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Washington D.C. - Last week’s election of the 47 years old Junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama, to the all-powerful office of President of the United States of America, marking a decisive generational and sociological shift in American politics, has received more attention and admiration worldwide than any election has ever done in the history of mankind. Bravo United States!
Well-wishers of the United States, like the world’s 26 million Sikhs (3 million FREE in the diaspora and 23 million captive in India) rightly feel that this momentous event will give a new and positive turn to real democracy, not only in America but, also in rest of the world, specially in India. Today the admiring world is in awe of the American democracy and the power of the American voter to bring change. Compared to the poor show routinely put up by corrupt Indian politicians, the Obama performance was pure magic. The 2008 U.S. election has lessons to offer to other countries, particularly the world’s largest demoNcracy, caste-ridden India, and it’s billion plus inhabitants, a majority of them unwashed like the 200 million Untouchables, 150 million Tribals, and other marginalized minorities like the 150 million Muslims, 25 million Christians and 23 million Sikhs. The 2008 US election was not just the visual impact of a picture perfect ‘black’ family making their way to the historical White House. It is the manner in which Americans have risen over differences of race, class, religion and region to vote for the first black president (44th) in their history. All Sikhs believe the American electorate has voted for a better country, a better future and a better world and the phenomenon deserves the world’s salute and admiration.
Barack Hussein Obama, the President-elect, was born on August 4, 1961, at the Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a member of the Luo tribe, from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya, and Ann Dunham, a white American from Wichita, Kansas of mainly English, Irish and smaller amounts of German descent. Obama’s parents met in 1960 while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his Kenyan father was a foreign student. The couple married February 2, 1961; they separated when Obama was two years old and subsequently divorced in 1964. Obama’s father returned to Kenya and saw his son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982. As a child Obama lived in Indonesia for five years with his mother and stepfather and has a half-sister in Kenya. His middle name is “Hussein” (after his late Kenyan father) but Obama is a Christian. He’s also a serious Scrabble player and in his spare time, he plays basketball. Obama is a graduate of Columbia College of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003, won a primary victory in March 2004, and was elected to the Senate in November 2004. Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. The first African-American president-elect, Barack Hussein Obama is also only the fifth African-American senator who represented the State of Illinois in the US Senate. Has authored or cosponsored 579 bills in Washington. As a state senator, Barack Hussein Obama, sponsored 820 laws for Illinois. That’s 1,399 bills in all.
President-elect Barack Hussein Obama has also authored two books, ‘Dreams of My Father,’ (2005) and ‘Audacity of Hope,’ (2008). Obama met his wife, Michelle Robinson, in June 1989 when he was employed as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. Assigned for three months as Obama’s adviser at the firm, Robinson joined him at group social functions, but declined his initial offers to date. They began dating later that summer, became engaged in 1991, and were married on October 3, 1992. The couple’s first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998, followed by a second daughter, Natasha (“Sasha”) in 2001. In December 2007, Money magazine estimated the Obama family’s net worth at $1.3 million. Their 2007 tax return showed a household income of $4.2 million—up from about $1 million in 2006 and $1.6 million in 2005—mostly from sales of his books.
