The missing leader

Every time I read about certain events in newspapers I feel embarrassed. I feel we are a society proud of commodities but uneasy about ourselves. We seem like petty creatures who prefer horse trading even the country to taking an ethical stand. It is not the size of the event that I am worried about but the stature of the people participating in it.

Instead of the predictable politics, let us begin with tennis. Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi might have won Grand Slams but they sound like spoilt teenagers. They have little sense of the nation and even less of the spirit of sport. They do not see themselves as leaders setting an example for younger sportsmen. Instead, they behave like quarrelsome divorcees refusing to recognise their past. Worse, their parents join in as excess baggage, issuing dictats to other players. Vece Paes, not happy with doling prescriptions to the All-India Tennis Association, issues instructions to Sania Mirza about her choices. Mirza behaved like a patriot, a woman and a professional to show Paes and Bhupathi what correct behaviour meant. There was anger in her comments and yet she came out with a sense of integrity that men’s tennis and associations seem desperately in need of.
Consider economics. India is going through an economic crisis. Inflation is rampant. You don’t need the RBI to tell you that. Yet the blandness of economists, from Montek Singh Ahluwahlia to Kaushik Basu to the RBI, is worrying. Is ordinary language so elusive to them? Is empathy for the common man taboo? All of them in their public pronouncements act as if economics can only be a technical answer to a technical question. They present themselves as managers or consultants, making you wonder whether Karl Marx, Joseph Stiglitz, Adam Smith and Amartya Sen were aliens from Mars. My concern is that many of them are competent, decent people but what is it about present-day goodness that dribbles out in dribblets? The question I want to ask is: Is there something in the air that wishes away leaders and prefers managers?
Think of the IIT controversy about entrance tests. It is strange that neither side is able to understand the true nature of the problem. The education minister seems to think he is running a feudal empire and the directors of IIT are merely rubber stamps. The world of academics acts as if snubbing the IITs does not affect them. They do not realise that if the IIT loses academic freedom, the acid of authoritarianism will eat deeper into their freedom. One has to recognise the problem, which is that the IITs are recruiting too many convergent thinkers and marginalising divergent thinking. The community has to look at this intellectual problem and, in fact, should have anticipated it before Union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal did. The sadness is the complete absence of a leadership that can articulate academic issues. The academic powers that be sit happy, content to be on committee harnessings the rivers of TA and DA (travel and dearness allowance) with a rapacity that would embarrass the mafia.
Now locate the presidential race in this collection of stories. Watching the fight for presidency was like watching crabs crawling over each other in a basket, each and all struggling to make sure no one reaches the top. One realises Pranab Mukherjee’s competence but his success reminds one of “social ecologist” Peter Drucker cautioning us about the difference between a leader and a manager. Drucker said that a manager does things right, while a leader does the right thing. A leader innovates in competence and ethics, while a manager is often a fixer.
Consider one last example, the Rajat Gupta trial. Rajat Gupta was the darling of the corporate and political elite. Accused, and now convicted, of insider trading, he received commendations from our corporate heroes like Mukesh Ambani and Adi Godrej. They see Gupta’s arrest as a threat to the Indian dream in America but given their blinders, no one sees the bigger picture. Heading the team of lawyers against Gupta and fighting corruption in Wall Street is Preet Bharara. He is the Indian hero fighting corruption in a way our elite cannot dream of. Sadly, our elite behave as if they are above the law. Our top one per cent treats hit-and-run driving as a coming-of-age rite and looks at insider trading as an everyday virus that the US is trying to eradicate.
There is a common theme running through all these events. Each event seems to follow a predictable, mediocre script where the actions were petty. There was not one who had the stature to screw courage to the sticking place and call a spade a shovel. India, in the first decade after Independence, had an epidemic of great leaders many of whom were honest and courageous. Think of Ghaffar Khan, the Pathan who fought the British with non-violence, or J.C. Kumarappa, who, in 1949, insisted on arriving for the Planning Commission meeting at Rashtrapati Bhavan in a tonga, or Jayaprakash Narayan, who showed courage to fight the Emergency. Today we lack such leaders. It is as if our IITs and IIMs are designed to eliminate leaders and create managers.
If one looks across the range of events, one sees a crisis of leadership. A leadership can emerge anywhere, be it a J.R.D. Tata or a trade union leader like A.K. Roy or a scientist like Satish Dhawan. Yet, India has suddenly run out of leadership. The odd thing is neither Bollywood nor universities, or other institutions bother about it. It is as if we are cloning mediocrity, claiming that democracy is content with mediocres and that management by committee is preferable to leadership by men and women. The more our managers talk about leadership the less we produce them. One hopes to quote our politicians and believe that it is “a temporary shortage”, but one senses it is a long-range crisis. Silence and indifference merely add to it.