Attribute Of A Non-Leader
By:
The Truth Detector
The root of the word is legere in Latin and it may have been the root word in India’s recent 1996 general elections too. And in this context, it would really mean ‘to select, gather, eliminate, concoct to catch the eye’. The gathering, evaluation and manner of release of information, initiated to measure an enemy, once had called for its special needs in the form of special agents, agencies, officers, operatives, committees of its own and other such paraphernalia.
The meaning of the word has undergone a radical change in recent times. Not that it is hard to find an enemy but it is easier, less dangerous and more immediately fruitful, to succeed in keeping oneself in the saddle. And in this, the question of leadership looms large.
Normally it is for the leader to sit in the saddle. How can a leader who is not a leader, be able to carry on as if he is a leader? It may sound like a riddle, but it is not. They are men whose only claim to position of power has been to follow a leader who himself has never been known to have done anything better than to follow the herd, but somehow had managed to install himself in the current position. That could only be done by fooling the people, the masses. Loyalty and seniority alone cannot be a proper substitute for leadership qualities. We see the truth of the statement every day while looking around ourselves!
The true meaning of the word leader is one who can lead; who possesses that special streak in his character, developed by upbringing, proper education and of course self-promotion by keen perception of men and material; a leader can foresee signs of impending danger much before anyone else. He can take decisions on his own, to guide his people and keep them out of danger. A true leader uses his exceptional attributes for the common good of his people; he does not exploit them to enhance his personal wealth and power. His deposits in Swiss banks for instance do not count in this context neither BCCI accounts. To him, the needs of the people come first. The interests of the nation has the first priority.
Many names come to mind. Winston Churchill, Mazzini and Garibaldi, de Gaulle and Napoléon and even Hitler, and so on. Some of these leaders finally failed, not so much because they lacked in leadership qualities but because they did not use their leader-like qualities for a good cause. Some did use them for a good cause but still failed; our Netaji Subhash is a good example. Veer Savarkar is another. But there never was any doubt in anyone’s mind that these men were indeed true leaders of their people.
Surprisingly, not all these leaders were natives of their respective lands. Napoléon for instance was a Corsican when Corsica was an occupied territory under France. But Napoléon rose to be a great Frenchman, one of France’s greatest, by intrinsically espousing the national cause of France. And thus, in time, instead of alienating himself from France, he endeared the whole of Corsica to France. His actions wedded Corsica to France for all time. Today, Corsica is as French as Ile de France.
It is not the same with a non-leader. For him, the key word is alienation followed by incompetence and ignorance. Usually, such non-leaders cannot stay in the saddle too long. Their body-language soon reveals their inadequacies as a leader. And they are ousted. The only way such leaders can prolong their stay in the saddle is by fooling their people by misinformation and subterfuge.
In the history of mankind, one often finds instances of ‘natives’ acting like enemies of the people. Such conduct gave rise to the dictum ‘With a friend like you, who needs an enemy?’ And why do these natives, once put in leaders’ position, behave in such inimical fashion? Only because these native non-leaders had let themselves be alienated from their own people, their religion, their culture. Such alienation stems from various reasons. One is lack of determination against heavy odds. Qualities, so prominent in Churchill, de Gaulle, Rana Pratap, Chhatrapati Shivaji or Guru Gobind Singh, are lacking in them. They are not the ‘toughs’ that get going when the going gets tough. Jawahar Lal Nehru’s name readily comes to mind as a classical non-leader. Born and reared in already alienated families, devoid of moral principles, nurtured by an ideology of assumed inferiority of their own people and superiority of the foreigner, they do not see any merit in hard life and austerity for the good of the nation. They are not concerned by the miseries of their own people, the constant insults heaped upon them by inferior men and women of alien lands. These so called leaders are really seekers of the line of least resistance. They are wimps who buckle under the slightest difficulty. Their thoughtless actions cause their people to rue for decades. It is the common people who have to pay for the sins of these false leaders. One has only to compare the legacies of Sardar Patel in Hyderabad and Nehru’s in Kashmir. One need not go too far to realize that a bad leader is a curse, never mind how many statues are made and dedicated to him!
