Sunday Editorial
2014 dilemma: what kind of political leadership do we need?
By Ratnakar Tripathy
It has now become very common for us all, including the barely literate, to talk of political paralysis in the present government. The only difference between the educated and the rest may be, and I am far from sure of this, we are less likely to blame a government for a bad monsoon or a hailstorm than the illiterate peasant.
Members of the government on the other hand would have us believe that the paralysis stems from the finely balanced coalition of several parties or even worse a morally dulled bureaucracy. Very much like the Congress, the BJP shares the same predicament of perpetually looking for supportive company. Complaining about the compulsions of heading a coalition is actually a not very subtle way of putting the whole blame on the voter. The ruling party’s argument in simple words may be – ‘you created the mess by not making up your mind in not giving us a decisive victory. So, quite simply, suffer!
Clearly, this sets the tone for an inherently hostile relation between the voter and the ruling power, since the voter can always retaliate and say ‘you didn’t deserve my clear verdict. Your past record and your intentions are suspect’.
At a deeper level, the voter seems to say – ‘your coalition partners are our best bets for safety and are meant to protect you from your own likely excesses.’
Such relationships, as we all know from our joint or extended family quarrels, are impossible to resolve and generally have a future far beyond the several funeral pyres.
The funny thing is unlike the centre, a number of states have chosen their governments with a decisiveness that suggests that the voter was determined to force on himself a sense of clarity that he didn’t really feel. I have in mind those few confused hours of counting of votes a few months ago after which the SP discovered it could form a government on its own in UP. Poor Rahul Gandhi was a victim of this self-enforced clarity since the voters refused to be confused by his benign image and went for the sure thing, namely the SP.
The conclusion drawn from this may be – we are more concerned with the state leadership than electing the speechmaker for the 15th August from the Red Fort. And that of course, we are currently paying the price for our parochial and provincial thinking. It takes a dramatic hike of Rs 7 in petrol prices for us to come back to our senses and rediscover the utter significance of New Delhi!
So our ambivalence number one is to balance our choices at the level of the nation, the state, and the Zillah/panchayat/corporation!
And thus here we are, our voting finger swaying between New Delhi and the state capital. This is quite in line with our see-sawing between the state capital and the corporation or the panchayat, since the dilemma cuts through the national ‘burfee’[cake] right down to the grassroots. What is more important – panchayat level politics that causes a hand pump to be installed far away from my homestead or Delhi which can arbitrarily allow 20 per cent increase in fertilizer/diesel prices, is a genuine and lived reality.
Ever since the mid-1970s when Jayprakash Narayan[JP] bred a number of populist politicians in his personal ideological nursery, we have had Laloos, Mulayams, and their southern variants, such as Karunanidhi, NTR and Jaylalitha who draw more inspiration from movies than vaporous ideas like ‘total revolution’. The latest product is Mamata who now promises to reduce the great land of Bengal to choosing between two different forms of thuggery and mismanagement.
But the liberalization era brought us politicians like Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra who tried to engineer a managerial revolution in Indian politics, however locally. The executive, MBA style of doing politics has since become a fixture. It can now be said safely that the typical Indian politician [such as Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Naveen Patnaik and our own Niteesh Kumar] are actually two-in-one politicians. At worst, you could say they are split-brained – half populists, half managers. But at best, they are all blessed with two contrasting talents – they know their people and they know the best possible management solution to problems. They thrive on the trade off between the two.
And yet, there is a problem with this double-brained sort. At times their populism encourages and enables them to believe they know people better than the people themselves – look at Bal Thackeray who knows Maharashtrians better than themselves, Murli manohar Joshi who knew Hindus better than they know themselves, and Narendra Modi who knows Gujarat’s mind better than any given Gujarati as well as all the Gujaratis put together. This kind of arrogance now often comes combined with another one.
The other arrogance is of the managerial type. It goes as follows – ‘I know the land problem, the water problem, the employment problem and all I need to do is persuade, cajole, trick, swindle or even force people to swallow my solution and everything will be fine.’ This particular type waits for a success story, after which it starts ‘replicating’ the model in the manner of a ramapging epidemic at the citizen’s cost, with ‘replication’ as the godly and the ordained solution. Such people do not have time to hear local tales, and as we know the most authentic and real tales are always local, individual to individual, family to family, village to village, state to state, shop to shop, company to company, MNC to MNC!
Currently, I am not sure which of the three tribes is more numerous, the populist or the manager, or the hybrid between both. But I do think we need a leader of the sort who may rise above all three, the sort of leader we would like to become in our own fantasies, in the fantasies of the sort that have an enormous bearing on public life.
In tune with my own fantasy thus I propose a leader of great will and resolve but a modest opinion of herself or himself.
Two years before 2014, my finger unwaveringly goes right away for a seeker gifted with the talent of seeking, seeking to know what people want, and simultaneously seeking what is the right but most often ‘non-replicable’ solution.
Are you my kind of voter or better still, are you my kind of leader?