May 2016 \ News \ Diplomatic Column
From Far and Near: Radical Changes for a Social Order

It has been a week since I returned from my personal visit to America, the promised land. ‘Promised’ is a loaded term and has many connotations. In this specific context, it alludes to a certain sense of discipline and organized behavior in social and inter-personal relations,

By Malay Mishra

Unbelievable, it seems, when the much reviled real estate tycoon becomes the toast of America’s youth brigade. Yet if there is one single phenomenon, apart from the IS, which has taken the world literally by storm, it is Trump himself. Whether he trumps eventually to take oath as the next President of the US is an open question, though as of now, that situation could well happen if political trends run on predictable lines. An Independent candidate, for the first time in America’s democratic history, topping the primaries, beating top party contenders, Republicans and Democrats alike, beats even popular folklore by the sheer impossibility of the situation. But the impossible can be possible, only in America perhaps. For here, freedom of speech and expression have full play under the liberal shadows of democracy like nowhere else. Thus, while the whole world may stare agape at the churling of American politics at the Presidential hustings, here the political liturgy is not held happenstance. 

Over my several encounters with the common folks, from a white American taxi driver to a svelte Mexican waitress, even to the middle class gentry and men in business, the answer was uniform, ‘let’s wait and watch’. Was it a providential determinism or a sceptic’s prognosis? Hard to guess. 

But back to my part of the world… the recent Lahore park bombing to mark Easter Day celebrations by this brazen attack on the miniscule Christian community in an Islamic society where minorities run the risk of being exterminated, has once again laid bare the deep malaise which afflicts us all in this New Age, Terrorism with a capital ‘T’. The blood is still to dry in the airport and metro station of Brussels, where Europe’s combined might is powerfully represented in the EU and NATO, the killers are still on the rampage in these societies suffering the disastrous effects of their acceptance of the Islamic migrant flow from the East, South and Centre.




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