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Less than three weeks from now, an estimated five million people could descend on Washington, DC. January 20 is the day Barack Hussein Obamawill become the 44thpresident of the United States. It's been billed as a non-violent revolution. Much of the world outside the US is euphoric.
Obama's victory in the American presidential elections may be seen as one of the most seminal moments in world history, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. It's a paradigm shift in American history because a man from a community, which was excluded from the American dream till recently, is all set to move into the White House. Now, a dream is coming true for African-Americans.
But Obama is not just the first African-American president of the US, he has something of the world in him: his father was Kenyan; his mother was from Kansas; he did his early schooling at Jakarta in Indonesia; and then he moved to Honolulu in Hawaii. Post World war II, US presidents have all been solidly Atlanticist; for them the world hinged around the America-Europe axis. And the Bush presidency represented an America that effectively seceded from the world.
But Obama, who has been able to reach across divides of race, class, gender and and unify his country as never before, represents a diverse and global America. He could become the first truly multicultural US president.
Part of the excitement of Obama is that he has reconnected politics to the young and to youthful idealism, curing them of the cynicism and apathy that had prevented young people from engaging with public issues.
Riding on a consistent and eloquent message of change he polled 68% of the under-30 votes against 30%for Republican nominee John McCain, the highest proportion of the youth vote gathered by any presidential candidate since such counts have been kept.
The campaign that drove Obama to power was also, in part, a youth movement. And it used to revolutionary effect new media such as e-mail, text messaging and social networking sites. Obama utilised them to bypass established political machines of the day and reach out to grassroots activists and youth, demonstrating the long-awaited democratising power of the Internet. Starting out as the least well-connected man in Washington he raised a record $650 million in campaign funds, with about half collected in donations of less than $200 from a massive online drive.
There are two prominent, contrasting images of America abroad. One is that of a bullying superpower that undertakes bellicose military adventures abroad, epitomised by Iraq. The other is that of a land of hope and opportunity, where merit and hard work matter for much more than ethnic background, kinship or old-boys network connections. For people who welcome the passage from a Bush to an Obama administration, it looks as if the second image is getting vindicated over the first. It also marks the coming to power of a post-Cold War, post-baby boomer generation.
What are the implications for South Asia? The region has been a Cold War battlefield and previous American administrations have tended to view it through the Cold War lens, which involved excessive reliance on the Pakistani military as well as hostility with Iran. Under Bush the terror war has gone very badly which has hurt Indian interests, even as the Bush administration concluded an epochal nuclear deal with India.
But Obama clearly sees Pakistan and Afghanistan as the frontline of the terror war and plans to surge US troops by 30,000 in an effort to stabilise Afghanistan. The staging of the 26/11 assault on Mumbai, along with attacks on NATO supply lines passing through Peshawar, could be a riposte to Obama's plans. But he has been unwavering, describing safe havens for terrorists in South Asia as the single most important threat to the American people.
By normalising ties with Iran and making Pakistan a normal country, an Obama presidency could be transformative for South Asia. If he really acts on global warming, as he has promised to, that would be an added bonus.
