Leadership in 'Kaliyug'

'संघे शक्ति कलौ युगे'
I read the above quote in some context (I have forgotten the context now) when I was a child and had just begun to study Sanskrit as a part of my curriculum. I could never really grasp its meaning or significance beyond the rhetoric of 'strength lies in unity'.
But, this quote seems to assume rather new meanings in today's context. It seems to tell me that we no more need the much celebrated quality of leadership. Well, in order to delve further into the argument, it is imperative to define leadership. To be honest I have not bothered to find out the academic or dictionary definitions of the term. But is there an all-encompassing definition of leadership that exists? I doubt it. 


As a child, a leader for me was a person in power or trying to assume power. The one who gave speeches during elections and huge crowds gathered to hear him (it was usually 'him'). I myself sat as a seven year old with my grandfather in the front row of such crowds and listened to Laloo Prasad on the first day and Murli Manohar Joshi on the very next day. These people who appeared on televisions and newspapers were standing there in the local football ground in Gomoh. No wonder crowds gathered, just to watch them  raise their fists in the air and shout slogans (I obviously do not remember what those slogans were). In Laloo's case, however, it was the helicopter that pulled greater numbers.
After coming back from such election rallies my grandfather used to tell me stories about the leaders he saw in person when he was a child. He told me about a dark lady who was fluent in several languages and when she made speeches, the crowds fell silent. He also told me that those leaders were loved, so loved that the train compartment in which my grandfather was travelling fell silent when these words were announced on  radio - 'अभी-अभी किसी पागल ने बापू को गोली मार दी है'. My grandmother says she was cutting vegetables   in the aangan and her knife fell down when she heard the news. Nobody had food that day.


See, leadership was already a confusing concept. But, it got really muddled when I attended the leadership camp organised by Rotary club at the age of around fourteen, where I was told that anybody could be a leader. It could be a doctor who treated patients, a teacher who taught students, an engineer who built bridges...so on and so forth. I don't remember if they distinguished between non-leader doctors, teachers and engineers and the ones who were leaders. But, yes the whole aim of this exercise was to make us 'realize' that we all needed to seek leaders within us. As I grew up, I found countless such leadership development programmes, in colleges, at workplace. Leadership training is a profession for many. I wonder what teachers do nowadays in schools and colleges! There are books that talk about it, but strangely I have never seen the authors of these books anywhere else other than the books' cover pages. I wonder if Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Lenin wrote such books and offered a calculated recipe to become a leader.


The futility of this concept struck me when I started working with rural women who were organised into Self-Help-Groups by the NGOs. Yes, these women needed the NGOs to market their products, for they did not know the rules of the market (I doubt if the NGOs did). But, I could see the mute protest in their eyes and their demeanor when an 'outsider' told them to do the job  in a 'certain' way; the job they had been doing all their life. And moreover, these outsiders claimed the lion's share of the profits as well. I could also see them protest, in not so mute ways, when someone among them assumed leadership roles and tried to tilt the balance of power.


The point is whether it is business leadership or political leadership, a 'leader' makes sense when there are followers to follow him/her. With the growing cynicism towards leaders on one hand and every second person being moulded into a 'leader' on the other hand, I wonder if we need leadership at all. Don't we need collective efforts for an inclusive growth instead? And don't we simply need good intentions? A little love and a lot of selflessness. Well, the nuances of the latter call for yet another discussion altogether...

if Binayak sen is guilty of sedition, so am I...

Every time i wish to shed the negativism that has crept inside my thinking, opinion, writings regarding the state of my country, every time i wish to celebrate hope, development, something sad, outright disgusting crops up. I am ashamed, not only of my country's castrated judiciary, corrupt politicians but also of the shameless apathy of my countrymen.
67 year old Dr. Binayak Sen, working in rural tribal areas of Chhatisgarh for his entire life, was sentenced to life imprisonment, charged guilty of sedition for his alleged connections with the Naxalite movement. If being sympathetic to the movement counts as sedition, I openly proclaim that I am sympathetic too. I might not agree to the means the movement has adopted, but that does not make me a lesser advocate of the goals the movement began with. If violence is what the Naxalites are condemned for, the injustice and violence on the part of Government and Police are no less condemnable. And if I need to choose, i would choose the Naxalites as the lesser evil of the two.

