Of the many qualities of a leader, one of the most important is the commitment with which ideals are held and valued. This needs no confirmation from any social scientists, for very often it is common sense that provides the most penetrating insights into issues that have direct and profound bearings into everyday life. And what other thing can have as much impact on everyday life as the quality of leadership any society gets. Ask any man or woman on the streets, literate or otherwise, and they will have the same answer `“ a leader without ideals, or a clear notion of a social goal, is no leader. The other important quality of a leader is, he must have the ability to draw up a clear roadmap as to how his ideals can be actualized. This again is street wisdom as much as it would be an absorbing agenda for highbrow academic seminar rooms and the classrooms of management schools. Do our leaders have these qualities, is an intriguing question. Many of them do, there can be no question about it, but the nagging doubt that arguably all of us would have expressed sometime or the other is, many of them do not seem to possess them. Why then do our voters allow those who lack this quality to return is a question that not many have asked themselves seriously or honestly, hence the recurrence of the phenomenon. The result is, we have many leaders in form only but not in substance. This leadership vacuum is, in our opinion, is at the core of some of the most vexed problems of Manipur, most pertinently, the question of insurgency. For ultimately, ideals are nobody`™s monopoly, and so also leadership, and if one set of leaders are unable to provide it, there will be others who would claim the role. Insurgency in this sense is very much a challenge and contest for this leadership space. Resolving the problem will in the end have also to be about resolving this issue.
But if there is a lack of ideal in the formal political leadership, the contenders lack the form. There can be no argument that all insurrections, including the ones we are witnessed to, are fired by ideals, hence their popular appeals. But the danger here is, when there are no definite forms to the leadership they provide, the ideals themselves come to replace the form. That is to say, the ideals become the system itself, resulting in a mix that have led to the most oppressive dictatorships in history. Stalin, Pol Pot, Trosky, Mao were all idealists, and people still admire their ideals. Their only failure was, they allowed their ideals, and ultimately themselves, to not only substitute the system, but to become the system itself. History bears testimony as to how oppressive ideals without moderation by a formal and objectified roadmap can get. In the modern context, this moderation must have to be looked for in a belief in constitutionalism. This would understandably limit the definition of leadership, for then a leader would have to be how the consensual constitution defines what a leader is, how he is to be selected and how deposed etc. In mature Western democracies, such as for instance England, we do hear of such stories as how even former Prime Minister Tony Blair, while still in office, have had to visit police station to face questioning by the officer-in-charge, and complete mandatory calls of the law for the drunken driving of his son etc. Nobody in this part of the world would not be amused or wonderstruck by such accounts of the law, and the clear perimeters it draws around this definition of leadership, but on second though, we are left convinced that such respect for constitutionalism is the only path that can keep men entrusted with power from becoming despotic dictators. If the form can dilute and destroy ideals, as is happening in our formal politics of today, an overflow of ideals can subsume the form, if the ideals are not drawn within the guidelines of a definite and institutionalized constitutionalism. The latter, it must be admitted, is one of the bane of the leadership of the non-official kind, in fact the insurgency movements in our region. The challenge of leadership then is, to have the ideals as well as the system `“ but separate from each other and one moderating the other.
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam