This week Kamala Harris became the first woman who is Black and brown to become a candidate for President of the United States. The atmosphere at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago resonated with the electric excitement of unlikely journeys and new possibilities, Made in America. But for Democrats, after the soaring rhetoric is over, there is no pretending that the fight that lies ahead will be anything but brutish and bitter.
And in that lies Kamala Harris’s greatest challenge: She is reaching out to her party’s voters, using her remarkable personal arc. But in a polarised and divided country, can she also reach across the aisle?
That question is one that travels across continents, and echoes in another sharply polarised and divided polity. In India, too, after an extraordinary election — not before one, as in America — it can be asked of the new government, and of the new Opposition: Can they step over and across the issues that divide, and create the room to tackle them, by speaking to concerns shared by those who may not agree with them politically, who may not vote, or may not have voted, for their party or leader? The test, essentially, is this: Can they address their neighbours, not just their supporters?
Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris, her husband Doug Emhoff, Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and his wife Gwen stand onstage on Day 4 of the Democratic National Convention. (Reuters)
In a time when politicians and algorithms step into the spaces between citizens and stretch them wider, and when they nudge people to caricature and troll each other, the can-you-speak-to-your-neighbour test is an important one, in India as it is in America.
The neighbour, an endangered neighbourliness, was a recurring motif in the main speeches at the convention. Perhaps it is because the Democrats can sense the opportunity to pitch the tent wider with a candidate like Kamala Harris, whose biography is evocative of America’s most encompassing promise — as Harris put it, that “anything is possible, nothing is out of reach” — and a running mate like Tim Walz or “Coach Walz”, whose career started in that most non-political and non-polarising of all spaces, in a classroom, teaching kids, and coaching them on the football field.
Going ahead, however, whether or not they can weave it into a winning campaign that can draw in those who feel left out, and who connect more to Trump’s idea of a resentful nation-under-siege, could arguably depend on whether they make the mistake of treating their neighbours who are Trump voters with the disdain with which they treat Trump. That caution, that warning, was heard again and again that night at the convention in Chicago — in the speech of former president Bill Clinton, for instance. “I urge you to talk to your neighbours. I urge you to meet people where they are. I urge you not to demean them… Treat them with respect, just the way you’d like them to treat you”, Clinton said.
He drew a line, not between those who vote for Trump and those who vote against him, but between Trump and the People. The next time you hear Trump, “don’t count out the lies. Count the Is — his vendettas, his vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies”, he said.
Barack Obama also called attention, with his special eloquence, to what unites the nation, despite the conspiracy theories and divisions on issues as fundamental as women’s reproductive freedom. “If we talk to our friends, if we listen to our neighbours… We’ve all got our blind spots and prejudices… We need to listen to the concerns of those who don’t agree with us, are not ready to vote for our candidate, and learn something in the process”. Americans, he said, are united by common spaces created by celebrations of sporting successes, by laughter around the kitchen table, by hopes that their children will go places and do things they could not have imagined for themselves.
But when politics becomes a contest in which the only way to win is to “scold and shame and out-yell each other, regular folk just tune out”, said Obama.
And Tim Walz spoke feelingly of “what it takes to be a good neighbour”, to the “family down the road…” who “may not think like you, or pray like you, or love like you do”
Of course, the sincerity of all the Democrats’ talk about creating and nurturing spaces for neighbours who agree to disagree is still to be tested in the electoral campaign that is just lifting off the ground in America. In India, however, it is still to be framed as a pressing challenge.
Here, after a bitterly contested election that has delivered a fractured verdict, the Prime Minister speaks from the ramparts of Red Fort about the enemy within — the “people who cannot digest India’s progress… There is no dearth of people having such a perverse mindset. The nation must be wary of such people”. And the Leader of Opposition, despite all his rhetoric of “mohabbat ki dukaan (creating spaces for love)” during the campaign, continues to play and perform to the gallery on his own side of the political divide, showing none of the daring or empathy that is needed to mend fences with neighbours who disagree.
Till next time,
Vandita