Right to abstain...

I will be 25 in the next 5 months...7 years past the voting age. And I have not voted once till date, in any election. This is not something I am proud of. And I offer no excuse. However, I do wish i had the rights to abstain from voting and furthermore, this 'right' would have made a difference.

For the current Indian polity neither invokes any motivation to elect our leaders nor imparts the confidence that democracy is deemed to bring about.

I seek leaders who can make me proud. I seek leaders who can take radical decisions surpassing the fear of losing political mandate. I seek a government that would have said 'NO' to organizing Commonwealth Games stating that it bears a terrible burden on the conscience of a nation whose 37% of the population lives below Poverty Line and 55 % of women and children are malnourished. I seek a government that would refuse to spend 2.1% of the nation's GDP on defense and armament and persuade the international community to extend help if needed. Of course that would invoke criticism...Criticism by the 'guardians' of nation's 'pride' and whose definitions of pride do not encompass the health and education standards of the country, the rampant corruption, violation of human rights, so on and so forth. I can assure there are several others like me who would NOT give a damn to such guardians.
I seek leaders I can talk about, to my children and grandchildren. I seek leaders I can tell tales of....tales similar to the ones i grew up listening to.

...what was dead was hope!

Outlook publishes an article claiming that the 'encounter' of Maoist leader Cherukuri Rajkumar, pouplarly known as 'Azad', was nothing but a 'cold blooded execution' by the state. Fake encounters are not new to the history of insurgencies in India, especially the Maoist movement. However, I am quite intrigued by the fact that these exceutions are considered perfectly acceptable to a lot of people who claim to be aware and educated. The same people who advocate human rights and assert the rights of independence in a democratic world, consider these murders as a fairly just way of dealing with 'terrorists' like Azad who pose a grave 'threat' to their 'peaceful' world if left alive for trials. And i am intrigued by the fact that this happens in a country where cases on rich American CEOs responsible for thousands of deaths and generations of physical deformities, continue for more than two decades, ending with a mockery of the country's judicial framework.
It hurts that our blood does not boil at these unspeakable crimes against humanity and we have the audacity to call ourselves the torchbearers of the new world of hope and freedom.

Many attribute poor social indicators in India to her heavy reliance on the Soviet model for all these years. Partially true, however the subsequent non-reliance has yielded no better results either. Hence, there emerges a need for a more discreet and objective introspection, a certain level of conviction and a definitive plan of action.
The staggering economic growth of 3.5% per year shot upto 9% after the reforms were introduced and it was widely accepted that India took a bold, yet inevitable step of coming out of its cocoon. But, in the midst of all this hullabaloo almost everybody comfortably ignored the obscure, yet vital statistics that build a country's economy. These statistics, given the fancy name of 'social indicators', do not merely represent the jargon blabbered at human development conferences or crafted to vent out frustrations on coffee table conversations. These figures go a long way in creating a nation's destiny, laying foundation for the tomorrow we visualise for our future generations, if at all we do so.
When one talks of child nutrition or the problem of malnourishment, the premise does not remain limited to problems of acute poverty, non-availabilty of decent livelihood options or the lacunae in the public distribution sytem, in fact, it trickles down to the very soul of our socio-economic-cultural framework, evoking questions that are subtle, yet extremely vital. Questions of whether we can realise the new world of our dreams with a generation that was brought up with empty stomachs? Can we establish the foundation of a free thinking, free-spirited society with its youth harboring underdeveloped, poorly nourished bodies and minds?
Yet another set of disturbing questions....

Gandhi's India...I dont think I know it anymore!

