The Hindu : Front Page : Creative global leadership stressed

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Sunday, Nov 23, 2008
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Creative global leadership stressed

P.S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE: The urgency of creative global leadership to address today’s borderless problems and the parallel importance of consensus-based politics in India were emphasised at a future-gazing professional conference here on Saturday.

The daylong conference was organised by the Singapore-based Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) Alumni Association. Leadership issues were discussed under the association’s overall signature theme of ‘IIT Everywhere – Asia 2020.’ Setting the tone for discussions, Singapore Minister for Community Development, Youth, and Sports, Vivian Balakrishnan, commended the evolution of the IITs in the light of their founding principle as “temples of learning.”

On the present crisis of leadership on the world stage, the Dean of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Kishore Mahbubani, said the “challenges are all global, [but] the solutions are national” in content and applicability. Another contradiction was that the “experts” would tend to “see each problem in a silo.”

Profiling the characteristics of a political leader in a liberal-democratic context and tracing India’s recent experiences, The Hindu Editor, N. Ravi, said: “By its very nature, coalition politics will probably check any tendency towards autocracy or even [check] very strong leadership from emerging at the Centre. With a single-party majority unlikely in the near future … a consensus-building approach will carry the day; and it might well serve the country well.”

In a close-up study of three contemporary Indian leaders, Mr. Ravi said: “In the final stretch of [the present] Government, [Prime Minister] Manmohan Singh emerges not just as a competent economic manager and hesitant politician [as evident earlier] but as a bold political strategist who pushes through the nuclear deal [with the United States], dares the Left, and survives with [parliamentary] numbers obtained through some hard political manoeuvring, and maybe even worse.”

The government had “survived the full term,” or “almost that” so far, although Dr. Singh often found himself “handcuffed from inside by the [Congress] party and outside by the Left.”

While Dr. Singh “has added a hard edge to his politics,” L.K. Advani, in his current role as “shadow Prime Minister, has softened his political tone,” Mr. Ravi said. “This tendency of the two leaders,” indicative of a convergence towards the middle moderate ground, would show that “future political leadership in India cannot be rigidly ideological.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, with the “image of a moderate,” managed coalition politics well. He also “brought India onto the world stage as a declared and demonstrated nuclear power.” However, “his politically fatal flaw was that he did not pay enough attention to poverty and rural deprivation issues.”

Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce & Industry Chairman Vijay Iyengar said, “a new leadership style will be needed once the [current] global financial crisis is over.”

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