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After roundly criticising Laloo Prasad Yaday and demanding his resignation as
Chief Minister of Bihar, a leading newspaper concluded by asking what is a
million-dollar question: "Are we to be ruled by men like these in the fiftieth
year of our independence?". And as many would no doubt say, that's a good
question. One answer is that we get the leaders we deserve. If all we deserve
are men like Deve Gowda, Laloo Prasad Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Kanshi Ram,
then they are the people we will get and we had better learn to accept them. What
else can we do? Leadership these days goes by caste, not character. But it wasn't
that way in the first half of this century. Consider some of the early leaders:
Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Mahadev Govind Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale.
They were men of substance. And they were men ahead of their times. They were the
early graduates, men of learning and therefore men of substance. Then came
another generation with men like Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal, Bal Gangadhar
Tilak. Nobody spoke of them in terms of their caste; they were honoured because
of their deep sense of patriotism. They were followed by yet another generation
with men like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, Chitta Ranjan Das, men
willing to sacrifice their lives so that India became free. They constituted a
distinct breed. Then came yet another batch of leaders like Vithalbhai Patel,
Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru Govind Vallabh Pant, Rajagopalachari, Bal
Gangadhar Kher, Bidhan Chandra Roy, Subhas Chandra Bose. This generation paid of
their lives in jail. We revere these men for all their shortcomings, for the
sacrifices they made. For them politics was not a prelude to power. Always it
was an invitation to suffering.
They were aristocrats in their own way. They commanded respect wherever they went
and most of them were inveterate travellers. Whether it was Gandhi or Vallabhbhai
or Nehru, they were constantly on the go and addressed huge audiences wherever
they went. Their pictures hung in thousands of homes. Their names were hailed in
full-throated praise. They represented India's longing for freedom and liberty.
One could never think of the Mahatma as a Gujarati though sometimes he would
self-deprecatorily describe himself as a bania. Jawaharlal Nehru hailed from
Allahabad which was his anchor but he belonged to all India. Subhas Chandra Bose
was not just a Bengali hero, he was the idol of young India from the Himalayas to
the Cape. They were one and all men of greatness. Can one name even one today who
can be compared to the giants of yore? G. K. Moopanar can't hold a candle to
Rajagopalachari, either in scholarship or leadership qualities. Can we compare
Laloo Prasad Yadav to Babu Rajendra Prasad or to Jayaprakash Narayan? It would be
sacrilege even to mention them together in the same breath, as it would be to
compare Waghela to Vallabhbhai Patel. Sadly, sadly, one must admit that the
country today is totally lacking in leaders.
How does one explain this fall from grace? One explanation, of couse, is that
politics invites not the great souls but the riff raff to participate in it. When
no sacrifice is called for, politics is unattractive to refined men and women. But
it attracts the worst elements in society as pollen attracts bees. There is money
to be made, power to be exercised and criminals to be shielded for which there are
no takers among the good and the decent. This will explain the unusually large
number of men with criminal record who get elected to Legislative Assemblies. This
will also explain the large number of people who don't even wish to exercise their
franchise considering it a waste of time, knowing that under any circumstances
their candidate will be outvoted often through unfair means. In the days of
limited franchise the educated and the cognoscenti could choose one among them,
knowing fully well that they would be well represented. Today votes can be bought
by a gift of sari, a dhoti or a swig of liquor. Who would wish to compete in such
a situation? Men become leaders not by virtue of their social conscience or their
capacity to serve but often because of the muscle power they can summon, and they
money power they can organise. Decent men have no place in public life. I. K.
Gujral was not the first choice, nor the second nor third. He was named to be the
Prime Minister because the thieves fell out among themselves. Gujral's
constituency is not even Delhi; it is the India International Centre.
Let us be honest to ourselves and ask what it is that we want to see in a Prime
Minister. First and foremost we expect class, such as Jawaharlal Nehru possessed
in plenty and as Indira Gandhi did. They were head and shoulder above the rest. It
is all very well to say that we need a 'popular' leader. Laloo Prasad Yadav could
whip up caste enthusiasm and mass hysteria. Do we require a man like him to be our
Prime Minister? Compare Rajiv Gandhi with, say, Chandrababu Naidu or G. K.
