The media, if not the country, has been saturated with coverage of the speeches by Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi over the past couple of weeks. NaMo vs RaGa, to use the print media's shorthand (less damning than "Pappu vs Feku" of cyberland), has supposedly set the stage for the coming "big fight". Privileged but callow youth vs tried and tested administrator; or well-intentioned idealist vs hard-core communalist; the possible play-offs are many and varied. All heart but no head, was how one listener at CII characterised Mr Gandhi, whereas many would say the opposite about Mr Modi. This binary reading of a complex, multi-party, multi-state contest that looms over the horizon is the media at its simplifying worst. But if you wanted to understand the many inadequacies of both Mr Gandhi and Mr Modi, and to get an elevated sense of what politics and public action can be about, you had to listen to Bill Clinton speaking to an invited audience in Mumbai on Wednesday.
Like Rahul Gandhi, Mr Clinton laid out his operative first principles. Enormous wealth accumulation by the successful is threatened by growing inequality and an unsustainable level of joblessness. Also, winner-take-all capitalism simply does not work. Finally, sustainability is a very real challenge. But unlike Rahul, who for 75 minutes could not get beyond the first gear of broad approaches, Mr Clinton in the hour allotted to him was also master of the detail, and offered specific action points - reflective more of Mr Modi's own command of detail. But unlike Mr Modi, Mr Clinton was benign and humanistic, with none of the latent anger or menace that is visible underneath Mr Modi's somewhat forced amiability of the moment. Also missing was the coarseness of thought and language that both Mr Modi and his shrill critics in an alarmed Congress have resorted to.
Mr Clinton's speech, hosted by Kotak Mahindra Bank (which, I should mention, owns a significant stake in Business Standard) was unfortunately not televised, so the national audience has been deprived of the opportunity for a first-hand comparison with the speeches of our putative leaders. The former US president picked more relevant anecdotes than the mostly pointless ones that Mr Gandhi chose for his CII gambit; and his comments on China were many orbits removed from Mr Gandhi's sadly infantile anecdotes on the subject. He addressed tricky questions (why are Democrat presidents less friendly to India than Republican ones?) with an analytical frankness that contrasted with Mr Modi's economy with the full truth when he spoke of the state governor blocking women's reservation in Gujarat. There were similarities too, of course; like a concern for the underdog that reflected Mr Gandhi's focus on the bottom of the pyramid, and a search for practical solutions that echoed Mr Modi's approaches in Gujarat.
It is of course unfair to both Mr Modi and Mr Gandhi to expect them to measure up to Mr Clinton, arguably the most skilful politician of the past half-century, and someone who has now gone beyond the power of office to acquire real personal influence - which he seems to use effortlessly to reach out to moneybags and decision makers for raising funds and launching programmes for everything from tackling AIDS (using cheap drugs from Indian producers) to providing disaster relief, as after the Gujarat earthquake. My takeaway was that he was closer to Mr Gandhi in his willingness to not allow personal goals to get in the way of defining priorities, whereas Mr Modi was a closer parallel when it came to his command of facts and programme details. A combination of the best of the two would not be a bad idea, but that's wishing.
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