Game Changers

Game Changers



Portnoy’s Complaint author Philip Roth once said, “memories of the past are not memories of facts, but memories of your imaginings of the facts”. That is why no two people quite agree on an eye-witness account.

And, that, at best, is how the world goes forward, believing in facsimiles and fantasies, because it is the belief itself, and not the factual about it, that makes everything real.

Then again, maybe it is a fusion of fact and fantasy that makes for the United States going into their presidential election on November 4th. We can clearly see a charismatic front-runner candidate, all but elected, except for the notorious “Bradley Effect” or because of an Act of God.

The Bradley Effect is named after long-term Black Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. It alludes to White voters who ultimately do not vote for a Black candidate, even though they say they will.

But Barack Obama, even if he is denied the presidency, has already made history. He is the first African-American presidential candidate. He is also the most successful US presidential fundraiser; with the best primary season organisation of all time.

Obama is an eloquent visionary and change agent. And he is resolutely inclusive at the same time. There are echoes of an uncanny amalgam about him. We can hear reverberations of the messianic “I have a dream” persona of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. And also, we hear a voice from another time, that flat Boston-accented Harvard privilege shining through. We can hear the “idealistic realism,” of an “ask not what your country can do for you…” John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

With Philip Roth to guide us, we can see JFK morphing into Obama, a similar poetry inspiring our souls afresh, during another cold 20th January 2009 Washington inauguration.

Having said this, there is, of course, no nostalgic recourse, no place, or time, or indeed, patience, in 2008, to replay the Sixties.

But still, a mantle, skipping backwards some 45 years, ignoring the Clinton and Carter years in between, clearly has been passed on to a man who walks and talks legacy. Perhaps this is because Obama talks change also, using his merit and hard earned privilege to promise a return to governance for the people and not just the rich.

Barack Obama walks purposefully, with the spring of youth in his step, like a man on his way to redeem a very Nehruvian pledge. A redemption that is, yes, also faintly Socialist, but in America today, that means Centrist. It is a Centrism that will also come, ironically, after being preceded, in the last days of George W Bush’s Republican administration, with nationalisations and bail-outs that no Left Wing government could have faulted.

But Obama’s mission as a Black man will be to redeem a pledge, made not just by King and JFK as they gave wings to the Civil Rights Movement. It is also to fulfil the dream of Abraham Lincoln, and the blood of thousands who died in the American Civil War.

Barack Obama is a “transformational figure” on his way to deliver on a promise that will ignite a Future calling out to be advanced, if not perfected. It is a Future of a young nation reaching maturity. If he succeeds, Obama will not only transform the face of America, but that of its friends and enemies, in sum, the potential and destiny of a much globalised world grown “small”.

And for us, in India, never given an inch by any Democrat President since JFK, it is nevertheless time to applaud the success of a man that will be good for America, healing its rifts, and putting it back on its economic feet. Because only then, it is plain to see, can the rest of us, in turn, realise our own hopes and dreams.

We should understand all the more because India too is crying out for a Game Changer. The old, oft trotted out rhetoric of a faked secularism has played out its course. It is now riddled with contradictions, corroded by anger, and shamed by betrayal.

But the rescue does not lie in a hundred regional aspirations contending in a morass of chaos, or the pornographic feeding upon “minority grievance”. Or, even, on the spewings of Liberal intellectuals that delight in sedition in the name of equity and justice.

And, as is often the case, the solution is here and in plain sight. But, in an evolutionary context, it will have to play out; in not One, but Two Acts; just as it did in America between the Sixties Civil Rights movement and today.

Our First Act is already over a decade old, and featured a pioneering Mr.LK Advani who exposed the face of “pseudo-secularism” with his Ram Rath Yatra and its aftermath. He catapulted his party to power, putting the nuts and bolts numbers at the disposal of his friend and senior, Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

It needs to be said, now, before the dust of electoral battle obscures such markers, that it was mainly the vision of Shri Lal Krishna Advani which dragged the Indian Right, kicking and screaming in embarrassment, owing to a kind of Bradley Effect of our own, outing us, from the margins of history to which we had been relegated. It was Advani who established, and gave respectability to, the Saffron Flag and the Lotus symbol in the national consciousness.

Perhaps Mr. Advani’s time has finally come and he will be rewarded with his own turn to lead this country, fed up, as it is, with a lax security regime. But, while poor security, and our stalled, unnecessarily bound and gagged economic growth, may well place the NDA in power again, the true historical significance of Mr. Advani’s long innings in national politics goes much deeper.

Mr. Advani has been instrumental in reinstating Hindutva, and the unapologetically militarist and free-market legacies, of great men, nearly forgotten, like Shri Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Shri C Rajagopalachari, and the greatly neglected, even maligned, Shri Subhash Chandra Bose.

But the Second Act is clearly yet to come. Mr. Advani’s natural successor in spirit Narendra Modi, is not prime minister yet. But he is already a third term chief minister. He is phenomenally successful and undeniably runs the most business-friendly administration of any state of the Indian Union. He is tough on terrorism and committed to promoting prosperity. Is this then the correct template for India going forward? And even if it is, do we need some more time, and alas, more blood on the streets, to admit it to ourselves first?

We will, of course, see for ourselves when Act Two actually opens. Meanwhile, it is enough to realise what makes for a Game Changer. It is certainly more than mere leadership. It is something grander, something epochal, and needs some people to pave the way; and yet others to stand aside.

(1,050 words)

October 20th 2008
Gautam Mukherjee

Published in The Pioneer on November 1, 2008 as "India needs a game changer" and online at www.dailypioneer.com and archived there under "columnists".