Moral Leadership

Offstumped begins a series of musings to mark the end of the year of 2008, to reflect on the year gone by and the challenges ahead. In the first post of this series. Offstumped has decided to focus on something this nation acutely needs and finds very little in supply at this hour of national crisis.

When one thinks of moral leadership, one is reminded of the episode in Mahabharata that has both Arjuna and Duryodhana at Krishna’s beside seeking his support with entirely different motives but both Arjuna and Duryodhana agree on one thing – Krishna’s unquestioned status as a moral leader who stood for Dharma above all else.

Today we in India are cursed with a malignancy that is consuming us at an alarming rate. The symptoms of this malignancy are evident in our public discourse that views every issue through the prism of partisan politics. Every subject has a political response, every public stance is a calculated political move and every piece of public criticism is dismissive, partisan and almost borders the outrageous.

Nothing exemplifies this cynical, partisan opportunism that has come to characterise our politics better than the response of a Muslim Member of Parliament from the JD-U to the Antulay episode

“I was made an MP to secure Muslim votes. But how will Muslims vote to make Advani the Prime Minister of this country? I have communicated this feeling of my community to senior party leaders.

If this partisan politicisation of the public discourse is at one extreme, at the other extreme is a tendency to disengage from the public debate by blaming politics for all evils.

In response to either extreme some have called for the country to be united to send a strong message to those from across our borders who lose no opportunity in stoking the partisan fires within our borders.

But then these calls for Unity are unfortunately are merely a window dressing exercise to put “lipstick over a doghouse” which the Indian Express in it editorial today on the Antulay episode describes very eloquently:

the larger danger is that our politics is fragmenting into so many separate discursive universes, each founded on a notion that the state is partisan. This is the matrix Antulay and Digvijay Singh were attempting to work in to optimise some perceived political gain.

To address this partisan fragmentation it is not merely enough that we pretend to be united grudgingly for that would be an exercise in political correctness no different from what the Congress party attempted in Parliament today.

To address this partisan fragmentation we need to go beyond this to agree that there are some principles, some values that are above beyond partisan politics that we will not quibble about. We need to agree that there are some unwritten rules that will not be bent or broken to pander or appease anyone.

We need to agree that there is such a thing as a Dharma in our public affairs that will not be sacrificed at the altar of partisan politics.

But who then becomes the voice of this Dharma ?  

Who commands this respect and enjoys this credibility and trust across the partisan political divide that even if one may have differences with such a voice one would not delegitimise the moral high ground that voice is seeking to occuppy by ascribing partisan motives to it.

Not too long ago Gandhi occuppied that moral high ground in this nation, one didnt always agree with him, he didnt always get it right, but he had enough of a reservoir of credibility and trust that when he spoke as the voice of Dharma people listened and a divided nation rallied around him.

Today the nation suffers a vaccum of Moral Leadership. We are prone to ascribe political motives to every public action that we dont fully understand or trust. In such an environment of Dharma-Deficit it becomes extremely difficult for this nation to muster the capacity to reconcile deep fault lines within the fabric of our society and to shed the baggage of our sub-continental past that slows us down from marching forward.

It is foolish and naive to expect this nation to produce another Gandhi in the current circumstances. But it is not beyond the realm of possible for this nation of billion to produce a million “Desire-less Actions” to overcome the trust deficit, re-discover credibilty in each other’s actions and to ultimately find that Dharma in our Public Affairs that we can keep above partsianship. If not by design, by default.

As a small beginning Offstumped appeals to the Leader of the Oppositon Mr. L.K. Advani, to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi to set an example by forefeiting political dividends and providing moral leadership on atleast one issue of their choice.

Filed under: DesiPundit, Dharma-debates, Lok Sabha Polls 2008-2009, War on Mumbai, War on Terror, betrayal of aam admi, jeetega-bharat