WHEN ALL ARE LEADERS

                                     

         

WHEN ALL ARE LEADERS

The disturbing  sign of a leaderless group is when  every member scrambles to lead at once, a condition now visible in the Kashmiri Pandit community where too many leaders have cropped up, fracturing advocacy and creating hurdles in the projection of issues through one unified voice. This produces what Max Weber saw as a vacuum of authority and what Hannah Arendt might call the banality of misrule ,  a cacophony where decisions dissolve, responsibility belongs to no one, and external dispensations withdraw because no institution backs a cause with ten rudders and no helm. 

A leaderless group is usually manipulated by establishment, for where sovereignty is absent, subtler regimes of control advance to occupy the space, as Michel Foucault observed. Press conferences, media interviews,events.  lectures and assemblies not backed by a single voice are useless, multiplying noise while diluting moral weight; and those who truly feel the pain of human beings rarely need these platforms. They must serve, sacrifice and lead with egoless sincerity, for any community or group  where all are leaders can rarely achieve its objectives, since collective ambition without hierarchy breeds contention, not redress. 

A leader needs time and encouragement to be tested and tried; a test deficit in every person does not create leaders who shape the future, because, as Arnold Toynbee argued, civilisations advance only through the ordeal of challenge and response. And  leaders today tend to be more media-cautious than rooted in service and sacrifice, curating image where once they courted risk, a shift Neil Postman foreshadowed when he warned that we would amuse ourselves to death rather than govern ourselves through duty. 

True leadership is intellectualism made ethical: Plato’s philosopher-king and James MacGregor Burns’ “moral risk” of choice, the rare capacity to translate thought into direction while bearing blame and dispersing credit, because as T.S. Eliot noted, humankind cannot bear very much reality and needs someone to bear it for them. Such selflessness is scarce, and history’s few exemplars like Cincinnatus or Dag Hammarskjöld prove that only those who willingly give power away truly deserve it. Without that one architect of will, nurtured through trial and trust rather than teleprompters, the Kashmiri Pandit cause risks remaining unattended by fortune, eloquent in grief but starved of command, its legitimate claims diffused by too many voices and claimed by none.

The leadership landscape for Kashmiri Pandits has by and large been broadly reduced to two dispiriting categories : Event Managers who barter community interest for ministerial photo opportunities and political patronage, Press Release aficionados who mistake column inches and televised outrage for tangible change, whilst the existential imperatives of dignified return, secure rehabilitation, youth employment, temple property restoration, residential property restoration , grant of justice to the families of innocents killed by terrorists , confronting the fake narratives of vested interests, meaningful political representation and many more get quietly shelved; in this calculus of optics over outcomes, rhetoric masquerades as responsibility and roadmap, and community interest is sacrificed at the altar of self-interest, and performative piety. Isn't there a thirty-six year delay in achieving our desired objectives ?

Yet the fragmentation of political elites and their inability to articulate a unified platform has thrown into relief a parallel, non-statist locus of resilience. The community’s post-1990 survival has been underwritten by a diffuse network of civil society workers whose Nishkaam-service constitutes a significant, if under-theorised, form of civilisational agency. Without recourse to publicity or state patronage, these individuals established educational institutions and primary health initiatives in exile, instituted vernacular media through community radio, undertook the philological revival of the Sharda script, published community magazines / periodicals , produced archival documentation of displacement and dispossession, and organised material relief for distressed populations. Their labour, situated outside formal political channels, has ensured civilisational continuity under conditions of demographic dispersion and institutional marginalisation.

Thus, whilst performative leadership has largely reproduced itself and failed to come under one umbrella and speak with one voice, it is this non-political cohort that has maintained the communal hearth. The implication is clear: in the absence of accountable elite representation, the burden of cultural and social reproduction devolves upon subaltern civil society, whose contributions remain the most durable asset of the Kashmiri Pandit community in exile

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( Avtar Mota )

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.