It’s time India Inc gave us a real US-style pre-election debate. Two speeches, one by Rahul Gandhi and the one soon after by Narendra Modi, are proof of our appetite for informed content. Imagine, if the two leaders came face to face! Moderate voters would benefit. So would the “undecided,” seeking deeper debates on policy and economic issues.
CII and FICCI, who did a good job getting Gandhi and Modi to speak at their respective functions, should see this as a fit case for collaboration. The two chambers of industry are fierce competitors, but they do some work together – albeit grudgingly, with Assocham – during visits by heads of state and government. So, why not help in the search for India’s next Prime MinisterIJ
For dummies, the US has had presidential debates dating back to Abraham lincoln vs Stephen Douglas in 1858. Seven such debates have been reported; lincoln speaking for an hour, his opponent rebutting and then making his points for an hour and a half, and lincoln finally coming back for half an hour. A particularly well-known duel was in 1960, when John F Kennedy outdebated Richard Nixon before an estimated audience of 66 million viewers.
Before you think the US system is on a settled track, far from it, there was a break down for all of 16 years. So, the debates could restart only in 1976 and this time the format included a duel between the two vice presidential candidates, Bob Dole and Walter Mondale. Even then, just twelve years later in 1988, the league of Women Voters, a neutral organization chosen to service the cause, threw its hands up in despair. “A charade devoid of substance,” is how the league bad mouthed the debates, charging the respective campaign committees of striking deals behind closed doors.
The job is now undertaken by the Commission on Presidential Debates.CII’s Chandrajit Banerjee and FICCI’s A Didar Singh should learn from these pitfalls without losing sight of the obvious merits in joining forces here. How about a hackathon on a draft MOUs for the two principal parties to agreeIJ
A word or two for cynics. India has already moved towards a Namo versus Raga model just as it has accepted that there are two main parties and the rest are a motley crew in a supporting role. This isn’t in our Constitutional scheme, but signs that we’re headed that way are – increasingly - hard to ignore.
In fact, a direct debate is the global trend. As per the BBC, eighty countries have a face-to-face format. This, one must emphasize, now includes the British themselves; though only in 2010, when Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg faced each other. The journey wasn’t easy. John Major, in 1997, made the famous “any place, any time” challenge before Tony Blair, never to walk the talk!
The implicit advantage of a series of structured debates is that economics would get the importance that it must have. The present discourse is plagued with episodic “bayaan baazi” which leaves most unattached stakeholders wondering what the two main gladiators really stand for. A nation seriously aspiring to “great-power status” deserves deeper soul searching by the two principal aspirants. Only a direct debate would force both to look beyond prepared homilies and ring-side opportunists to stop coveting the PM’s chair!
A clear beneficiary would be advertisers and the media. Audiences might want this content in large numbers, just as millions would turn to the social media to discuss what they’ve just seen and heard. This could be the silver bullet that the news TV folks want. Starting in 1996, as I recall the first “live” discussions that were kick started by India’s first private news channel, the formats haven’t moved beyond shadow boxing among official spokespersons. The “abhi” generation want no less than mortal combat. Enough to TOMs (tired old men!)
(The columnist is CEO & Co-Founder, India Strategy Group, Hammurabi & Solomon Consulting. Tweets welcome @therohitbansal)