Of snakes and leaders…

We’ve had enough of the former

Machiavelli wrote that when states reach a nadir due to mis-governance, corruption and internal dissentions, only a person of the calibre of the founder of the nation is able to set things right again. How accurately this saying applies to our present pathetic condition, as the Quaid’s most laudable attribute was his personal integrity, a trait conceded by one and all. What a world of difference it would make if the current crop of leaders possessed even a fraction of that legendary incorruptibility. Machiavelli got it right about sick societies 500 years back.

The ideologically driven political leader has a burning concern for human suffering and the disinherited in particular. Mao Zedong constantly exhorted his colleagues, ‘We must go among the masses and concern ourselves with their weal and woe’, and ‘We must make the broad masses realise that we represent their interests, that our lives and theirs are intimately interwoven’. Despite the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, China’s economy at the time of his death was the sixth largest in the world. The nation of opium eaters regained its self-respect, and the hard work of the idealistic pioneers was continued by pragmatic and shrewd successors. Today, China is number two in the world… and counting.

The second is a clear vision and a set of policies to translate that vision into a reality. This requires of the leader a steely courage and steadfastness, with a rational as well as imaginative approach to problem-solving. It certainly excludes histrionics, and political blackmail of the provincial ‘card’ or ‘political actors are out to get me’ variety.

The Welsh Wizard, Liberal British statesman David Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Exchequer fought tooth and nail with his ‘rich armoury of rhetoric’ to impose a tax on the landed classes (the People’s Budget, 1909). The landowning Conservatives with a majority in the House of Lords opposed it with equal ferocity. A new election in 1910 decided the issue in the Liberal’s favour and the Upper House never returned a Treasury bill to the Commons again. Britain was truly launched on the path of a welfare state by Lloyd George’s social measures, such as old age pensions, and unemployment and sickness insurance in the face of fanatical opposition, hatred almost. Can one ever imagine such idealism from our legislators, in taxing their astronomical land holdings and their billions?

An unwavering Kemal Ataturk (‘the Gray Wolf’) despite great personal risk from numerous enemies, grasped a screaming and protesting Turkey by the neck and dragged it into the modern era. When the Duchess of Windsor (previously Wallis Simpson) met Ataturk she wrote later in her autobiography, ‘In Turkey we met Kemal Ataturk, and I saw in his eyes the same pale blue fire I had earlier seen in the eyes of Adolf Hitler’. Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, a many-sided personality, at the age of 66, courageously rallied the British people and led them to victory in their life and death struggle against Germany in World War II. By his inflexible defiance, brilliant speeches and radio broadcasts, ‘he mobilised the English language and sent it into battle’. Former Cuban President Fidel Castro, barely 90 miles from the US mainland, braved US economic sanctions since 1960 without possessing any real natural resources, beat off a CIA sponsored invasion and about forty assassination attempts on his life, survived the demise of the Soviet Union, and despite illness still takes aim at the new imperialists in his newspaper articles. That is defiance for you, our ever slavish and apprehensive rulers!

The third is a capacity for hard work, doggedness and a willingness to deal with the dull details of administration. Lenin once called the Pravda editor and later Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov ‘the best filing clerk in the Soviet Union’. The ‘landlord’ (as Stalin was nicknamed) and the commissars were all ‘desk men’ working long hours in the musty rooms of the medieval Kremlin fortress. The working could go on till late into the night. But if, at one in the morning the ‘landlord’ asked for a minister and was told he had already left, it was possible, especially in the turbulent decade of the ‘30s, for the unfortunate official to be exiled to Siberia, or in extreme cases be sent even ‘farther’. But, in a couple of decades, Russia was catapulted to the forefront of the major powers. A phenomenal capacity for hard work and unremitting toil must be a leader’s element, he must be ‘born and made’ for it.

Above all, the committed political leader is aloof, indeed scornful, of money and material wealth, and above all abhors using his position to enrich himself. Hungry for power, granted, and in its single-minded pursuit and retention, the ultimate yardstick of every successful politician, after all. But he is not ‘contaminated’ by base bribes or addicted to ‘sell and mart his offices for gold… to undeservers’, the Bard’s colourful phrase for cronyism.

Aneurin Bevan, the British Labour party politician and one of the greatest parliamentary orators rightly remarked, ‘Let me give you a personal confession of faith. I found in my life that the burdens of political life are too great to be borne for trivial ends. The sacrifices are too much, unless we have something really serious in mind…’

The most serious obstacle in making independent decisions for a leader or high public officials lie in their parking of their booty abroad. Such mercantile rulers and functionaries are sitting ducks for blackmail due to their dread of the beloved assets being frozen, in case they do not toe a certain foreign line. They represent a clear and present conflict of interest, with personal gain often overriding the national good. High office and foreign ‘nest-eggs’ are a dangerous mix, and there should be a strict law against it.

That most-demonised of all world statesmen, Adolf Hitler always held that it was demeaning for him, as an artist, to personally handle money. Joseph Stalin’s, the ‘Chingiz Khan with a telephone’, monthly salary (300 roubles in the 1930s?) was disposed off by his personal secretary. And then there is Lee Kwan Yew, who transformed a desolate stretch of sandy beach into the economic powerhouse of Singapore. He decided very early on, he wrote, that ‘either I can be rich or my country can be rich’, and opted for the second option, the right option. But our leaders seem besotted with the dance around the golden calf.

Our prime minister, after a lapse of four years, has suddenly acquired a voice and, it would seem, a spine. Every day brings a new and nasty statement by him on the apex court and the brass. Before, he had been meek and modest, and indeed had much reason to be both! But now he has turned into a veritable loudmouth and a braggart, not speaking softly but still carrying a big stick! It is unfortunate that his poisoned barbs and darts are mainly directed at one of the pillars of the state, the Supreme Court judges. But it is only hot air, the still insecure pomposity of one who has done exceedingly well for himself.

We would even welcome the aloof and Olympian grandeur of a De Gaulle (‘lunar but not cold’), but no more of these degenerates. After seeing our elite in action, how one agrees with these words: ‘In the end it is character not cleverness that counts; goodness and simplicity not analytical subtlety, and the power to spin verbal webs’. We have not seen the like of a true leader in ages, and it is high time he put in an appearance…

The writer is a freelance columnist.