The Foreign Service Journal, October 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2016 35 T he fact that the U.S. presidential elec- tions come around in the same years as the Summer Olympics creates a pecu- liar tripwire for an Indian like myself. To date India has been famously mediocre at the Olympics: we may scrape the odd gold every now and then, but our participants usually come away with bronze medals, the total of which you can count on the fingers of one hand. There’s no logical connection, but that marginalization somehow links up in my mind to how utterly irrelevant India has always been to any American presidential campaign—not that too many other countries find themselves discussed, How India Sees U.S. Elections The old formula for evaluating the U.S. presidential contest has given way to complexities. BY RUCH I R JOSH I Ruchir Joshi is a novelist, filmmaker and columnist based in Kolkata. He is the author of a novel, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh; Poriborton—an Election Diary , a series of reports on the Bengal state elections of 2011; and the forthcoming novel, The Great Eastern Hotel . A regular opinion columnist for The Telegraph newspaper of Kolkata, he also writes for other newspapers and magazines in India, including India Today and Outlook. at least not in positive terms, in the greatest (and extremely inward-looking) one-on-one electoral contest on earth. And yet many of us in India end up glued to the yearlong battle, with almost the same fascination as watching some Olympic sport in which we have never had any representation. In the 1960s, in the days before we had TV, the U.S. elections came to us chiefly via the print media. While local Indian news- papers carried the daily developments, magazines like TIME and Newsweek delivered the more detailed analyses (naturally from American points of view) and LIFE® Magazine gave us the visuals. Embedded in the local broadsheets amidst the mess of Indian politics were progress reports on the primaries and the election proper; what such and such candidate said about Viet- nam, the Cold War or U.S. foreign aid—whatever might eventu- ally ricochet into our reality; and the odd cartoon from the great daily cartoonist R.K. Laxman making fun of this Democrat or that Republican. Historically, there was across-the-board agreement in India, even among grown-ups of opposing political views, concerning the outcome of the American presidential contest: A Democrat president would always be friendlier toward India, whereas a Republican was bound to favor Pakistan. This formula proved reliable into the Ronald Reagan administration and the end FOCUS ON THE U.S. ELECTION