US Sutra | Passage to America: Society divided, polity fragmented

Forty-four years ago, when I came to the United States as a graduate student, I found myself at the fag end of a hectic election year. Jimmy Carter, the incumbent and the Democratic presidential nominee, was losing. His Republican rival? A former bit part Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan. While Carter was well-known and well-liked in India, no one had even heard of Reagan.

He was, it was clear, still very much an actor, mouthing lines written by others. He always read from a script. But his message was clear and crisp. He was photogenic, personable, handsome, well-built, and always well-dressed. He smiled easily, spoke convincingly. So effective was he as the spokesman and figurehead of the American right, that he soon earned the sobriquet of “the great communicator”. The intelligentsia did not take him seriously, but he went on to win, with a thumping majority, 489 electoral votes to the merely 49 that Carter garnered.

Carter was perceived as a good man, a sincere and committed Democrat from the South. Yet, his home state Georgia was one of the very few that he managed to win, along with Minnesota, West Virginia, and Rhode Island. Everywhere else, it was a clean sweep for the Republicans, a swathe of red across the length and breadth of the vast continental country. How and why did this huge, conservative reset happen?

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The answer, perhaps, lay outside the United States. On 4 November, 1979, after the Islamic revolution in Iran earlier that year, the radical student wing, called the Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, seized the US Embassy in Tehran. They took hostage its 53 occupants, many of them diplomats. All of these Americans were held captive for 444 days. Every day, their captivity was flashed on all the major television channels.

I was an avid follower of CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite. Those were the years of extremely influential and powerful TV anchors such as Dan Rather, who succeeded Cronkite, Peter Jennings on ABC, and Tom Brokaw on NBC. These three channels competed fiercely for viewers and TRPs. But CBS was ahead. Before ending the evening news, Cronkite would tell his viewers the exact number of days American hostages remained incarcerated. It was a glaring reminder of the helplessness and humiliation of the world’s greatest superpower in a distant part of the world, whose name most Americans mispronounced as “Airan”.

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It was clear much before November that Carter would lose. He was seen as too nice, too soft, too weak. Americans preferred, even prized, strong leaders, who maintained American dominance in the world. Reagan conveyed a sense of purpose. Within a couple of months of his election, on 20 January, 1981, on the very day of his inauguration, he brought the hostages back from Iran. He emerged as a hero in the eyes of the republic.

Soon, he also began attacking the Soviet Union, America’s principal opponent on the world stage, and the only other superpower. He called it “The evil empire”. He and his UK counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, also a conservative, did much to hasten the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union. During Reagan’s second term, Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev began opening up and reforming the USSR with glasnost and perestroika. Though the USSR was officially dissolved much later, on Christmas Day in 1991, it was the two-term Reagan administration that took most of the credit.

There was a third candidate in the 1980 presidential election, former Republican but now independent candidate, Walter Anderson. Like Bernie Sanders more recently, he attracted a sizeable section of the young and educated populace, going on to poll a not insignificant 6 per cent of the vote share. Anderson was a University of Illinois alum, where I was studying. His support base on campus was very strong. Most students of this large public university offered him unstinted help. I had no voting rights, but attended one of his rallies on campus and left quite inspired.

The Indian population in the US was much smaller, not to speak less influential, then. I was clearly marked as a foreigner. Wherever I went, the “locals”, especially the older ones, would ask me what my plans were after I got my PhD. When I said I intended to go back to India, they were visibly pleased. It seemed as if they didn’t want outsiders taking away jobs. One lady I met in “Acres of Books”, my favourite second-hand bookstore, right down the road from the English building on Wright St, even said to me rather bluntly, “We don’t want too many of you settling down here. I believe you should go back to your own country.” I retorted, “Of course. I want nothing more than to return to serve my own country.”

That is exactly what happened. I did give the best years of my life, my entire working career almost, to Bharat. Coming back to America feels good now. I have the satisfaction of seeing India cross many barriers and milestones. I trust that Bharat Rising, to invoke the title of Utpal Kumar’s bestselling book, is now irreversible.

As to the United States, where it is election time again, the entire nation is in the throes of an unprecedented crisis. Republicans and Democrats, presidential candidates not excepted, are attacking each other in ways and words inconceivable in earlier times. It is a divided polity and fragmented society. In the Trump-Biden contest, it is not clear who will win. Not so much because Biden may score an upset, but because of several as yet intangibles and imponderables.

But for these, await my next column.

The author is Director of Education, Access Health Care Physicians LLC, Spring Hill, Florida. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.