personal level. I remember my grandmother, a truly formidable and imperious lady and uncommonly flinty-eyed when it came to public figures, once telling me that there was only one man at whose bidding she would, without thought, throw herself before his motor car: Nehru. Today, except our PM, there’s not a politician we would not gladly fling in front of our own motor cars.

In some ways Obama is to my generation what JFK was to an earlier one (but without the surrounding murkiness) in that he represents a sense of hope and real possibility, an ideological balance, and demonstrates a profound concern for and engagement with people. He is clearly a man shaped by a shared history—Gandhi was in his mind and on his wall long before this visit—and he is both interested in it and respectful of it.

So when he says that this generation of politicians must seize the possibilities of the moment it is as much a warning as a call to arms. But if we are to live up to this potential, we need original men and women, public people with qualifications, a record of service, with an ideology, concerned about the evident imbalances in our state; people to whom “seize the possibility of the moment” means something more than cash. We’re not waiting for a Mahatma. There won’t be another. But we do need our own version of Barack Obama.