Desperately seeking exemplary leaders
IT IS CLEAR THAT the initial euphoria surrounding the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) rise to stardom has given way to a collective sense of bafflement at the recent antics of Mr Kejriwal and Co. Even as the media continues to forcefully showcase the Modi-Rahul contest as if it were a fait accompli, for many aam aadmis and aurats, the country’s mainstream political drama seems a hodgepodge of the bizzare and banal. Despite their best efforts, leaders in the Congress and BJP cannot seem to get past clichés and age-old platitudes, regurgitating tired lines of argument rooted in their political parties’ twentieth century orthodoxies. The rise of the AAP is essentially the result of such banality, of the staggering lack of political inventiveness by the established parties. Unfortunately, after over three weeks in power, it appears that the AAP leaders cannot seem to decide whether they are most comfortable in their old avatar as street-fighters, or if they want to function within the structures of parliamentary democracy as a political party.
This begs a critical question: What sorts of political leaders do Indians really want; and relatedly, what should the citizenry expect of political parties today? There are obviously many answers to these questions, but most people will agree that political parties are the pillars of India’s democratic framework. No matter how unhappy the electorate is (and undoubtedly it is pretty livid today) it elects MPs and MLAs so that they fulfill their political parties’ manifestoes. When viewed this way, political parties and elected representatives should embody, in the clearest sense, the ideals and values of the electorate, and more generally, those enshrined in the Constitution.
Has this abstract democratic ideal ever been realised in practice? Possibly, on occasion, in the past... But in the present context of political atrophy, crony capitalism, and policy paralysis in the corridors of power, what sorts of expectations should the citizenry harbour on issues of public accountability (and therefore, morality)? More generally, do today’s political leaders have the capacity to rise above their self-interest to serve the needs of the public good, to become exemplars of the values and ideals that our democracy stands for?
On the subject of how to understand the moral core of public life, it is often valuable to turn to that most original of Indian politicians, Mahatma Gandhi. Akeel Bilgrami (in an essay entitled Gandhi, the Philosopher, published in the Economic and Political Weekly in September 2003) argues that Gandhi’s ideas contain an implicit but bold proposal: “When one chooses for oneself, one sets an example to everyone.” For Gandhi, a satyagrahi was required to live an exemplary life. And as an exemplar, he embodied (or as Erik Erikson put it, “actualised”) the ideals that he stood for in the pursuit of his ends, the hardest of which was the truth.
How does this notion of the satyagrahi (or for our purposes, the “politician”) as exemplar play out in real life? Bilgrami answers this with an anecdote from when he was a boy on a walk with his father: “One day, walking on a path alongside a beach we came across a wallet with some rupees sticking visibly out of it. …
My father said: ‘Akeel, why should we not take that?’ Flustered at first, I said something like, ‘… I think we should take it.’ My father looked most irritated, and asked, ‘Why?’ And I am pretty sure I remember saying words more or less amounting to the classic response: ‘Because if we don’t take it then I suppose someone else will.’ My father, looking as if he were going to mount to great heights of denunciation, suddenly changed his expression, and he said magnificently, but without logic (or so it seemed to me then): ‘If we don’t take it, nobody else will.’”
Bilgrami says that as a satyagrahi, Gandhi does not treat the “truth” as a cognitive notion at all, but as an experiential notion, woven into everyday practices
What does this ideal of the satyagrahi as exemplar offer today’s politician? As the institutional embodiment of public life, politicians must (at the very least try to) exemplify moral turpitude. Their legitimacy as politicians depends on this. For the political establishment to meet its responsibilities it needs to not only function transparently and with accountability, but must also be perceived to function in such a manner for the public to have faith in it.
On whether our politicians come close to embodying this ideal, the prognosis, I’m afraid, does not look good. This sobering conclusion emerges from two related developments over the past six months. In a significant judgment in June 2013, India’s Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) ruled in favour of bringing India’s political parties under the ambit of the Right to Information Act (RTI) as a “public authority.” According to the Constitution, a public authority is a “non-governmental organisation substantially financed, directly or indirectly by funds provided by the appropriate government.” The rationale for this, as stated in the CIC’s order, lies in the “public” character of the functions that political parties perform. The CIC’s judgment relies on the impeccable logic that public institutions that receive public benefits because they serve a public good should be subject to public scrutiny. Shockingly, almost all political parties have joined hands in opposition to the CIC’s judgment, and are seeking to amend the RTI Act through a Standing Committee of Parliament.
And as this fight for political transparency unfolds, claims by Arvind Kejriwal—who “will run politics from the road”—that he is an “anarchist” appear utterly befuddling since, if this were so, he should not be in government as Delhi’s Chief Minister! Actually, there is nothing inherently wrong with anarchism, since Mahatma Gandhi’s anarchist views ended up doing India a world of good. Unfortunately, Kejriwal, for all of his frugality and claims of turpitude, is also guilty of moral posturing and sanctimonious heavy-handedness that appear very un-Gandhian and disingenuous at too many levels. As we look forward to an interesting 2014, the good citizens of India are well advised to keep this in mind when rallying around Kejriwal the next time he sits on a dharna. By all accounts, the search for exemplary Indian leaders seems ongoing.