INDIAN DEMOCRACY'S LESSONS FOR AMERICA

This will be a fateful election for America. Will the daughter of Indian-Jamaican immigrants with a Sanskrit name and a Jewish husband become president?

- JAYANT SINHA

While every American presidential election is billed as history-making, this one genuinely belongs in category. The very soul of America is at stake. It is at this fraught time that the world's largest democracy might have some pointers for the world's oldest democracy.

The American Declaration of Independence says: "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." These are the words that made America. For the past 250 years, the American democratic enterprise has striven to provide its citizens ever more equality and liberty. Americans believe that these words reflect a universal moral order.

Unfortunately, America's reality has often been at odds with these values. From the decimation of Native Americans, to the enslaving of millions of Africans, a brutal civil war fought to end slavery, the repression of non-whites till the 1960s civil rights movement, to the present day marked by shootings and racism - American democracy has been a constant struggle between reactionary power structures and ever-expanding notions of equality and liberty.