Gandhi Jayanti remains one of the most significant days of the year to me. Not only does it remind me of one of the phenomena of all times that existed on this earth in the name of Mahatma Gandhi, but also it reaffirms within me the faith in the values he stood for, the values of truth, non-violence and love, the values whose presence in our hearts becomes more and more significant in this increasingly violent world.
However this year Gandhi Jayanti will remind me of the massacre in Khagaria, the massacre in which 100 gunmen, suspected to be Naxalites, mercilessly butchered 16 people, including 5 children. There are several questions that brutally follow this event. Are we actually becoming a violent society? Is armed struggle the only resort a common man finds in order to get noticed politically? Where does this road to violence and curbing violence with further massive forms of violence end?
The country has witnessed fresh attempts to curb naxal insurgencies in the recent times. An overall increase in armed forces to fight terror which includes additional troops, paramillitary forces and the state police force.
One can not help wondering if it would have been much effective to channelize these resources towards curbing the real causes behind this armed rebillion continuing for the past four decades, for this rebillion has been an outcome of an outright failure of government machinery, of social justice, of development. It is an aftermath of serious injustice incurred upon the poor.
There is a lot of mending to be done and it is not an easy task either. But the process has to begin somewhere.
I am reminded of the turmoil during partition. I am reminded of the continuous satyagraha Gandhi led against this violence, a satyagraha no less significant than the one he led against the Britishers. Only this time, to his great anguish, it were his own countrymen driven mad by the surge of hatred that swept away their entire sanity. Nevertheless, he continued his resistence without a hint of violence against this phase that symbolised one of the most bloodiest times of Indian History. And then it all ended, with Gandhi being shot dead by Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948. They say that 'Mahatma Gandhi achieved in death what he had striven for in his last months of life. His murder ended forever the insensate communal killing of neighbour by neighbour in India's villages and cities.'
I wonder what it was that evoked such an extraordinary sense of remorse in the masses, that brought back their sanity and their ability to look beyond the blinding fury of hatred? Was it the death of a man who led them in a manner unprecedented in the world history and whom they failed so miserably by the incessant killing of their own brothers? Or was it the values of love, peace and non-violence so deeply engraved in their conscience that resurfaced without much effort when they saw this messiah of love succumbing to death?
Are we not the same people? Have we not inherited the same values? Is there something fundamentally different in the substance we are made of? The questions are disturbing.

The ‘Naxal Threat’: As we call it!

It is neither easy, nor ordinary when the hands that plough the fields choose to raise guns. The incident dates back to the year 1967 when peasants in the Naxalbari village of West Bengal, rose in rebellion against ages of oppression and injustice. The rebellion escalated in the face of violence and soon insurgencies from various parts of the country surfaced. There was a huge participation of students, particularly in West Bengal where a number of students left their education to join the movement. What followed was a period of turmoil when numerous radical groups became active in different regions across the country.

The country has come a long way since then. We forgot Naxalbari; we forgot the movement, the raison d'être that led to it. What has remained is a term, largely ambiguous, Naxalism, another addition to the numerous ‘isms’ that continue hovering over our social, economic and political consciousness, but nevertheless inconsequential. In fact, it poses one of the greatest threats to the nation’s internal peace and harmony.

Where did we go wrong and where did ‘they’ go wrong? Or, is it the rift created between ‘we’ and ‘they’ that led to this state of affairs? The question has met with a shameful apathy since its inception and still awaits an answer. So do many questions that have been fostered by these years of insurgency.

The uprising at Naxalbari was supposed to be a wake-up call for our policy makers, governments and above all the ‘class’ that was constituted of both the oppressors and the majority which remained impassive to the plight of the oppressed. The unorganized rebellion was crushed with an iron hand and as time passed by it fragmented into numerous groups of varying degrees of extremism and varying ideologies. From what was initially a struggle for one’s basic human right to live with dignity, it transformed into a ‘class struggle’, and a cruel manifestation of the same in the principle of ‘annihilation of class enemy’.

The movement truly lost its direction, if it had any, and the world has changed in more ways than one since then. What is the significance of Naxalism in the current scenario is the question that needs to be pondered upon. Is creation of ‘Salwa Judums’ the solution for the rising militancy? Or, does the solution lie in a much deeper understanding of the entire problem, its dynamics, the factors that lead to such insurgencies and thereby undertaking some fundamental systemic reforms?