Opinion Who leadeth me?

Advani,on his voyage of rediscovery,has reneged on his earlier stand that he was not in the running,and now wants the party to decide. The next rung of leadership,Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj,are clearly both contenders — but their own rivalry has left the issue unresolved. Party President Nitin Gadkari now wants to contest a Lok Sabha seat,though he denies,unconvincingly,any higher ambition.

Then there is the perennial candidate,Narendra Modi,who calculatingly plays his cards close to his 46-inch chest. Finally,we have the heir apparent,Rahul Gandhi,who curiously,either doesn’t seem all that interested in the job or is content to wait till it falls into his lap. There are others,Nitish Kumar for one; we also have Yashwant Sinha stating that there are many BJP leaders capable of becoming PM,a broad hint that he deserves to be among the contenders.

It’s an increasingly crowded field but how qualified are they as individuals to lead India onto the increasingly treacherous road that looms ahead,whether it is 2012 or 2014? Great sportsmen,as Jaywant Lele reveals in his recently released book,while talking about Sachin Tendulkar’s captaincy,do not necessarily make great leaders.

Similarly,articulate,high-profile politicians are not necessarily ideal leaders. Equally,being effective chief ministers is no guarantee of effective national leadership where challenges are multiplied manifold and regional loyalty is lacking. Moreover,India seems wedded to coalition politics for some years yet ,which means dealing with parties of contrasting ideologies. Nor,as Singh proves,are ethics and integrity of much use in the kind of immoral,backroom-motivated politics currently in vogue.

Leadership and high achievement or exalted professional reputation are also not the same thing. Barack Obama in America,Silvio Berlusconi in Italy,Nicolas Sarkozy in France,David Cameron in the UK,are all victims of their past achievements clashing with high expectations. As Martin Luther King once said: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort,but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

At no time in recent history,has challenge and controversy been so dominant as now. Indian leaders of late,Singh in particular,have taken comfort and recourse in collective and often conflicting opinion from a select group,some identified by Anna Hazare as the “Gang of Four”. That too,is a dangerous dependence. American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “he who should inspire and lead his race,must be

defended from traveling with the souls of other men,from living,breathing,reading and writing in the daily,time-worn yoke of their opinions.”

What we clearly lack are leaders with vision — thinkers able to formulate a new direction for a country when challenges emerge and crises snowball.

Criticism without offering an alternate strategy loses conviction very fast,especially in a time when we are looking for what the Harvard Business Review recently defined as “crisis leadership.”

This has two distinct phases: first the emergency phase,when your job is to stabilise the situation. Second is the adaptive phase,“when you tackle the underlying causes of the crisis and build the capacity to thrive in a new reality.” People who practise “adaptive leadership” use the turbulence of the present to build on and bring closure to the past. In the process,says the journal,they change key rules of the game,reshape parts of the organisation and redefine the work people do.

What we have witnessed so far is the emergency phase — really an effort to stall and buy time. Time,however,in today’s crisis-a-day world,is at a premium. The Hazare movement has injected a new factor into the electoral equation and no one is sure how or where that might impact on the choice of our future leaders.

What is certain is we live in dangerously uncertain times when the need of the hour is adaptive leadership. We could still be surprised in 2014,or earlier as the case may be,but don’t hold your breath. What we have all learned is an important lesson: that there’s a difference between being elected to lead and the ability to lead.

dilip.bobb@expressindia.com