By Indranil Banerjea
The other day I had an opportunity of attending a seminar at India International Centre, New Delhi. It was a gathering of distinguished scholars, retired senior bureaucrats, diplomats, law makers and law breakers – I mean politicians and members of legal fraternity.
The subject for discussion was quality of leadership: Does India Have Leaders to guide the country in 21st Century? I fail to understand why such a subject was chosen for the seminar. If we read history, great leaders were born and not made by political circumstances.
I’m more than convinced of the moral and intellectual weakness of the Indian intelligentsia as it is today, that is their piteous yearning for a leader. They want him so that they might be assured of a life of ease, security, and mediocre well-being as a gift from him and therefore without any effort of their own. The cry for a leader was heard as soon as British rule disappeared from India. Whenever I have spoken about unsatisfactory political, social, or economic conditions in India during the last 30-years or so I have got the stereotyped reply: “We have no leaders,” or its alternative, “We need a dictator.” Nehru was not accepted as one.
Since his death the yearning has taken a more deluded form, which makes the intelligentsia see a leader in anyone who has a little more energy, assertiveness, obstinacy, or even perversity than they possess. These men forget that India did have men who could be regarded as leaders by any standards adopted for them, for instance – to mention only three – Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Subhas Chandra Bose. Even they have made no difference to the course of Indian history or the condition of the Indian people after independence.
The truth is that we educated Indians of today have no understanding of the phenomenon of leadership, because, on the one hand, they have ceased to be the raw material out of which leaders may emerge, and, on the other, become incapable of providing the following needed by all leaders. I have always thought of leadership among men in terms of a chemical phenomenon, that of crystallisation. Crystals can form only in a highly saturated solution in water of the material of which they are made. In the same way, the qualities which are present in a concentrated form in the leaders have to be present in a diluted form in the whole population. Without this correlation there can be no leaders.
The historical junctures in which leaders appear, and appear at a very young age, are political or social revolutions in a country. Thus every such revolution has seen men of exceptional ability who are also young, ranged in a hierarchy. The leader of this corps of leaders might be very gifted, but he is to a greater or lesser degree only the primus inter pares – the first among equals. I shall illustrate the correlation of revolution, leadership, and youth by giving some examples, beginning with Napoleonic France.
When in 1800 Napoleon as First Consul, became the dictator of France, he was 30. He had with him 22 soldiers who became his active Marshals. None of them were above 50; only four were between 40 and 50, the oldest being 47; six were between 36 and 40; 11 between 30 and 35; and one was 26. Only two of them were of noble birth, the others came from the middle-class, and even the working class. All of them rose by virtue of their talent, and never by patronage. They did not have to be groomed for their position.
At the time of the Meiji Revolution in Japan, the Emperor (Mutsuhito) was only 16: the leaders of the revolution were young: Okubo was 38, Itagaki 31, Okuma 30, and Ito, the most active and energetic of them, only 27.
In China, Sun Yat-sen emerged as a leader before he was 30; Chiang Kai-shek became the dictator of his country when 41; and Mao emerged as leader when he was 27.
Coming now to the Russian Revolution of 1917, one finds that Lenin was then 47, Kalinin 42, Stalin 38, Trotsky 38, Kamenev 34, Zinoview 34, and Bukharin 29.
Last of all in Turkey, Mustafa restored the position of his country after the defeat in the First World War when he was 41. But he had already established his reputation as a military leader at the age of 34 when he commanded in the Gallipoli Peninsula and contributed to the Turkish victory over the British in 1915. Ismet who became the leader in Turkey after Kemal, was only 38 when he won the decisive battle of Afiyon Karahisar in 1922.
It might also be added that all the Indians who attained to the position of leaders in the nationalist movement had emerged as such between the ages of twenty five and thirty, talent being precocious in India. But no upsurge of young men was seen in 1947, when it should have occurred.
So, Nehru, himself nearly 58, had to form his government with men who were even older than he. The only man who was below 50 was Sardar Baldev Singh, and everybody knows why he was included. About the men with whom he had to run the government of independent India from 1947 Nehru had already written in 1939, when many of them were at the head of the Congress governments formed in the provinces under the Act of 1935: “They are worn out in mind and body and their troubles from all directions tend to increase. I would hate to have job.” This is a human situation of ominous significance. It would be foolish to dogmatise about the absence of talent in contemporary India. Genetic, social, and cultural factors in combination may be responsible for it. In any case, nothing can be done about it by conscious effort. “Genius bloweth where it listeth.” But men of ordinary stature can do something: they can work hard to make up by joint, average effort a part at least of what can be accomplished by leaders of genius. But even this response to the challenge before India is not coming from the generations below 50, not to speak of 30. INAV
