The Telegraph
All for Obama, Amartya counts the gains AMIT ROY
New York, Nov. 5: Amartya Sen today told The Telegraph he was delighted with Barack Obama's victory and that it had important consequences for India.
"It was a big night. I went to bed late. It's an excellent result. I obviously don't have a vote in America — I am an exclusively Indian citizen — but I have been a supporter of Barack Obama's candidature right from the beginning," the Nobel laureate, who teaches at Harvard, said from his home in Boston.
"He (Obama) brings three very important things for America. First, a kind of democratisation by the inclusion of African Americans now in the highest political positions of this country. This is a wonderful change since there were racist laws excluding blacks from their rightful place in society even a few decades ago," Sen said.
"Second, the alienation of the world from the US was based on an American policy that had been extraordinarily unilateral. For example, world opinion was quite contrary to the intervention in Iraq. Obama had been critical of this unilateralism and it is quite clear that in his vision of a good world, multilateralism plays a big part and that is very important for the world given the fact that the US is still the strongest country.
"Third, the unilateral policies chosen by the government have often been peculiarly daft. Often they were not well thought out, for example, attacking Iraq was not only a unilateral decision, it was also a stupid decision. Iraq had no involvement with 9/11 since it did not allow al Qaida to function in the country; and the running of Iraq essentially by an American administration was bound to be deeply problematic and resented.
"Similarly, it is not smart to do nothing about the deteriorating environment and just watch the calamity develop. It is also not very astute to let all the regulations of financial markets go away, allowing people to make huge amounts of unaccounted profits and then complain about the greed of the money-makers.
"Greed is not a new phenomenon but what it needs is decent regulations which make people responsible for their decisions.
"So, in all these respects, by making America more democratic (and) American policy more multilateral, we can expect major advances from an Obama administration. The most distinguishing feature of Obama has not been the fact that he is black or that he has a liberal voting record but that he brings a reasoned approach to taking decisions. And this America needs today. And so does the world.
"Since I have been involved in the civil rights movement in America for a long time — I visited this country many times and I was very much present at Berkeley in 1964-65 when the free speech movement occurred and at Harvard during 1968-69 when there were also participatory movements on the campuses — it is a moment of particular joy to see what is ultimately a success of the fruits of the civil rights movement.
"I can't say like some of my friends that I wept, I didn't, but I am delighted and extremely happy.
"I think this victory has implications for India. The Bush administration has not been particularly hostile to India at all. And therefore it is not so much that the last administration was more anti-Indian than the Obama administration would be. But it is in the interests of all countries, including India, that American policy be based on reasoning.
"We all have much to benefit from intelligent decisions taken by each country and it is the likelihood of a more reasoned approach to world problems on which world peace, including suppression of terrorism in an intelligent and effective way, depends. And India has a huge stake in that."
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges