Six months that make a leader

As time goes on, most elected leaders run out of ideas. It seems to hold as true for the world as for India

In early 2008, when he was running for the office of president, Barack Obama met Rupert Murdoch, the man who owned and ran News Corp, the world’s largest news media business. Mr Murdoch is three decades older than Mr Obama, and had, according to a report, of their meeting, “a simple thought to share with Obama.”

This thought was that he, Murdoch, had known and met every American president since Harry Truman, who left office in 1953. His advice was that “leadership was about what you did in the first six months.” Mr Murdoch was right about front-loading agendas: Mr Obama got his affordable health Act (Obamacare) passed in his first term but struggled in the second term to get things done, though he remained and remains popular.

The reason for going back to this is events from this week: The enigmatic and unpredictable Donald Trump has announced he is running for president again in 2024, having lost two years ago. Though many in the media have been dismissive about his chances, particularly after the tepid performance of his party this month in the midterm elections — candidates personally backed by Mr Trump taking an especially severe hammering — he is popular with a large section of devotees.

Even after all the scandals that haunted his years in office, his approval rating at the end of October 2020, days before the election he lost, was 46 per cent, the same as it was when he took office four years previously. Though it fell following the insurrection attempt on the US Capitol after his defeat, it is clear that he is the most influential individual in the Republican Party.

Many of the things that he sought to achieve, including a trade war with China, remain in place and it is unclear what else he can achieve if he wins a second term.

The fact is that most elected leaders with agendas get things done early on in their first terms. As time goes on, they run out of ideas or the ideas they have run out of steam. This is true particularly of leaders who are elected but have little or no opposition. Their power and strength gives them agency but unfortunately that is not all that is needed to achieve results.

^{Illustration: Binay Sinha}

Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has been in office for 23 years, became president in late 1999 when the country’s per capita gross domestic product (current US dollars) was $1,330. It went up quickly under him in the initial years, reaching $11,600 in 2008 because of the appreciation of the ruble and healthy growth. It has remained more or less there in the 12 years since, with negative growth or no growth in four of those years (2009, 2014, 2015 and 2020). What he has contributed to the country in this period is not especially positive. But he clings on.

Perhaps, the holding of office is itself the end to such people and there is no other objective, but that seems to be a dim view of human ambition. Surely, leaders want to be seen and if nothing else would want to see themselves as having achieved something.

Jawaharlal Nehru did not deliver much by way of economic growth, but he built institutions throughout his long innings of a decade and a half. As late as 1961, the government of India founded the National Institute of Design, which still produces world-class aesthetes, as those of us fortunate enough to know some of them will testify. It is highly unusual for someone to keep building things of quality as late into their time in office as Nehru so seemingly effortlessly did. He would not be displeased to see where some of the institutions he built and thought up stand today.

Let me close with another example that is recent.

India’s merchandise exports were $314 billion in 2013; $322 billion in 2014; and then fell for three years to below $300 billion in 2015, 2016 and 2017, before coming back in 2018 and 2019 to where they were in 2014. This is not a record of growth. The following year they fell to $276 billion and this was of course because of the pandemic. Last year, 2021, exports rose to $395 billion. Global trade expanded by about 25 per cent in that period and that tide lifted all boats. Was this the understanding of growth that was communicated by the Government of India? Not really. The rhetoric was about how exports were now the great new driver of growth. Average the two years out and we remain more or less where we were when this government first came to office. PTI ran a report on October 16, headlined: “India will achieve USD 2 trillion export target by 2030: Piyush Goyal”. Exactly a month later, the agency reported that October exports were down 17 per cent to where they were before the pandemic. A story in a business daily that had anticipated the fall in numbers said “the minister (Goyal) sought inputs on how the weakness in the numbers could be addressed.” However, it is clear to anyone looking at the trend by year that this was in fact inevitable. More than weakness, it is return to the norm. In August 2018, then commerce minister Suresh Prabhu said exports would double by 2025. We know what came of that.

What is such confidence based on? We do not know. Leadership appears to be a strange thing. It inflates one’s sense of what can be done through one’s genius, though the data points us the other way.

The fact that all of us in most fields achieve things early on and then stagnate or regress does not seem to be how great leaders view themselves.

The writer is chair of Amnesty International India