And saints do not win elections
A second term in office is dangerous if there is no third term. It is like entering a casino with plastic money. A prime minister or president has no personal stake in the game. There is of course the duty towards good governance, and national interest, but that fire which stokes a leader’s instincts has become ash. Politics is a human business, and human beings need the zeal inspired by ambition. Only saints are content with moral purpose alone, and saints do not win elections.
The two largest democracies of the world, India and America, are both suffering from the second-term syndrome. Washington worries about the strange aloofness that has descended upon Barack Obama, and the indifference that is driving his signature decisions into disrepair.
Obama has not become arrogant; he was arrogant to start with. He is probably just bored. His great battles were over with his re-election, and he does not quite know how to handle the meandering journey through a downward swamp. A quagmire oozing with the pride of victory, and heavy with the drudge of complacency is an invitation to mistakes, errors of judgment, and indifference to consequence.
Dr Manmohan Singh was not blocked by India’s constitution; he could have sought a third term. He was stymied by the jump-start ambitions of Rahul Gandhi, the heir who is sometimes here, sometimes there, and often nowhere. Dr Singh was, in essence, given the responsibility of creating the conditions that would elect Rahul Gandhi as the next prime minister. He did his best. But a mentor cannot help a protégé beyond a very limited point. If you want the medal, you have to do the heavy lifting yourself.
But for Dr Singh and Obama, history beckons. Both, perhaps wearied by the complicated demands of an often fruitless domestic agenda, sought a place in the books through an audacious gamble in foreign policy. Dr Singh attempted nothing less than peace with Pakistan, an objective that has eluded visionary prime ministers like Jawaharlal Nehru and Atal Behari Vajpayee. Like them, Dr Singh believed that goodwill was good enough. It never is.
India and Pakistan are locked not in a geographical dispute, but in an ideological war over the present and future of the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan believes in the two-nation theory, conceived in the conviction that Hindus and Muslims cannot cooperate as equals.
That epic delusion slips repeatedly into its equations with India. Dr Singh began his second term dramatically, with a gesture to Pakistan that was as unprecedented as it was unwarranted, conceding the possibility of Indian involvement in Baluchistan. He got no return on such risky investment. Islamabad continues to provide pelf and protection to a mastermind of the Mumbai terror attack, Hafiz Saeed, who gets government security at his public rallies where the main theme is aggression against India. But Dr Singh was also stumped by his own Congress party, which became apprehensive that Rahul Gandhi might have to suffer any backlash within Indian public opinion.
Over the last four decades, Iran has become to America what Pakistan is to India. Obama is in his Nixon moment. Richard Nixon recognized that history would be kinder to him than journalism if he could reverse the absurdity of America’s stagnant attitude towards Maoist China. His China manoeuvre shifted the balance of economic and strategic power in ways neither Nixon nor Mao could have foreseen when they cracked the glacier in 1970.
Obama wants an equally transformative coup in America’s relations with Iran, a regional power that is far more durable than its detractors thought. If there is a deal and that deal survives the acid attacks inevitable along the long road ahead, the strategic map of Asia will be altered beyond recognition, and in ways that no one has yet begun to articulate. From Delhi’s perspective, America’s spatial dependence on Pakistan will weaken, disturbing a basic foundation of the America-Pakistan relationship.
Iran will also be a more reliable partner than Pakistan in the continuing confrontation against militias of the Sunni Jihad, who believe that after defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan they have now delivered a death blow to the mighty Americans. They want to turn Afghanistan and Pakistan into the epicentre of an offensive against India, and China, which has absorbed Muslim Sinkiang into its territory. 2014, when most American troops return home, is not an end but only another beginning.
But Obama has a problem: every Nixon needs a Henry Kissinger. The birth of any new era requires a midwife with an exceptional grasp of the world order, the imagination to conduct negotiations with a tough enemy, and the blessed virtue of silence. This was Dr Singh’s dilemma as well.
A casino has its rules. If you are not playing for money, you can always lose something more precious. Your reputation.
Mobashar Jawed Akbar is a leading Indian journalist and author. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Sunday Guardian. He has also served as Editorial Director of India Today.