THE hurly-burly of American elections reminds me, like so many other elections, of the story of a pair of hooves. In the 1960s when the city of Lucknow was waking from its nawabi slumber and expanding across the River Gomti, a small tributary of the Ganges, residents had to use the desolate Monkey Bridge to get there. The story goes – and many a traveller would insist they had experienced it that the driver of the horse carriage they hired to take them across had a pair of hooves instead of hands.

This experience visited mostly the late-night travellers. The frightened passengers would usually, instinctively, jump off the carriage. In sheer panic they would run to the only other person they could spot in the dark and cold night. It was the roasted-peanut seller, all wrapped in a thick quilt to ward off the cold night. A small lamp flickered on the peanut heap to indicate he was open for business. Hearing out the harried traveller’s story, the peanut vendor would slowly pull out his own hands from the quilt, and guess what he had to show: a pair of hooves instead of hands. Of course there was little anyone could do after that than to run for their dear lives, that is if they hadn’t already fainted with fear. Whether the two were ghosts, if you believe in them, or mere confidence tricksters eyeing the passengers’ belongings will never be known because very often the luggage was left untouched.

A variant of the double whammy on the Monkey Bridge assumes a political dimension in elections such as the one we are witnessing in the United States. All the three candidates, the sole Republican and the two Democrats, showed a pair of hooves to so many of their naïve supporters just the other day, as they walked in procession, one by one, in slow motion and so purposefully, to the only pulpit that matters in American politics the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). They, all three of them, did earnest genuflection at the altar of the world’s most powerful ethnic lobby, their loud obeisance suffused with emotion and theatre. They left little doubt that come hell or high water the security of the hapless and perennially besieged nation of Israel was the most vital factor for them and everything else, including prospects of a nuclear conflagration flowing from their blind indulgence of AIPAC, was only secondary.

Take NBC’s story of Ayman abu Syrieh, the 45-year old grocer in the Old City of East Jerusalem. He was rivetted to the fate of Senator Obama. “Every time Obama was on TV, I asked everyone to be quiet, so I could listen to him. When he was talking, he represented hope for me and I believed that he would be the one to bring real peace between Palestinians and Israelis.”

But Syrieh’s feelings changed after Obama stressed his support for Israel in the AIPAC speech. “We were looking at him differently, from Bush and the others,” Syrieh, the grocer said. “We thought he would bring real peace to the Middle East. I have to be honest with you, I am shocked now.” If someone was counting on Hillary Clinton, because she is a woman and, therefore, more likely to be concerned for the daily tragedies visiting Palestinian mothers, wives, widows, daughters, forget it. Even after losing to Obama, she maintained a shrill stance with nothing to offer to anybody other than Israel. Go ahead, defend yourself with whatever means, she seemed to signal to her Jewish supporters. The United States would not stop you if you clobber Iran, Lebanon, Syria, AIPAC was told again and again by speaker after speaker.

The Israeli response was one of gleeful acceptance, naturally. Israel “will attack” Iran if it continues to develop nuclear weapons, one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s deputies warned immediately. Shaul Mofaz, a former defence minister and a contender to replace the scandal-battered Olmert, said military action would be “unavoidable” if Tehran proved able to acquire the technology to manufacture atomic bombs. So there you are, staring at a debilitating crisis and more bloodletting if it doesn’t translate into something even more sinister.

Many Palestinians like to cite a comment Obama made to a small group of Democratic activists in Muscatine, Iowa, early in the campaign: “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” The comments drew fire in the United States, particularly from supporters of the AIPAC, but were not forgotten among Palestinians. Soon enough Obama clarified that his remark was actually an indictment of the Palestinian leadership that he believes has caused much of the Palestinians’ suffering. If this is the tragic side of the hooves-like betrayal, it has its farcical aspect too.

I was reading this February story from CNN-IBN. “Gujaratis living in the US may be strong supporters of a right-wing politician like Narendra Modi, but their politics in America is of a different colour,” it said. Groups like Support Gujarat and Overseas Friends of the BJP had launched a long-distance campaign to get the BJP re-elected in Gujarat in December 2007. “And while those gathered in New Jersey may be right wing in their political inclinations regarding India, here they prefer the Democrats, especially liberal candidates like Hillary Clinton,” the story declared. Liberal? Hillary?

“It has been a pro-Gujarati party and that’s why we have been supporting Democrats for years. They haven’t given us a chance to believe otherwise,” said a member of Support Gujarat. While Modi and the BJP have been identified with communal politics at home, said CNN-IBN, many of his supporters in the United States are against the Republican Party because of their fear of the Christian right. I think that’s a load of rubbish. There are enough Indian right-wingers, may be not that many Gujaratis, cheering for the Republican candidate. I would relate the current alignments in the US fray to the tendency among reactionary Gujaratis to go for Hillary partly because her husband spent considerable time with Gujarati businessmen during his March 2000 visit to India (which saw Hillary visiting the state subsequently). But there is a marked racial aversion among Indians (South Asians to be exact) towards black people. This bias roughly divides the left-right contours among Indian expatriates. I’ll never tire of giving the South African example where the left diaspora from India was firmly aligned with the black majority and the rightwing, a heavy component belonging to Gujarat, opted for the whites-led tri-cameral parliament.

For Narendra Modi acolytes in the United States even a hint of Obama’s Muslim connection should only compound his unacceptability. This group will campaign till the bitter end for Hillary to get at least the second slot on the Obama ticket. A similar fate confronts India’s Punjabi migrants in the United States. Obama had staked out his turf on the moral high ground with a call for a new kind of politics, devoid of personal attack and characterised by debates on the issues that matter. But his campaign apparently did not pay heed. Members of his staff circulated a document that, in its title, slightly referred Hillary Clinton as the Democrat from Punjab. The D-Punjab description apparently refers to a joke Hillary made last year, at a fund-raiser hosted by New York-based Sikh hotelier and Democratic fund-raiser. “I can certainly run for the Senate seat in Punjab and win easily,” she had said on that occasion. In any case, after all the brouhaha, quite a few of her Indian supporters must be feeling cheated. She has now directed them to the roasted-peanut vendor on the Monkey Bridge. They don’t like the colour of his skin, nor his religious lineage.

But the one passenger on the American equivalent of the Lucknow tonga who refused to be intimidated by the pair of hooves is Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He had been Obama’s pastor for nearly 20 years. He had brought Obama into the church, helped him find his faith in God, officiated at Obama’s wedding and baptised both his children. But, as Time magazine noted: “Wright had also said a lot of incendiary things from his pulpit about America over the years, things that would be awkward to explain away for a politician hoping to unite the country and become the first African-American president of the United States.” Rev Wright evidently had something scarier than a pair of hooves to evoke such awe.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com