What Fails Political Leadership?

Columnist Dr. SM RAHMAN analyses the reasons for the failure of our political leadership.

It is indeed a matter not easily reconcilable that three of our elected Prime Ministers, were to encounter punishment as “criminals”. One went to the gallows, the other one - the Daughter of the East, convicted for corruption, is a declared absconder, the third one is languishing in jails and only God knows for how long? If the Terrorist Court verdict is upheld by the Superior Courts, then the period is a quarter of a century. One could compassionately hope that the Government’s appeal for hanging of the deposed Prime Minister may not be acceded to, but the gravity of the “crime” is not likely to be lowered, and in all probability a longish jail life appears to be the nemesis. One is reminded of the story of a convict in his late forties, who was sentenced to ninety nine years imprisonment. “My lord”, he said, “I can’t make it”. The gray-haired judge retorted: “Do as best as you can, my son!!” Will Mian Nawaz Sharif reconcile to the predicament and take a dispassionate look at where he failed? Such introspection is rare in our leaders. Failures are never learning experiences. It is not ‘failing’ which is failure. It is how one responds to it. In other words, dissecting a ‘failing experience’ is the essence of leadership. Its absence is what failure is. Attributing blames, and taking refuge in conspiracy theories, are what such leaders take recourse to and they tend to live in a self-sealing system, oblivious of what contribute to their fall.

Modern researches on leadership have testified to what Aristotle had pointed out nearly two thousand five hundred years back. One predispositional element of personality determining failure of a leader, he had identified was hubris. What is it? It is a self-induced intoxication of overly inflated ‘ego’. It is a big ‘I’. One looms larger than his size. It is a tendency to attribute qualities to oneself which are god-like. The pervasive megalomania makes one immune to the limits of one’s power. It breeds arrogance. To sustain this belief system, one has to ‘act’ in order to convince himself that he is endowed with invincible power. Heavens will fall, if I am unseated from power, is the kind of logic used to bolster delusional pride. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s famous utterance: “Himalayas will weep in the event he was removed,” is symbolic of that type of leadership which in the Aristotelian sense is the tragic trait of many vanquished leaders. It may be pertinent to recall how similar was the fate of three charismatic leaders - who cumulatively contributed to the fall of Dhaka in 1971, entailing colossal human tragedy. Shaikh Mujeeb - Bangla Bandhu - wielded power of enormous magnitude. But one has to look at his ignominious end. There was hardly anyone to lift his dead body for religious burial rites. He lost all his kith and kin, except for one daughter, who survived only because she was not on the scene. Incidentally, now she is the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s tragedy of being hanged, is very poignant indeed, as he was undoubtedly a popular leader endowed with rare intelligence. To make matters worse, he lost two of his sons through murder, and his daughter Benazir Bhutto, the political heir is experiencing the worst humiliation of being branded a corrupt politician - ousted twice as Prime Minister. The fate of the iron lady of India - Indira Gandhi, who lost two of her sons and her own life, was no different. All these cannot be simply dismissed as chance events of history. But running through them is the force of nemesis - silent but inexorable. Perhaps nature abhors any propensity to overstep power threshold, to enter into the domain, which is essentially divine.

The other personality flaws that Aristotle discerned are hamartia and anagnosis. Hamartia a derivation from Greek hamartanien, means to miss the mark, to err. It refers to a mind set, which is a self-induced inhibition against alternative points of view. It is a flaw which emanates from inability to transcend the limited perspective. If a leader does not take cognition of the human temptation to remain locked into a simplistic orientation, he is doomed to failure. In other words, hubris and harmartia, combine to predispose a leader towards making erroneous judgements and thereby fail in his action. Anagnosis, which has been termed by Randal Ford, Anagnosis - lack of knowledge and inability to see how different elements fit into a jigsaw puzzle. To put it differently, the trees are seen but the wood is lost sight of. This failure to arrive at an integrated perception of reality, is typical of a leader, who due to hubris is insensitive to listen and hamartia, makes him constricted, in his understanding and anagnosis tunes him towards acting without full knowledge and awareness. Thus the triangle of tragedy HH&A (abbreviated hubris, hamartia and anagnatis - the leader killer) is the trap. They remain utterly ignorant of why they do what they do, and in the end their destiny is the debris of history.

Viewed in the HH&A paradigm, our contemporary leaders, even though they allude their failure to an easy scapegoating of boot-culture - Army interventions - fail to realise that it is an attributional error. It is a failure to realise that if institutions are not allowed to build their resilience and strength to act as shock absorbers - the Army, willy nilly comes to fill in the void true to the famous dictum nature abhors vacuum. Benazir Bhutto in her recent histrionic outburst blamed ISI and MI for destabilizing PPP, and what she calls endangering Pakistan’s interests at international level. It is a typical manifestation of hubris - a failure to listen and remain glued to a sense of infallibility. Let us take the example of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who despite his intellect and insight did not play his cards well, dealing with General Ziaul Haq, to be able to save his skin. In other words, being a first rate politician, he behaved like a typical incompetent General who has a predilection for frontal attack. General Ziaul Haq on the other hand known for his mediocrity as a General, played a politician’s role. This was an ironic reversal of roles. If Bhutto had eased out Ziaul Haq’s own fear of the grave through a political finesse and dexterity perhaps, the later would not have gone to the extent of physically getting him eliminated. What is intended to convey that Bhutto’s failure was essentially that of over inhaling power and perception of being a sacred cow - and thereby being indispensable. General De Gaulle was right in contending that the graveyards are full of indispensable men.

In Mian Nawaz Sharif’s case, the failure was due to lack of proper understanding that propelled him towards wrong actions. He is a victim of humartia - a false notion that by assimilating power into his hands he would be very secure. It was a cardinal mistake, as man of power is usually ruined by power. Depriving institutions of the freedom do not ensure security. Karl Pepper, very rightly counselled: We must plan for freedom and not only for security, if for no other reason then that only freedom can make security secure. A frontal attack on the freedom of Parliament made a mockery of democratic norms. The judiciary robbed of its freedom looked sterile and impotent to deliver justice. The President was reduced to a robot like entity. When the axe fell on the Army, it had to boomerang as passivity is no trait of any fighting machinery. It was a failure to understand - hamartia, compounded by the blind spot and not paying heed to the ground realities-anagnosis.

That the Army was least interested in political power grabbing is a patent reality sequel to the 1971 Dhaka debacle and a progressive realization that the power of a nation emanates from political maturity and strength. The post-1988 events testify that Army leadership made determined efforts to restore democracy. But alas! this was not to be. The dark personality traits of our heavy-mandated leader has again put the nation on a regressive track. Will the deposed Prime Ministers rise gracefully to acknowledge their failure? Will they admit, false thinking brought wrong conduct into play. One must listen and understand to qualify for being a good leader. Bernard Shaw had once remarked: If you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy yourself there. One could say the same about politics. There is a couplet by some one which is an apt commentary on Nawaz Sharif’s failure:

Na Asman se, na dushman key zor-o-zar say hua

Yeh mojza to meray daste behunar se hua

(Neither fate ordained my failure nor the enemies manipulated it through force or their riches.

The miracle was brought about by my own inept hands).