Nehru’s conduct in this regard was extremely galling. Motilal’s son was born in a brothel area of Allahabad and later he was reared in the palace of the Nawab of Oudh. He was educated in England and behold he had already started to insult his own countrymen, the overwhelming majority of the Hindus that ‘he was Moslem by upbringing and western by education; he was Hindu only by accident of birth’. Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that such a character, in any other free contry, would have been shown the door the very next minute and he would thus cease to be the prime minister of his own land for good!
Quite clearly, Nehru cared nothing for the wellbeing of his people. His attitude was that of the irresponsible French tyrant who had said “Après moi, c’est le déluge”. (After me, let the deluge take over!) During the wars with Pakistan and then with communist China, brought on in great measure by Nehru’s own folly, the prime minister of India was never seen visiting our jawans on the battle front while he spent bags of time in foreign female company. Such men can never be true leaders of the people, no matter how many red roses are put on their lapels!
Thus the second reason is the self-inflicted alienation from their own people who, unbeknown to them, sustain them. The reasons of such alienation are many and they fall outside the purview of this write up. These false leaders tend to live in a make-believe world and they assume that the world at large evaluates them as they do so themselves. But the truth eventually comes out. Their pining for the comforts and luxuries of London, Paris, Milan and New York becomes evident to all and sundry although they do not cease singing in public “…phir bhi dil hai Hindustani”. We still have to see that first black-marketeer that Nehru had promised to the nation to hang from the nearest lamp-post!
The key word is thus ‘perception’. Under the circumstances, in order to prolong their rule, it becomes imperative that the people’s perception be obfuscated. The longer the people are prevented from perceiving the truth about the inadequacies of the false leaders, the longer the status quo could be maintained. Such a game may even be named ‘mini-realpolitik’ and it can theoretically go on indefinitely, as it has in India for the last fifty years. It is only now that it has become clear that the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is not at all indispensable for the survival of the country. Neither is its God-forsaken doctrine of secularism a sine qua non. The entire dynasty has disappeared within the span of only a few years but the Indian democracy is still on the rails. In fact, the recent election exercise proved clearly to the world at large in unmistakeable terms, that India’s democracy can survive even without the self-proclaimed overbearing personalities such as Nehru’s, Indira’s and of course Rajiv’s. This has, as if, reinforced the self-confidence of the people who had been treated almost like orphans, all these years.
“In the real world”, writes Herbert E. Meyer in Real-World Intelligence (the hyphenated phrase means “practical, neither abstract not academic”) “intelligence has come to mean information that not only has been selected and collected, but also analyzed, evaluated and distributed to meet the unique policy making needs of one particular enterprise. In short, intelligence has become a management tool. And what is this enterprise? To keep the people in the dark for even a longer period, of course! This tool helps to loot the wealth of the nation and exploit the people for a longer period. We in India, by now, should be aware of this fact!
How is this enterprise of fooling the people put into actual practice? Huge fees are paid to past masters of such tricks of the trade in India and abroad, out of sight of the common people. PR giants such as Saatchi & Saatchi are brought in at exorbitant fees. They arrange to whitewash thieves as saints; a lot of black is covered up with white paint. The thief of Delhi is renamed Mister Clean. Tools such as the Door-Darshan and the All India Radio are used to the fullest extent to confuse the people. Money is squandered like it is no body’s business while the national literacy programs hibernate and vegetate.
The saddest part is that the intelligentsia of the country fail to perceive the most conspicuous anomaly in the conduct of these false leaders and the variance between their words and deeds, which in other democracies would not go unchallenged so shamelessly. In a primarily poor and illiterate country, the responsibility of the native intelligentsia is even more onerous. They must not let themselves be bought over by temptations of privileges, turning them into privilegentsia!
Communist China has gotten rid of Mao’s theories; Gorbachev has attacked head on Marx’s doctrines in Russia. What is stopping our people from totally overhauling Nehru’s bankrupt and useless policies? Time is running out and we need to clean up the Augean stables now, without any further delay.
