BARACK Obama is an avowed admirer of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. That their fanatical compatriots murdered both his heroes represents a deep and unyielding battle-line that ought to weld South Asia and America into a common struggle against racial and religious bigotry.

This resolve was evident in the inaugural speech the new American leader delivered in Washington DC on Tuesday.

Gandhi's killers accused him of appeasing Muslims, while Pakistani ideologues slandered him as their dangerous enemy. In fact, the founders of Pakistan accused Gandhi of being a leader of Hindus so as to deprive him of his secular credentials. This was a canard and ironical too. Gandhi was assassinated by an upper caste Hindu.

King's killers structured a similar mythology to justify his cruel death. By 1967, the civil rights leader had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall US foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his 'Beyond Vietnam' speech delivered on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States 'the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.'

Time magazine called the speech 'demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi,' and the Washington Post declared that King had 'diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.' The fact that Barack Obama's inauguration as America's first black president was conducted under unprecedented security flowed from the fear of white supremacist plotters stalking him.

American TV commentators acknowledged the threat to Obama (and, with him to the syncretic idea he symbolised) came as much from within the national boundaries as from outside the United States. This in spite of the fact that the venue of his oath was jam-packed with the widest range of cheerleaders and ordinary fans, who included 'Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and non-believers', a bouquet the new president celebrated as the cultural patchwork that made America strong.

This is the mantra that India publicly celebrates too, both as a legal contract and as moral precept. In translating the ideal into practice, however, the state can be perceived as using underhand methods of tokenism and democratically veneered subterfuge to perpetuate an inequality, which may not be too different from what its colonial equivalent was. Election campaigns brazenly champion a Hindu card or a Muslim card, the Dalit card and so forth. At least since 1991, the cumulative outcome is then handed over to the highest corporate bidder.

It is hardly a surprise that Indian tycoons today are able to openly bid for their favourite politicians, the front-runners being those that most vehemently denounce the tenets of democracy. In this they have mentors in the American business behemoths. The nexus between American industry and Nazi Germany is all too well known. Naturally, they would be uncomfortable with both of Obama's heroes or the influence they wield on him.

But Obama offered hope. His inaugural speech showed glimpses of Gandhi's musings that he had scribbled as a 'talisman' in 1948, days before being killed at a prayer meeting in Delhi. The 'talisman' says 'Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.'

Obama's vision looked similarly eclectic in its appeal to 'all other peoples and governments' who watched him the other day. 'From the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more... To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect.'

The new president rejected the false choice between America's 'security' and America's core 'ideals'. It is tempting to see it as a critique of the Bush regime's 'Guantanamo Bay policy', or as a veiled tribute to Martin Luther King's anti-war speech he gave exactly a year before his death. 'Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home,' said King.

'It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.'

Obama talked of inadequacy, if not uselessness, of 'power' to provide 'security'. He talked of criticality of 'justness' of cause, of global 'peace' linked to 'dignity', of engaging the 'allies' and 'former enemies' alike.

There was perhaps one critical issue missing from his speech Israel's bestiality in Gaza. Gandhi's major statement on the Palestine and the Jewish question, on the other hand, appeared in his widely circulated editorial in the Harijan of Nov 11, 1938.

He started by sympathising with the Jews, who as a people were subjected to inhuman treatment and persecution for a long time. But Gandhi asserted, 'My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?'

It was also an implied critique of the nascent idea of Pakistan as a religion-based state. Obama may be no Gandhi, or Martin Luther King. It is good enough that he has emerged as the best bet on offer in a long, long time.