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Leadership in times of terror

By Harish Khare

We need leaders who will tame our vengeance, shame us out of our stubborn pettiness and enable us to cope with insecurities by helping us discover our potential for collective synergy.

YESTERDAY, WE celebrated Gandhi Jayanti in the all-too-familiar fashion. The constitutional functionaries made their annual pilgrimage to Rajghat. The State Governments and many other official agencies took out newspaper advertisements and supplements in memory of the Sabarmati Sant. Doordarshan, too, contrived to remember the Father of the Nation. These rituals may appear trite. May be these are. But the Mahatma remains the only morally inspiring national icon. In these times of eroding popular confidence in almost all our public institutions, yet another Gandhi Jayanti should provoke a thought as to how the Mahatma would have dealt with the challenge that terrorism poses to our collective sanity. How would he have marshalled the Indian nation's emotions at the time of a Godhra, an Ahmedabad or an Akshardham? Admittedly, our designated saviours have not been able to help us cope with the terrorists' challenge.

The terrorists' idea behind killing innocent men, women or children is to create a sense of collective vulnerability among the citizens. Outrageous and seemingly mindless use of violence is intended to instil a sense of fear that the next time around it could be the turn of this or that individual to fall prey to yet another terrorist's bullet. And those who have the responsibility of protecting the citizens are unable to come up with corrective measures or punitive responses against those who motivate, train, finance and arm these terror-vendors. Anger and resentment prompt the citizens to demand that their leaders perform rites of retribution against our enemies, real or imaginary.

The leadership's most obvious task, then, defines itself in times of terror: how to talk the citizens out of a sense of helplessness and how to harness the collective anger and anxiety as a positive force. Citizens need to be reassured that their leaders share their sense of vulnerability; hence, the exaggerated stress on the Prime Minister cutting short his foreign tour when the Akshardham outrage took place. It was symbolism worth its weight in gold that A. B. Vajpayee flew back straight to Gandhinagar, offering words of assurance to an outraged nation that the Indian state was not going to buckle under the threat from a bunch of jehadi terrorists. At the same time, the Prime Minister took care to warn against any cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation; anger was transmuted into a calm and considered response. No less thoughtful was the decision of L.K. Advani to fly out to Gandhinagar, generating images of a hands-on Home Minister, signalling that at least this time New Delhi was not going to countenance a repeat of the post-Godhra kind of violence. Also, the traumatised nation was able to see for itself that the country had the requisite instruments — in this instance, the National Security Guards — to put the mischief-makers out of business. Hence also the rite of reserve re-assurance: words of praise and rituals of salutes and honours for the dead commandos from a sufficiently grateful nation.

Leadership in times of terror, however, is not a one-shot deal. It means having the skills, the willingness and the credibility to educate the masses that all conflicts — conventional or unconventional, like against the proxy war being waged by Pakistan — entail costs. Leadership means preparing and convincing the citizens that these costs and hardships are worth paying, and that the short-term inconveniences and sacrifices they are being asked to put up with would produce long-term gains. In the particular case of state-sponsored terrorism from Pakistan, the crux of leadership is to ensure that in the process of defeating that challenge we do not end up becoming a mirror image of Pakistan, raising vengeance and retaliation as the highest principles of statecraft.

This leadership task is not easily achieved. Make no mistake about it, even when the ramparts of the Indian state happen to be manned by self-proclaimed nationalists and deshbhakts; at best, the task has been approximated in fits and starts in the last four years. The reason is perhaps not too difficult to dissect. Most BJP leaders have fallen way short of an inspiring national stature because of a visceral inability to make the transition from a bus-burner, bandh-organiser to habits of responsible ruling; hence they often are unable to make the obvious moral choice between sectarian partisanship and the country's collective well-being. They remain in thrall of their cultivated duplicity of being committed to the so-called "NDA agenda" without having jettisoned the BJP's exclusivist Hindutva designs. That is why so often the Vajpayee Government finds itself having to explain its moderation to the VHP/RSS crowd, and at other times it tries its best to convince the nation that it does not share the Sangh Parivar's mad prescriptions.

Leadership is not and cannot be a matter of adaptability in the art of sleight of hand. Nor is leadership simply a matter of someone capturing a party organisation or becoming a Cabinet Minister. The Venkaiah Naidus and the Bangaru Laxmans simply do not come close to leadership role. Nor does someone become a leader just because a couple of newspapers may decide to become his cheerleaders. Nor, for that matter, can someone be deprived of the leadership role simply because a media mafia may decide to shut him out. All said and done, a genuine leader inevitably has to have the attributes of a hero. And every society has an intrinsic need for heroes, those individuals who by words and deeds would move millions to forget their personal pains and subjective hardship and to sublimate their failures into a collective triumph and joy. We search and tend to locate our heroes among exceptional achievers — a swashbuckling batsman, a captivating cine artiste, a daring commando — who provide temporary relief from our daily quota of setbacks, disappointments and despairs.

But a leader is much more than just a hero; whereas a hero enchants us with his/her accomplishments or talents for a few hours, a leader has to inspire us on a daily basis to morally defensible purpose, spurring the country to purposefully ennobling action. Ipso facto, a leader also has to have a bit of the chief executive in him, someone who knows how to get things done, how to motivate others — colleagues and subordinates — and to hone their energy, emotions and enthusiasm for a collective goal. In the larger democratic context, leadership thus becomes a relationship of moral equation between the leader(s) and the citizens.

As a matter of fact, we keep coming across examples of exceptional leadership from those least suspected of wanting the limelight for themselves. A J.M. Lyngdoh suddenly decides that moral cowardice would not go well with his constitutional responsibility, and raises the institutional profile of the Election Commission and restores Indian democracy's efficacy; a J. S. Verma quietly helps the National Human Rights Commission shed its institutional habits of equivocation and diffidence when confronted with organised violence against the minorities in Gujarat; or, in bullet-ridden Kashmir, there emerges a Sajjad Lone, who refuses to let the Pakistani guns control his politics and rhetoric and, unlike another son, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, refuses to break bread with the killers of his father.

Violence at home or from abroad tests not only the resourcefulness of our security apparatus, it also challenges the leaders to search within themselves for their dormant moral courage.

Times of crisis invite the leader to discover within him that capacity to cast off the no-good partisan and follower in order to reach out to decent people on the other side of the divide. Above all, it is in times of terror that we need leaders who will tame our vengeance, shame us out of our stubborn pettiness and enable us to cope with insecurities by helping us discover our potential for collective synergy.

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