The election of Barack Obama to the office of the president of the United States of America has received more attention worldwide than any election has ever done in history. Well-wishers of the US rightly feel that this momentous event will give a new and positive turn to democracy in America. It also has lessons to offer to other countries, and particularly India.

The significance of Obama’s success lies not only in his being the first black person to have won the election but also in the manner in which he won it. Obama won his way to the White House through a long and gruelling political campaign in which he steadfastly avoided recourse to identity politics or to the strategy of seeking political support on the basis of race and ethnicity. Nobody could be more deeply aware than he of the injustice and oppression suffered for generations by the blacks at the hands of the whites. But he did not invoke that suffering for rallying electoral support, although it is true that proportionately more blacks than whites voted for him. He won his victory by appealing to what is best in the American electorate and not what is worst in it.

In the televised speech the president-elect gave immediately after his victory, he reminded his audience of the long and arduous journey that began with the civil rights movement in the 1950s. What was achieved on November 4, 2008 would not have been possible without a change of attitude and orientation among significant sections of the American population of all colours and all persuasions. No change in the political order can be significant or lasting without some corresponding change in civil society.

It will be naïve to expect Obama’s spectacular electoral victory or the cumulative weight of the civil rights movement to wipe away all the divisions and inequalities of race in America. Race exists and will continue to bedevil social life for a long time. But that does not mean that individual effort can make no headway against the current of racial prejudice. One does not have to deny the existence of such prejudice in order to give up making political use of it in the name of collective reparation and social justice.

Indians who take a complacent view of India’s achievements as a democracy have been quick to point out that we had a prime minister from a religious minority well before the US elected a president from a racial minority. But the comparison is shallow and misleading. Despite his many admirable qualities of head and heart, our Sikh prime minister has secured office without winning any popular election. Our political life is now so arranged that winning a popular election is becoming increasingly difficult for men such as he. Obama’s strength is not simply that he is a person of exceptional intellectual and moral calibre, but that he has convinced the American people that it is good for them to have a person like him as their president, not because of his race but in spite of it.

Today in India it is becoming increasingly difficult to secure electoral support and, indeed, political support in general, without appealing to the loyalties of caste and community. The fact that this is done in the name of equality and justice does not make it any less subversive of the liberal values on which our republican constitution is based. No doubt distinctions and inequalities between castes and communities exist in India just as they exist between races and ethnic groups in the US. But we have chosen a different political approach to address our problems from the one that has achieved such dramatic success in the recent American elections. The longer we pursue the approach of identity politics the more insistent the claims for collective reparation will become.

Our Constitution was designed to make the citizen and not the community the ultimate bearer of rights and responsibilities. Those who designed it were not unaware of the strength of collective identities in India, but they hoped that a liberal Constitution would help to weaken those identities, or at least prevent them from gaining further strength. Those hopes appear to have been frustrated to a large extent by the political events of the last three decades. Caste in India, which appeared to be on its way out just after independence, has been given a new lease of life by the political process.

B.R. Ambedkar had said in the Constituent Assembly, “It is wrong for the majority to deny the existence of minorities. It is equally wrong for minorities to perpetuate themselves.” Because the political leadership of both the majority and the minorities has decided that the safest way of protecting and promoting the interests of their voters is through recourse to identity politics, each caste and each community has nurtured its own set of grievances. These grievances are now habitually articulated through demands for representation by means of quotas in every sphere of public life. What I had described in these columns 10 years ago as a “checkerboard of quotas” has now become the most conspicuous feature of our political landscape.

Addressing social disparities through the adoption of quotas in education and employment has become a part of the common sense of contemporary Indian politics. Whatever one may think privately about the wisdom of this kind of approach, one cannot question it openly either in our legislatures or in any of our major political parties. It is not that there are no social disparities, including acute ones, in the US. But it is not a part of the political commonsense there to believe that these disparities cannot be remedied except through quotas. It is doubtful that Barack Obama would have achieved his magnificent success if he had made himself a prisoner of the kind of political commonsense that prevails in India.

It is true that race and caste are not one and the same thing. But both blacks and Dalits have endured extreme forms of oppression and exclusion. It will be difficult to rate on any meaningful scale the sufferings endured by Dalits on the one hand and blacks on the other, and to draw a balance-sheet without bias or prejudice. It is not self-evident that a hundred years ago the blacks had an easier time in the southern parts of the US than socially stigmatized groups anywhere in the world, including India. Yet they are now producing leaders who can look to the future without claiming a bonus for their sufferings in the past.

The Dalits are not the only ones who ask for special treatment by the State as compensation for their past deficits. Some of the claimants belong to locally or even regionally dominant castes. Our political environment encourages their leaders to believe that they should put in their claims as well, and that if they do not, they may be abandoned by their followers. This is a very different kind of political environment from the one which has led a ‘skinny kid with a funny name’ — and a black at that — to fight successfully for the highest political office in the US.