Political Leadership in India: Dimensions and Limits

HENRY C. HART

Political leadership has been a perennial concern among evaluators of Indian democracy. It was addressed in 1956 at the first international conference of such evaluators, convened in Berkeley by the late Richard L. Park, although it was not then a conventional category of political analysis, and it remains a concern today. Why has the subject of leadership occupied observers of India and why does it recur today with new urgency? Some assert that India is well-nigh ungovernable, that no system can suffice, and that only superhuman leaders can, for a time, hold the reins. Yet this is certainly not the premise that guided the 1956 conference, and it is not supported by fact. India's constitution and her established rules of power, formal and informal, have been working longer, arguably, than those of any developing nation.

The leadership problems examined during the 1956 conference differ from those confronting analysts today. In 1956, toward the end of its first decade of independence, India had already lost some of its political giants — Gandhi, Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Ambedkar — but those who remained far exceeded the top leadership cadre of other new nations — Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Abul Kalam Azad, Govind Ballabh Pant, C. Rajagopalachari, Jayaprakash Narayan, and Vinoba Bhave. They were men who differed in intellectual outlook and leadership style and whose followings were complementary rather than common. Yet, it was remarked by the 1956 conferees, these leaders shared a single vision of the system of rule that must guide the new nation. It was a parliamentary system, its leaders answerable to the people through elections. The entire existing network of power was manned by a "Westernized minority," whose aim was to make over society in its own image, using the state as its main instrument. Those manifestations of leadership operating outside the elective/parliamentary sphere (labeled "nonconventional" by the 1956 conference) could enter that sphere in the roles of "interest groups." The leaders who rejected Western models of society — Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, though dead, had left his Jan Sangh party in place — were increasingly drawn into the orbit of the elective/parliamentary system as opposition parties.

The great unknown, in the perspective of the 1956 conferees, was the response of the people themselves. Would the hundreds of millions, suddenly drawn into politics beyond the horizons of their villages, non-Western in culture, and innocent of English or of any written language, accept the patterns of leadership prepared for them by an elite very different from themselves? To this gigantic challenge the leaders of the 1950s were perceived as bringing two mighty resources: the civil services and the Indian National Congress. Both institutions were in the midst of vast and rapid extensions into the villages, and through them leaders were able to keep in touch with the Indian people, and even to work their will.

In 1986 India recognized in Rajiv Gandhi a true political leader, but he stood alone on the plateau of national eminence and public trust. The legitimacy of his entitlement to lead has been tested and vindicated by the now familiar elective/parliamentary process, but that process had little to do with his emergence. During his first year in office he has grasped firmly the nettles of crisis, but it is not yet apparent how he will cope with less clearly defined chronic problems. We need both historical and theoretical perspective to assess a leadership function and capability that is evidently in transition.

Robert C. Tucker provides a helpful scheme for categorizing the functions of leadership. As a scholar of Soviet politics, he is concerned with more than mere Westminister conventions. Yet, we must stretch his list to contain the Indian experience. This done, we can order the tasks of Indian leadership under three headings: 1. maintaining political and administrative institutions; 2. diagnosing problems and formulating policy responses; and 3. integrating the nation as a political community. In a democracy, as opposed to a totalitarian or authoritarian system, access to leadership is as well structured and open to scrutiny as are the tasks to be performed, and the ways in which leadership is gained throw light on how leaders perform their functions. The path taken to leadership in some part determines the power held by the leader, the legitimacy of his leadership, and, to some extent, support for his policies. It provides, also, a test of whether established routes to the top tend to select and prepare men and women who can carry the leadership load. Two added categories with which to assess the Indian experience are, thus, 4. winning mandates; and 5. pathways to power. Using these five categories, our task is to scan thirty-six years of Indian political experience to determine the characteristics of leadership in India's democracy.

Maintaining Political and Administrative Institutions

The Indian republic was born with governing institutions fully grown, institutions remarkable for their strength and, even more, for their deep roots in Indian society. The Indian National Congress and its rival parties comprise the most remarkable of these. As to administrative institutions, Paul Appleby, a senior American practitioner and teacher of administration, rated them in 1953 as among the world's best. Although a foreign observer might be judged a bit generous, the process of constitution making, which proceeded right through the trauma of partition, provided unassailable evidence that the political leaders maintained full confidence in the very apparatus that had recently been locking them in jail. They retained intact the tools by which the great subcontinent could initially be governed.

Changes in Indian society and in the tasks imposed on the administrative institutions,...