The leadership deficit

If the riots in England and America’s debt crisis have a silver lining it’s that they prove that India does not have a monopoly on leadership deficit.

It would not be inaccurate to say that even their traditional supporters have been underwhelmed by the lack of leadership displayed by Barack Obama and David Cameron in their recent moments of crisis.

In India, where Manmohan Singh’s reluctance to step up to the podium and assume the responsibility of his job has been the elephant in the nation’s drawing room, the problem has assumed chronic proportions.

I cannot recall a situation as extraordinary as this, where an activist has so publicly and urgently urged the Prime Minister of India to come clean — “redeem himself”, admit to “poor performance” and reconnect with his countrymen — as was done this Thursday in Times of India by Kiran Bedi (“Mr Prime Minister, allow me to present you with a draft of your Independence Day speech”).

Even if we ignore the slightly hysterical sentiment of what she recommends the PM say (“My fellow Indians, I stand here… to ask for redemption”) the heft of what Ms Bedi, who is herself a skilled orator and an astute judge of audiences, is saying cannot be ignored: the country wants an apology from its leaders for their failure at the job. And who better than the top guy on the job to deliver it?

In America, Mr Obama’s caving in to Republican stonewalling has resulted in (to paraphrase the lyrics from Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs Robinson”) a nation turning its lonely eyes towards him.

“These are the times when Americans look to Washington for leadership and solutions. Instead, they’ve gotten a sideshow debate over the long-term implications of the budget deficit — a fight that can wait for another day,” writes Michael Hiltzik in Los Angeles Times.

And in England, British Labour MP and political strategist John McTernan writes, “As we face a breakdown of social norms in the UK and a potential meltdown of the global financial system, what can we tell about our current generation of political leaders? The most obvious answer is this: these crises have exposed a shocking absence of meaningful leadership.”

The issue of leadership has engaged some of the greatest minds, from Plato and Plutarch to Thomas Carlyle and Francis Galton.

And whereas earlier the “trait” theory of leadership held sway (leaders were born, not developed, and possessed certain common characteristics), later others prevailed, primarily the “situational” theory of leadership — the times produce the person and not the other way around.

Be that as it may, the consensus on leadership is that leaders require basic traits like intelligence, adjustment, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, charisma and general self-efficacy.

In such arid times it would be prudent to recall that many of us in our lifetimes have experienced great leadership: Nelson Mandela and F W de Klerk, Vallabhbhai Patel, Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill and Mikhail Gorbachev have all displayed a willingness to bite the bullet, think out of the box, take the hard decisions, rise as their occasions demanded (and embrace every cliché known to this writer!).

Still want proof that the world believes there is a crisis of leadership? A Google search yields 35,800,000 results for “good leaders”.

And for “failure of leadership”? A staggering 93,900,000!

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer
malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com