Indians, more than Americans, need a leader who has 21st century ideas - on education, healthcare and, most of all, inclusiveness.
Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential poll involves us all, one way or another. That’s why his campaign and what he claims to stand for captivated the world — and in some of its most unexpected corners. Along with pictures of children in Delhi’s elite schools carrying Obama posters, there were glimpses of Siddhi tribals in Gujarat wildly cheering the Democratic leader’s win. Few us have heard of the Siddhis but these are descendants of the people who were brought from Sudan some ten centuries ago as slaves or soldiers for India’s erstwhile rulers and now add to the patchwork of the country’s myriad races, slaves no longer but still shackled by a number of factors.
So, Indians of all hues and races, it appears, are thrilled with Obama’s spectacular victory. However, all this admiration leaves one with a distinctly uneasy feeling, specially by the commentaries on the triumph of the first Black man to occupy the White Office. Although written in laudatory, almost gushing, tones, there is a thinly veiled air of condescension in them — that the US had finally made amends for its long record of discrimination against African Americans and expatiated its national guilt by voting for a man who is black-skinned. There was no hint in any of this that India has much farther to go than the US has.
Perhaps this is the right time to remind ourselves of some sordid figures to puncture our sense of well-being on how we are dealing with discrimination and how far we are from achieving an Obama-like liberation. In this day and age when India has blazoned its proficiency in most things high-tech — from enviable software skills to manufacturing sophisticated missiles and setting our sights on the moon — the country still employs one million people to carry human excrement on their heads for a living. Yes, manual scavenging is still rampant in this country and it’s all done by the dalits. One million is the government figure; unofficial estimates put it closer to 1.5 million.
Another everyday reality of discrimination that is glossed over: every day two dalits are killed, three dalit women are raped while every 18 minutes a dalit is assaulted. And once again a caveat: these are figures culled by the National Crime Records Bureau from registered cases; twice this figure, it is estimated, goes unreported. India may have long crossed the legal barriers against discrimination but not the psychological barriers that the US, for the most part, has crossed.
Given our record of discrimination against huge swathes of society — dalits, tribal folk, religious minorities — and a polity that is becoming even more fractured, the Obama phenomenon calls for some serious introspection here. Did the colour of the Illinois senator’s skin matter at all because of his message of hope and his clearly defined plans to set right inequities over a wide spectrum of public policy?
India desperately needs an Obama of its own, a leader who will focus on the critical issues that are fragmenting its plural society and offer healing and solutions. Over the past year, the discourse has become violent with hate erupting into barbarism of the Middle Ages. Instead of trying to douse the anger and bring sanity into the discussion, politicians have been fanning the flames. If Indians can pause for a moment to look at how much they have regressed in the past year — and will regress further as elections loom closer — they need to demand an Obama agenda on at least three issues.
First, inclusion. This is a priority as successive vote bank agendas have pitted more and more Indians against each other. The multitude of the unorganised sector workers, forest dwellers, small farmers, the dispossessed, the lower castes, the minorities all need to be made part of an Indian dream if, indeed, there can be one. So far not a single party, either from the right or the Left has articulated anything remotely inspiring, much less something that would grab the imagination of the one billion Indians as Obama has with his countrymen. Will India be able to throw up a leader who can “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long”?
Second (and this follows from the first), education. More than 61 years after independence, India’s politicians are still shying away a Right to Education Bill that will ensure some modicum of schooling for children between 6 and 14 years. A whittled-down version of the Bill which has been lying in cold store for two years, will now come up in Parliament while close to 11 million children are out of school, and many times that figure are dropping after the fifth grade. If there is one issue that is never part of the political rhetoric of India it is education, although poverty, which thrives on the lack of education, is an overworked slogan.
Obama has formulated some simple but innovative measures to make the education system competitive in the global knowledge economy. Perhaps, our politicians, and specially the one heading the Ministry of Human Resources Development, could spare a moment to look at the Illinois senator’s blueprint (21st century schools for a 21st century economy) to remedy what he termed the “visibly separate and painfully unequal” schooling system. Surely he was speaking about India’s schools where the apartheid is brazen and unrepentant?
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And finally healthcare. The very first promise that Obama made in his campaign was the promise of a universal healthcare plan, a plan that not only guarantees coverage for every American, but also slashes the costs for the poor. In the US, 45 million are uninsured; in India the figure of those without access to public healthcare or any kind of insurance is at least 15 times that figure.
If the messy and high-cost American system can be sorted out, India can surely do better if the politicians apply their mind. But that would require the audacity of hope. Do we have it?