On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois. The choice of the announcement site was symbolic because it was also where the 16th US President, Abraham Lincoln (1809 to 1865) delivered his historic “House Divided” speech in 1858. Throughout the campaign, Obama emphasized the issues of rapidly ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care, at one point identifying these as his top three priorities. On June 3, 2008, he was named the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party after a 17- month-long primary campaign. On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama, defeated John McCain and became the first African American to be elected President of the United States. Born in Hawaii, Obama will be the first U.S. President born outside the contiguous United States. He also will be fifth youngest President at a date of accession and the second since President Lincoln whose primary political base was Illinois. On November 4, 2008, President-elect Obama delivered his victory speech, before a crowd of hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Chicago. People danced in the streets, joyously honked car horns and beat drums. The mood here in Washington DC was festive: crowds gathered outside the White House well past midnight on Election Day (November 4) and happily posed for pictures with a cardboard cutout of Obama. In his hometown of Chicago, Obama told supporters, “change has come to America”. It is but natural that none felt the change to be more cathartic than the African-Americans, for whom the memories of America’s past segregation forms a haunted backdrop to existing injustices. For them, the night of Nov 4-5, 2008, will symbolize a veritable revolution in a country where blacks were bought and sold as slaves and kept apart from whites. They were the ‘untouchables’ of America. Now, they have one of theirs in the White House. America has changed for the better... What about the state of the Indian state, the Indian demoNcracy? Indians who take a complacent view of India’s achievements as a democracy have been quick to point out that India has a prime minister from a religious minority (Sikhs) well before the US elected a president from a racial minority. But the comparison is shallow and misleading. India’s Sikh prime minister has secured office without winning any popular election. Mr. Manmohan Singh is Prime minister of India because the insecure Italian widow of the late Prime minister Rajiv Gandhi of the ‘Nehru dynasty’ (Mrs. Sonia Maino Gandhi) feels secure that he will surrender the ‘prime minister’s throne’ to her effeminate son, Rahul Gandhi, the ‘pretender’, when called upon to do so. Obviously, Indian political life is now so corrupt that winning a popular election is becoming increasingly difficult for men such as he. One has to be a ‘thug’ to survive! Obama’s strength is not simply that he is a person of exceptional intellectual and moral caliber, but that he has convinced the American people that it is good for them to have a person like him as their president, not because of his race but in spite of it.
Today in the Indian demoNcracy in comparison it is becoming increasingly difficult – nay impossible - to secure electoral support (and, indeed, political support in general) without bribing, intimidating or appealing to the loyalties of caste and community. The fact that this is done in the name of equality and justice does not make it any less subversive of the liberal values on which India’s republican constitution is based. Distinctions and inequalities between castes and communities exist in India just as they exist between races and ethnic groups in the US. But, India has chosen a different political approach to address it’s problems from the one that has achieved such dramatic success in the recent American elections. Senator John McCain conceded defeat early on November 4, 2008, and made a speech that re-affirmed that dignity and fair play are both alive and kicking as essential ingredients in democratic politics in the US. He called upon his supporters to assist the new president in his endeavour to bring change despite differences on policy and other issues. He hailed the mandate as being ‘historic’.
An excellent Op-Ed by one Malvika Singh in The Telegraph newspaper of Kolkotta, .......... yesterday gives a ‘bird’s eye view’ of what would have happened in India if a similar situation (like Sen. McCain’s) had emerged in India. He wrote that, “abuse and accusations would have taken centre stage, re-polls would have been demanded, guns would have been brandished, threats would have been hurled across podiums and on the small screen, parliamentary sessions would have been boycotted and adjourned, money wasted, actions stalled. Sen. Barack Obama’s speech at the celebratory rally was hugely inspiring. What he said there affected and impressed people around the globe. It was as though planet earth had shared a victory because we all know this ‘change’ could well alter the future course of action and partnerships between all countries in our fast shrinking world. Consensus could become a tangible reality. Collective redressal of international problems and disputes, between races, faiths, classes and creeds, could become the acceptable, democratic instrument for accelerating peaceful solutions to tricky, volatile and painful schisms. Cut to India — when did we last hear an awe-inspiring national address? What we get from our leaders is predictable rhetorical jargon and divisive politics, encouraged and endorsed by supreme silence on contentious issues. Parochial positions are never combated. Monsters are created and used to pander to vote-banks of one type or another. No decisive retort or action happens. Instead, a strategy of let-sleeping-dogs-lie overwhelms us. India gasps for breath to live another day as it is manipulated, used, taken for granted, mauled and betrayed by the elected representatives and their minions.” Malvika Singh concludes his excellent article in The Telegraph newspaper with a one liner, which says a book about the ‘state of the Indian state’ with a truism about the Indian demoNcracy which reads:- “Our politicians rule us (Indians) as ruthlessly as our colonizers did.”
Readers may recall that this column has been providing backgrounders, from time to time on the state of the the world’s largest oligarchic, caste-ridden, dynastic Indian demoNcracy. Over two years ago, on June 28, 2006, the Khalistan Calling headlined ........“A ‘bird’s eye view’ of the Indian demoNcracy, a democracy for the rich and the elite, from three different angles,” says it all.
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