What our netas can learn from former US President Carter’s legacy

In less than a month from now, the US will have a president-elect. The shifting trends and the indecisiveness of the outcome are at the very centre of global attention. American elections and American politics have never been only about America. They have always had small and big consequences across the globe. In the present context too, the war in Ukraine and the warlike atmosphere in West Asia are expected to take a decisive turn for good or for worse after a new POTUS gets into the Oval Office.Anyway, besides sitting President Joe Biden, his Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, another person from the White House league has been in the news this season for a very different reason. That is Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1. He is the only American president to have been a centenarian. There were a few presidents who got into their 90s, but no one had come this far.CBS News showed Carter in a blue baseball cap being wheeled out in Plains, Georgia, to witness a military flyover with four fighter jets to mark this extraordinary birthday milestone.Carter was reasonably alert and active till he went into hospice care in February 2023 and lost his devoted partner, Rosalynn Carter, in November 2023.Interestingly, until now, when Carter’s presidential term is being revisited and reassessed, he was seen as an American president who had strangely built a legacy only after he had stepped down as a one-term president. He had been thrashed at the hands of Ronald Regan in 1980. Regan had won the popular vote by nearly 10 points — 50.7% to 41% for Carter. When it came to the electoral college, Regan had carried 44 states with him, and Carter prevailed only in six states.Mary McGrory, the popular American columnist, had written then that there was no election: “That was Mount St Helens pouring hot ash over the whole political landscape, burying a president and much of his party.” medium114051738It was this enormous defeat that had somewhat clouded Carter’s presidential legacy. People forgot that the spadework to end the Cold War was his. It had been entirely usurped by Regan’s marketing machine. It was Carter who had championed the democratic cause in Eastern Europe by supporting Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland, among others, which had a chain reaction across the region, eventually leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.The moral stature of Carter was also very tall. Immediately after he had lost the election, he had said that he would follow Harry Truman’s model and not “enrich himself” from the presidency. He turned down being on corporate boards and also huge speaking fees offered to ex-presidents. His successors did the opposite. It is said the Clintons and Obamas amassed $100mn in net worth within a few years of leaving office.Forget making money, Carter found himself a million dollars in debt after he stepped down as president. That is because the blind trust Carter had put his farm assets into when he assumed office had performed miserably. He had to rebuild his life. Carter’s decency as president and ex-president has come into special focus now because it offers a stark contrast to Trump’s liaisons and provocations.In his time, Carter had brought into play the forceful language of human rights. Even in his farewell address as POTUS, he had said: “America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way round. Ours is the first nation in the history of the world to be founded explicitly on such an idea. It is both our history and our destiny.”Carter was also the first to speak of environmental challenges and sustainable development by commissioning the Global 2000 Report to the President. In this sense, he was very much ahead of his time.A biography of Carter published in 2020 by Jonathan Alter, titled His Very Best, offers a delightful and fair-minded perspective on Carter’s presidency and the later decades. medium114051773Edward Luce, the Financial Times journalist who wrote a brilliant column when Carter was being moved to hospice care at the age of 99, said that Carter was “wronged by history” and was an “orphan of partisan historiography”. Carter had said that his own successors in the Democratic Party, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, had gone “out of their way” to ignore him, while it was Biden who had paid his respects and somewhat resurrected his presidential glory. Luce had concluded: “The moral of the Carter story was that virtue must be its own reward. History is a biased judge.”In the Indian context too, longevity of our prime ministers and the reassessment of their life and legacy has acquired a new curiosity in the last decade. The space for discussing those who were in the nation’s top executive role, outside the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, has been a trend triggered by the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. History that had been told with the scaffolding of long, sustained stints in power by the Nehru-Gandhi family is being looked at afresh or at least being shaken up. The good and glory of others are being brought to the fore, just like the Carter legacy is being brought forward.Among our prime ministers, quite a few of them have gone past the 90-year age mark, but no one has yet been a centenarian. Gulzarilal Nanda and Morarji Desai were 99 when they passed away. IK Gujral and AB Vajpayee were 93 and 92, respectively, when they exited. HD Deve Gowda and Manmohan Singh are pushing 91 and 92, respectively.While Singh has retired totally, Gowda, the mass leader, a few days back said he had five more years of politics left in him. He did not mean in Carter-style to be the nation’s elder statesman and mentor but wanted to continue turning the nuts and bolts of the grassroot power game. Incidentally, Gowda was a potato farmer and Carter was a peanut farmer, and both were rank outsiders to New Delhi and Washington, respectively, when they took power.One wonders if Carter’s election campaign in 1976 made an impact on Indira Gandhi and in India, which was under Emergency at the time. During the campaign, Carter had emphasised human rights and expressed clear disapproval of dictatorships that mistreated their own citizens. Lawyer and later Union law minister, Ram Jethmalani, who had secured asylum in the US at the time had popped this question. Carter’s agenda had in a way “collided” with the Emergency, said Susan Adelman, Jethmalani’s biographer. Two days before Carter’s inauguration as president, Indira lifted the Emergency and announced elections. medium114051794In fact, when Carter became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in July 1976, TN Kaul, then India’s ambassador to the US, sent a note to foreign minister YB Chavan. The letter was accompanied by a profile of Carter written by AP Venkateswaran, a diplomat who later became foreign secretary and was infamously dismissed by Rajiv Gandhi in a press conference.Kaul, who predicted Carter’s victory, said in his note that Carter could be more tolerant of “regimes following different policies and ideologies”. This was particularly important because Indira had a problematic relationship with Richard Nixon and to a lesser extent with Gerald Ford. In fact, Ford had not minced words in condemning the Emergency.Kaul also revealed that Carter’s mother had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Vikroli village near Mumbai, and Carter had apparently said that his mother had left a “major part of her heart in India”.However, Kaul had warned that it was possible that despite his “friendly inclination” towards India, Carter may feel inhibited to some extent because of the “anti-India propaganda” by the media related to the Emergency.Venkateswaran in his profile, besides a whole lot of things, wrote about how Carter, who had never served in the US Congress, had travelled to the centre of American politics “very far and very fast”. He said three-fourths of Americans had not heard of Carter before he was nominated for president.Venkateswaran also wrote about the religious nature of Carter, who came from an evangelical Baptist family. He recalled what Carter had said when he had lost his bid to become governor of Georgia in 1966: “Carter claims that he had a profound religious experience that changed his life and enabled him to develop an intimate personal relationship with God.” Perhaps that relationship still continues.Read more from the author here.