Bush emerged a winner from 9/11

Early last year on a long drive from the Washington airport to my hotel at the city centre, my African-American cab driver kept me engaged w...

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Early last year on a long drive from the Washington airport to my hotel at the city centre, my African-American cab driver kept me engaged with his views on the new president, George Bush. ‘‘He is not my president,’’ he had thundered angrily. He was, of course, reflecting the views of the African-American community, which traditionally votes Democrat.

The driver’s diatribe against Bush came as no surprise. Most ethnic minorities here had voted for the Democrat and were not pleased with the results of the just concluded elections. But what did tickle me was this man’s complete lack of identification with the highest office in America. In one’s adult life in India one very often did not vote for the party or prime minister in power, yet one identified with the exalted chair he held.

This was before 9/11 happened. September 11 changed Bush’s image completely. And the difference could not be more stark. Last week, while driving through the crowded streets of Boston, an African-American cab driver said to me, ‘‘We are so glad we did not have Gore as our president. The Democrats are too decent to deal with the Osama louts. These terrorists understand just one language — bombs — and Bush knows that language best.’’

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His sadistic pleasure at the bombardment of Afghanistan revolted me just as his assessment of the Republicans surprised me. Such is the change in the US, post 9/11. The Democrat’s political mud slinging last week, alleging that Bush knew about the terrorist threats, did not produce the desired results.

That Bush has succeeded in not just whipping up American nationalism but making it inclusive and not pitched at an internal ‘other’ has earned him widespread support. Most revealing is the soaring popularity he enjoys among the Muslim ethnic minorities in the country. The general view in such quarters is that Bush has handled the post 9/11 situations very well.

Travelling in the US while the dastardly anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat were still on, it was easy to go soft on Bush. Given the magnitude of devastation on 9/11, law and order was firmly under control. A few sporadic acts of lynching and murder were reported but they were condemned in no uncertain words by the president himself and, within a few months, the culprits brought to trial and punished. Bush made an all out effort, I was told, to issue statements clarifying his stand on Islam, and also visited mosques to send out the message of whom he was really targetting.

Compare this with the direction in which Vajpayee’s anti-terrorist (read anti-Muslim) campaign is going. Compare this also with his government’s mishandling of the unprecedented violence in Gujarat and the statements of New Delhi on the issue. Every statement the prime minister made only intensified the hurt and anger of the Muslim community rather than assuaged their anguish. His speech at Goa was, of course, a first, for any prime minister of independent India.

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The nationalism Vajpayee has whipped post 9/11 is most self-destructive. Like the nationalism of the nation states of Europe, it is exclusive and pitched against the enemy within: India’s large Muslim minority.

On my flight back to New Delhi I kept wondering if it is the fate of the third world to emerge out of global wars in self destructive ways, while the US, where it all began, has used 9/11 to cement further its social fabric.