Bush is not Clinton; Singh is not Sen

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George Bush for Bharat Ratna! The Congress Party's official spokesman floated this balloon publicly in Delhi, so it may well come true. It may be the Congress's idea of honouring Bush. But it will also dishonour the people of India in the eyes of the world. What's more, it will dishonour the people of the United States who have persistently declared their strong disapproval of the man. How cut off from public opinion can the Congress be.

Fortunately, G.B. himself is saying nothing, doing nothing these days. That's not the American style. Bill Clinton is still in the centre of things. Jimmy Carter even got a Nobel Prize for his global activities.

What ex-Presidents usually do is write their memoirs. Clinton wrote a rather indifferent one, but got 10 to 12 million dollars for his effort. Then he hit the highly paying speech circuit. For one of those "leadership summits" in Delhi he was paid $150,000 by an Indian publishing group. Ronald Reagan made $2 million from a single speaking tour of Japan.

In America there are professional agents who arrange these book and speech deals. They have assessed that there is no demand for Bush in these fields. Remember, on retirement his most memorable statement was that when he looked into the mirror the next morning, he was going to like what he saw. Who wants to hear or read such self-justifying drivel? (Except Congress patriots in Delhi.)

Not that Bush is going to be hard up. He is a wealthy man anyway. George Washington was wealthy enough to decline his annual salary of $25,000 (600,000 in today's terms). John Kennedy donated all his remuneration to charities.

But being able to earn well after retirement is nowadays a matter of prestige. Bush can still make a few millions through what is called private equity consultancy. This is a system by which crony capitalists pay politicians sumptuously for opening doors and providing connections. Henry Kissinger is still making good money through this route.

Indian politicians are denied any of these recognised means of making money. That may be why kickbacks have become their preferred route. That may also be why none of them retires. The only Prime Minister after Nehru who tried to become an author was P.V.Narasimha Rao. But he made no great impact with his "Insider" tales. The likes of Morarji Desai wrote empty memoirs which people did not even become aware of.

This may be linked to the generally uneducated status of our politicians. Even in the Nehru family, Jawaharlal was an exception. From Motilal to Indira to Rajiv to Sanjay, nobody finished a university course and nobody was intellectually inclined. Narasimha Rao was a scholar. But the politician in him crippled the intellectual in him.

Manmohan Singh, highly educated and highly intellectual, has the capacity to write a few books that would be valuable historically. But he won't. The politician in him has grown so much that he wouldn't dream of rocking any boat, let alone Soniaji's. Our only hopes lie with the Amartya Sens who are free of political dependence and therefore give us some food for our souls.

Obama: Do we expect too much?

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No American President in living memory has generated the kind of international excitement that Barak Obama has. We can almost say that he has assumed office not as President of the United States of America but as President of the United States of the World.

This is risky for him. When expectations are so high and so many, can any human being meet them? When the world is in such a complicated mess, can any one person solve even half its problems? When hopes are too high, disappointments come too fast. Will the world’s honeymoon with this new kind of leader prove to be just that – a honeymoon?

Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt are the two American presidents with whom Obama has already been compared. There is good reason for that. In their time, Lincoln and Roosevelt faced unprecedented challenges and rose to the occasion. People wanted a healing leadership after the civil war that devastated America; Lincoln provided it. People wanted visionary initiatives to save the country from the catastrophe of the Great Depression; Roosevelt provided them.

Obama faces both these challenges. Americans today want a unifier and healer after the terribly divisive war years of George Bush. They also want a saviour who would lift America from the mounting misery of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In other words, Obama has to be a Lincoln and a Roosevelt rolled into one.

As if that’s not hard enough, he has to be more. The problems Lincoln and Roosevelt faced were entirely domestic. Bush’s America has erased the boundaries between domestic and foreign. Solving American problems today is not separated from solving world problems, and vice versa. Which means that Obama faces challenges no government leader in modern history has faced.

Will he succeed? To put the question in sharper perspective: Will he be superhuman enough to succeed? The short answer is that if anyone can succeed, he will. But that may not be saying much. In today’s chaotic, anarchistic, violent, lawless, madhouse of a world, can anyone succeed?
Two words summed up both the campaign and the presidential profile of Obama – Change and Hope. These two simple, monosyllabic words must be the reason that all countries in the world joined America in its excitement over Obama. For every country in the world wants change – from the politics of corruption, the economy of the rich and poor, the social systems of discrimination. And every country welcomes the slightest glimmer of hope because hoping for a better tomorrow has become the only way to survive.

Obama, unlike any other leader in our times, has held up the message of Change and Hope in a credible manner. People in Japan and South Africa, in Indonesia and Brazil think that Obama’s success will somehow be their success. This is not entirely a reaction to the Bush years of deception and cruelty. It is rooted in the fact that Obama is a fresh breeze, a man whose sincerity is as impressive as his intellectual talents.

He still has to work under an entrenched system of lobbies, political pressure groups and manipulative power centres such as the Jewish caucus and the evangelicals. His climb will certainly be steep. But he will have one incomparable strength: the backing of Americans, and the people of the world, in greater measure than any American President before. To wish him success is to wish ourselves success.