If and if and if

Tuesday November 3, which is when the U.S. will choose its next president, lies twenty-nine days into the future as I type these lines. Given (a) the time required for counting ballots, including the millions mailed rather than dropped, (b) the time that courts will need to adjudicate likely challenges to the counting process, and (c) the complications of America’s “electoral college” system, the next president’s name may not be known for days if not weeks after the night of November 3. 

Adding to these uncertainties is (d) the unabated vigour of the Covid virus, and (e) Trump’s insistence that he must be satisfied over the election’s fairness before he will accept its result. An ominous hazard (f) joins the uncertainties: Trump’s impassioned supporters might not limit themselves to objecting verbally to an unwelcome result. 

However, if matters (a) to (f) all end satisfactorily, and if Joe Biden becomes the next American president, towards him will be directed the hopes and expectations of much of humanity. 

Inside the U.S. and beyond, this humanity, we all know, is deeply divided. Whether the question is nationalism versus human rights, or law-and-order versus free speech, or over a Trump here, a Modi there, or an Erdogan elsewhere, or something similar, the divide cuts deep inside families and countries. 

The division has made conversation harder even among close relatives. In politics, abuse has replaced debate. 

Most troublingly, we are ready to disbelieve everything said from the other side. Even so, when in his hospital Trump (he’s not the one I am rooting for) thanked God for his apparent recovery, I felt he was voicing a real feeling. True, he was voicing it in a carefully prepared video, and he has had years of practice selling himself to a TV camera. 

Yet there was no mistaking the genuineness of that expression of thanks to the Almighty. The sudden acquisition of Covid, some clearly challenging, and perhaps frightening, moments, and then the regaining of a sense of wellbeing appeared to stir him to gratitude. 

Let us admit that those whose politics we dislike are also human beings with hopes and fears. The presidential floor at Walter Reed is said to be grand and wonderfully equipped, but a hospital is a hospital, and staring alone at a ceiling cannot be a happy exercise, the more so when you know that your spouse is fighting an identical battle in another place miles away. 

This thought takes me to a wider one. How do we converse with those across the great political gulf? Applying the question to the Indian scene, I ask for ways in which those whose spirits are wounded by the government’s assaults on the lives and liberties of dissenters can nonetheless find some common ground with the regime’s supporters. 

There are those who cheer the astonishing court judgment that finds the 1992 Babri Mosque demolition to have been spontaneous, even when all of us recall what we saw happening before our eyes. Perhaps there are some who would even now hold that the Rama idols secretly inserted into the mosque in 1949 were divine and spontaneous manifestations. 

Alive and awake as I was during both events, I could never agree to either assessment, even if the Supreme Court had validated it, which it did not. And I would oppose policies based on such opinions. 

But I would not reject the humanity, no matter how flawed, of those making the false claims. For I know that the humanity of those on my side of the divide is also flawed, if in different ways. 

If matters (a) to (f) all end satisfactorily, and if Joe Biden becomes the next American president, he will have the fearsome responsibility of finding a common ground where sharply, bitterly, and at times violently divided Americans can come together, even if briefly and occasionally. 

Since so much of the world is experiencing an almost identical divide, how he discharges the responsibility will matter to more than Americans. 

If America gives Joe and Jill Biden the chance to stare at a White House ceiling, their desperate prayers will be joined by the nervous hopes of millions on the planet.