Moopanar. Is there any comparison? Neither Chandrababu nor Moopanar can articulate
well in English. And neither has that indefinable something called class. What
about Mulayam Singh Yadav, the man who permitted copying in examinations and
liberally gave financial help - to put it tactfully to journalists? Can one ever
think of a Lal Bahadur Shastri indulging in such dirty tricks? And would one any
time really think that Hardanahalli Deve Gowda is Prime Ministerial material? He
was an embarrassment in an international gathering. Can we ever hope to get
another Jawaharlal Nehru or Rajiv Gandhi - except from the Bharatiya Janata Party
where we have at least two towering personalities in Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal
Kishan Advani? A Ramakrishna Hegde would have made an excellent Prime Minister but
he was shunted out by small men. In the end, thirteen parties between them could
not find one tall man and had to settle for I. K. Gujral, a politician with no
following and no base.
But Gujral should make an excellent Prime Minister, precisely because he does not
need to depend upon goons to manage booths or play upon caste sentiments to garner
votes. He has what all his colleagues, whether it is Deve Gowda, Laloo Prasad,
Mulayam Singh do not possess: class. He has a certain presence and he has
character. There is nothing vulgar about him. He may be in his late seventies,
but he is a modern man, as modern, perhaps, as Britain's newest and youngest Prime
Minister, Tony Blair. This is a man one can be proud of and he trusted to hold
his own in any international gathering. This cannot be said of most of our
politicians including Sitaram Kesri, whose ambitions outpaced his capacity. It
may be asked: is it important that we have a Prime Minister who can meet
international leaders on their own terms? In an increasingly globalised world, it
is. We should have a Prime Minister who is equally at ease at the Elysees, at 10
Downing Street or Buckingham Palace, at the White House or the Kremlin. It is all
very well to be a humble farmer, but that does not wash when international affairs
are at stake. We need someone who is sophisticated and presentable and could speak
with equal case and presence of mind whether at a Shivaji Park rally or a CNN
interview. There surely are plenty of humble farmers in the United States. But
the Americans still speak of John Kennedy with reverence if not positive awe and
only last week the British elected another handsome young man, Tony Blair, as
their Prime Minister. It is not that Britain is deficient in humble farmers.
Increasingly today leaders have to be of international standards and none of the
United Front leaders measure up to them. Gujral thus has turned out to be their
saviour. Sharad Pawar no doubt has a solid political base among Marathas but it
is hard to conceive him at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly or
the US Congress. One can't even think of him addressing a meeting at
Thiruvananthapuram, for that matter. As a matter of fact how many of the United
Front leaders have addressed public meetings all over India? This is where a
Vajpayee or an Advani score over all their competitors. In fact they have no
competitors. Vajpayee and Advani are made of the old mould of politicians like
Jawaharlal Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan. They are accepted all over India.
Truly, they are among the great.
There is not a single leader - if that word can at all be applied to the small men
who make the United Front - in government circles who can measure up to a Vajpayee
or an Advani who are both in a class by themselves. They are beyond state or
linguistic tags. They are national leaders, in the fullest sense of the term, men
known and respected in all corners of the country, for what they are and what they
are known to be. The time has come for Indians to speak out clearly and boldly
that they do not want the Laloos, the Mulayams, the Kanshi Rams and the Sitaram
Kesris, not even the Moopanars and the Chandrababu Naidus for the Prime
Ministership. The public has been bamboozled long enough, but now people must
express themselves in no uncertain words. that they will accept nothing but the
best.
There is no dearth of good men in this country. They have to be discovered and
encouraged to come out into the open. There are scores of Gujrals who are waiting
in the wings whose services the country needs badly. They must be coaxed to come
to centre stage and given the honour due to them. Then and then only can we
expect other nations to respect us and listen to us. All else is folly.
The task of weeding out the undesirables from politics is in the hands of the
intelligentsia which has for too long been suffering from a guilt complex. There
is nothing to be ashamed of in being the elite. In fact it is the elite that must
show the way to progress and provide true leadership. When will it decide to
shoulder that burden?
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