What is ironic is that the winner of the brilliantly produced and publicized Lead India campaign will be sent for a course on leadership to an American University. You’d think they’d sent him or her for a year or two long extended travel of India – rural, urban, semi-urban, suburban, disturbed areas, prosperous regions etc etc. But no. A yearlong degree course at Kennedy school should do it super quick. A leader prepared delivered and ready to contest the next Lok Sabha election.
This attitude exists because in the manufacturing age it is managers that are mass-produced and we pass them off as leaders. Managers are accommodated where leaders are needed.So the race is on to manufacture the best manager with the finest credentials. Managers are very important too and they serve a very significant function, which we all must appreciate. But leadership has too many factors that are intangible and unquantifiable which only show up over time.
Several institutions try to set up systems that churn out potential leaders - assembly line produced, that can pursue their agenda. No outfit is devoid of agenda. But neither the RSS’s mass producing, strictly disciplined and regimented shakha factories and neither the most well respected and elite schools and universities can do so successfully.
A leader represents a society and therefore society will mould him or her through pulls and pressures, experiences and a churning, a propensity to change. And that involves more than a board of governors or a jury of “eminent citizens and achievers”. Colleges, schools and jury’s pick and grant admission to an application, not an individual. It’s something that was told to me years ago by a friend studying at one of these centers of excellence – “They choose an application, not a person. It’s all about making the application look good.”
A leader is not an application, he/she is an individual.
Leaders are thrown up as a result of a churn or a more accurate Hindi word - manthan.
History is replete with several such examples. Love them, hate them, agree or disagree with them but they are the result of grass root mass movements.
The freedom struggle between the British Empire and Freedom Fighters gave us among others Patel, Tilak, Tagore, Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose - and Bapu the tallest of them all.
Independence was followed by another churn, as many battles raged within due to the huge economic and social disparities. Leaders like Ram Manohar Lohia and Jai Prakash Narayan were the outcomes of that transitional turmoil.
Out of industrialization and the trade union movement were born George Fernandes and Datta Samant; the emergency era took them to the next level.
The inter caste friction and turbulence led to the rise of Periyar, Ambedkar and more recently Mayawati.
A single or a combination of societal and political churnings creates leaders from within.
It’s not like hiring a manager or consultant where a board looks at a resume and says - Ok. This person can lead us.
Lets take Maywati. A prodigy of Kanshi Ram she has risen to lead the BSP. She evolved from the social set up, caught his attention and millions of others she worked with. Imagine if Kanshi Ram had taken a bunch of resumes… Said – “Ah.. This application looks promising. Now lets send her off to a nice grad school that teaches leadership and voila, I will have an all in one Dalit leader to take over.” Agree with her or disagree, this is not about her politics, but she does represent Dalit power and its ability to influence the course of governance. And to fight in that unforgiving and ruthless caste badland you need someone with an aggression that may not appeal to the fine palates of some.
Similarly with freedom fighters, textile workers, oppressed castes, aam admi, Indians, any group or sub group, ethnic/national/economic – them forming a panel and saying now lets see the applications and pick a leader to lead us would be preposterous.
And that is the fundamental difference between picking a leader and a manager.
Leadership is not glamorous work. It’s very basic and dreary. The lecture on the Farm Crisis by P. Sainath at the Parliament Library Building was fairly well attended, but just a couple of “leaders” of the lot of our celebrated young MPs thought it worth their while. (Lok Sabha channel yet again. Try getting any other news channel dedicating an hour or so to a P.Sainath lecture).
So here was a lecture that is extremely relevant to any elected politician claiming to represent India, to get a better idea of ground realities on one of the biggest crises confronting the country. Even if you don’t agree with the causes and conclusions of the speaker, it’s time well spent just to get an idea of the other India. This is information that will be useful, it will be of consequence and it’s delivered to your doorstep - facts figures and all, but just two attendees from the young MPs brigade across parties (For those curious - Rahul Gandhi and Supriya Suleh. If there were anymore, an apology dudes!! But I watched the whole thing and saw just senior members, including Mani Aiyer once again). You’d think this would be something almost all our “leaders” would be interested in.
Had there been a retired US asst. secretary of state (as happened year before last) or any conference or seminar on Us/Euro/Uk/Indo Trade summit type affair, our pack of young MPs would be climbing over each other wanting to get a piece of that action. Some went to New York for the Indo US parliamentarians meet a while ago. MLAs and MPs going for all sorts of educational tours is commonplace, from Australia (to “study” the management of commonwealth games) to USA’s transport systems. I’m sure they learn a great deal and have come back enriched with wisdom, but the Sainath lecture about matters alarmingly pressing and relevant to India might have been a tad useful too. But it was at the boring old Parliament Library Building. And it just wasn’t glamorous enough. And that’s the problem with leadership - it has too many non-glamorous aspects.
Bapu Gandhi had shied away from any call to action or any intentions or pretensions to lead a movement before he traveled the country and worked at a grass root level. He said that he must get to know how the people in his country live, their struggles, aspirations, their customs and traditions before he could serve them, and later as destiny had it, lead them. It’s hard, it’s very far away from TV promos and mug shots in print, and it could very possibly end in nothing. But that is how leaders are made; it’s a slow baking process. Not a fast food quick deep fry.
However today’s urban Indian wants glamorous success, and they want it fast. Short cuts to stardom and visibility. The young stung journalist, the aspiring reporter posing as a decoy prostitute, institutes and schools that make such claims (some even advertise on TV) and every other indicator of popular culture suggests this.
The Lead India campaign actually promises, “Lead India is designed to enable the brightest of India to cut short the normally long-winded path up the political ladder.”
There may be a shortcut to the parliament house up the political ladder (we have many who have taken that route and failed) but there is no short cut to leadership. No quick fix.
Abraham Lincoln had written in a letter to his son’s teacher - “Teach him gently but do not cuddle him because only the test of fire makes fine steel...”
And closer to home one of Harivansha Rai Bachan’s inspiring poems goes (his grandson is a “brand ambassador” for the Lead India campaign)–
“Jinko ye avkash nahi hai dekhein kab tare anukool,
jiko ye parwah nahi hai kab tak bhadra, kab tikshool
Jinke haatho ki chaabuk se chalti hai unki takdeer
Main hun unke saath khadi jo seedhi rakhte apni reedh.”
Not tenderloin, serve us a leader with spine - cooked nice and long, served well done. And thanks, no fries with that please.
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