A crisis of leadership in the world

The summer of 2022 was a difficult one for India. Prices of petrol, diesel and LPG cylinders have continued to rise alarmingly, devouring the finances of the poor, even as the stock markets have turned as choppy as the Pacific Ocean during a sea-storm, eroding the wealth of those higher up in the food-chain. The Reserve Bank of India has explicitly stated that interest rates will go up further (the repo rate is already at 4.90%), which is hardly the news that will gladden the hearts of EMI-payers and free-market liberals.

What’s more, we could be importing serious trouble soon. The US Fed obviously is the key driver of global monetary policy. With inflation at a record high in the US (40-year peak), the age of negative interest rates that for long fueled excess liquidity is finally over. Cheap money, quantitative easing, unbridled capital flows that sought short-term arbitrage and quick returns, may be a thing of the past.

Vladimir Putin is the unofficial governor of our long-term fortunes. The Ukraine crisis is not just about a European ego-war being fought between a recalcitrant autocrat with a fragile ego with a hot head and the duplicitous trans-Atlantic alliance led by a dodgy America seeking fresh pastures for military influence. It has grave implications for countries far and beyond (Sri Lanka, for example), as the disruption in the supply chains of essential food items and energy prices are proving catastrophic.

Many countries will face bankruptcy and go belly-up; sovereign defaults cannot be ruled out. Public protests have become quotidian as several societies are severely shattered, even as they struggle to recover from the pandemic’s rupture. The world faces an acid test, an examination of its character, an appraisal of its resilience. If at any time post-World War II there was a need for inspirational, far-sighted global political leadership that commanded ecumenical respect it is now. Sadly, such leadership is conspicuously missing. India is no exception to this gnawing scarcity.

The Gyanvapi mosque controversy has raised the communal temperature. It is an extraordinary development that challenges the Places of Worship Act, 1991, which attempted to freeze the status quo on the religious character of places of worship as of India’s Independence Day of August 15, 1947, when India chose to become a pluralistic, multicultural society. In my opinion, more than the legislative import of the law, it was a healing touch to a nation that appeared disunited, disheveled by the violent manifestations around the Babri Masjid dispute. Former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao deserved much more credit for this epochal law; instead, his adversaries lampooned him for being a saffron-sympathiser.

But that is now history. The fact that the current gridlock over religious sanctity is happening coincidentally in the parliamentary constituency of the Prime Minister is telling. Narendra Modi has just completed eight long years in office as Prime Minister. Not surprisingly, the BJP is proudly propagating its ‘New India’, which essentially wishes to convey that pre-2014 India was an aberration whose history needs a fresh repaint, or maybe expunction itself. That’s why our colorful history is being rewritten with a monochromatic kesari. Secularism has been maligned so much that even genuine democratic liberals appear ill-at-ease when talking of social harmony.

There cannot be a bigger civilisational crisis confronting India when its quintessential component -- religious tolerance and communal peace -- itself has become anathema to powerful political warlords. It found a disparaging demonstration when vulgar language was used against Prophet Mohammed by a prominent member of the BJP. All hell broke loose thereafter.

The personality cult of Narendra Modi, promoted relentlessly by the protagonist himself, using a choreographed storyboard, has imperceptibly subsumed the real ‘India Story’, whose intrinsic foundations of secular democracy and constitutional sacrosanctity has been demolished. Everything has been reduced to eulogising the self-appointed Messiah with a magic wand whose standard playbook is that the previous governments were incompetent and corrupt, while he is the preternatural savior of this great country of 140 crore people. The rest are all dunderheads or anti-national.

Such absurd hyperbole works during electioneering because the megaphones look for hot-buttons that make for good copy. But when India is alleged to have lost over 47 lakh lives (officially, only 5 lakh), the young are spending time on Instagram and WhatsApp videos instead of 9 to 5 jobs, farmers are being ravaged, our social structure is being inexorably fissured through aggressive toxic animus, rising inflation has gutted the middle class and knocked the daylights out of the poor, then all the chest-thumping sounds immoral. And insufferably condescending.

If you look at the government’s track record, barring using the UPA government’s innovation of Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) efficiently (Aadhaar, for instance, being a crucial component in welfare distribution), the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, and increasing digitisation (which was in any case inevitable in a post-pandemic world), there is little to cheer for a government that has had eight uninterrupted years and a full majority in parliament.

Which brings me back to the billion-dollar question: We face a leadership crisis -- both in government and in the Opposition. Just like the world does in a Putin universe, with Donald Trump accused of plotting a coup against the US government, and Boris Johnson barely surviving a trust vote. Once, we had Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru here, and Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the West.

We live in a leadership deficit world. But the search must continue. Someone will surely rise.

(The writer is a former Congress spokesperson)