US elections are like a wedding in the big landlord’s family in our village. It makes for a spectacle, designed to keep the entire village busy for some time. As rituals do, it brings out tensions and fissures within that family. As affairs of powerful families do, it has some fallouts for everyone, including us.
But as village elders know, we must not forget that this is not a wedding in our family. A vicarious partisanship — pro-Trump or pro-Harris — is not just misplaced, it is undignified. The foolhardiness of “Begane ki shadi me Abdulla diwana” may be redeemed by its romanticism in some other context. But in relation to a powerful family, this response is cringeworthy.
A village elder might also remind us that the US is not even our neighbour. Our sense of proximity to them is largely imagined. So is our exaggerated anxiety about what a Donald Trump or Harris administration can mean for us. That Kamala Harris shares her first name with my mother cannot make me forget that what matters most to this Kamala in relating to my country is the cold logic of geopolitics and GDP. For us, a charming Obama was not fundamentally different from a boorish Trump. For us, the POTUS is a POTUS. So, keeping a distance from this contest is not a bad idea. As they say, “hathi se na dushmani bhali, na dosti”.
This is not the family of our priests either. They may have tried preaching and exporting democracy to the world, but thanks to Trump, that posture looks more comic than ever before. Democracy in the US may be anything else, but it is no model........