Need For Trust-based Transformational Leadership

Leadership is a trust building process in which aspiring personalities elicit the voluntary support of people to their initiatives to get organisational goals and shape their values, beliefs, feelings and preferences. This process spurs the beginning of political socialisation through political and electoral campaigns, educational institutions, media and workplace experience. Peoples’ trust in leaders and governing institutions varies with their experience about their performances and the stage of the nation's political development.  Wise leaders are known for their conscience, conviction, intellectual flair and tasks performance in public policy making and anticipated outcomes. 

The rules of leadership in Nepal entail principled political practices, not self-serving impulse or reducing rationalism to individual choice. Wise leaders know the visible power of institutions including the state to act as a restraint on the natural passion of individuals. Leadership brands arising out of caste, class, cronyism and hereditary traits, style of communication and organisational control of party hierarchy are, however, becoming archaic. They harbour a tendency to dent the modernisation ideals, standard democratic norms and the ability of political institutions to acquire polity’s legitimacy and stability. 

Ironically, Nepalis are more connected to the stellar personality of leaders with multiple motivations and channels of loops than political parties which thus fail to act as a transmission belt of people’s grievances to political power and conversation to develop shared group propensities of political culture. The fusion of cadre-based unity-struggle-transformation aim of Nepali left parties and the mass-based strategies of liberal forces is central to reform centralism in leadership’s endearing poise. Nepali leadership got success in democratic struggle and elevated themselves through elections, political mobilisation of cadres and spread of auxiliary bodies to derive popular support. 

Performance-driven outcomes

They have yet to acquire the knack and knowledge of reality to settle the nation’s problematic conditions and the state of imperfections of the polity. They seem feeble to induce change in the long-established habits of mind and mood and achieve performance-driven outcomes. Bulk of Nepalis now finds a slighter flame of hope in bureaucratised party structures and reasons for emotional reverence.  National integration of diverse societies like Nepal entails a high level of exchange of information and goods among varied groups of leaders and people. The information diffusion is changing the hierarchy of introverted Nepali society into an extrovert sort and building a new hierarchy of those in command of knowledge and craft. 

Digital platforms are, however, shaping the cognition, values, attitude, norms and feeling of people about the workings of power, leadership and polity.  Socialised in democratic values, ordinary Nepalis are demanding equity, identity, social inclusion and participation in the political process by overhauling politics in line with cultural and value shifts. Fulfillment of these demands builds the trust of people in polity, political leadership and parties. It is generally believed that Nepalis are unhappy with the leaders’ aberrant tendency, not the democratic polity. The growing voters’ turnout in the multi-level elections indicates that the people have faith in their polity.

The question is whether Nepali leaders from diverse spectrum have been able to create civic patriotism to mobilise the society’s connectors or act as dividers of society. Framing of national will is vital to manage opposing interests and values of diverse actors and create a bigger perspective and purpose of statecraft beyond the ascendance of partisan gerontocracy riddled with mutual indictment and reprisal to tease out troubles, not follow common goals. Myriad of disoriented oppositions and factional interest groups of political parties jockeying for power in no way constitute a recipe for political stability as they want to keep the fluid political situation so as to create a bargaining environment. 

The hiatus between the conditions of people and their aspirations for better life stoked by political leaders in each election and the constitutional dispensation is so great that any satisfying constitutional engineering without broad-based national consensus can spike tumult beyond the edifice of politics to bridge the rights of people and their needs. Superficial reforms in the polity are false solutions to endure the status quo of transactional leadership in the nation. What is required is a transformation of the national political culture with apt policy, answerability, transparency and impersonality. The demand for quality of life has even indulged Nepalis in non-conventional, non-institutional forms of stirs in the digital space and streets beyond the ability of patriarchal leaders to administer.

Nepali leaders have often acted more in accord with their own passion and prejudice, than with the democratic principles and constitutional imperatives of serving the public and national interests. As a result, many of their vital decisions are nullified by the verdict of the Supreme Court. Many party bosses of the nation have failed to acquire the status of national leaders for their inability to think wisely beyond their electoral constituency, stand above factional politics and promote the coherence of party programs and policies. This has deprived them the art of unbeaten governing and conquering personality deficiencies. 

Obviously, it is hard to enable egoistic leaders to coexist in the same political space for long and act like statesperson if their divisions are marked by self-deification and demonisation of the rivals rather than finding common ground for national collective action.  The big challenge for circumstantial leaders of Nepal is their inability to display magnetism for the long term, translate this into legal-rational authority to stabilise its political space and continually hold the esteem of people by satisfying their non-negotiable needs and rights. The ironies within populist parties may dim their glittering lustre in the future if their fractious groups cannot create a common position even if the media's focus on them does not retreat their resonance.

When public media provide an arena for leadership image and personality then politics becomes only a matter of style in the dreary shade of power, not real substance. The theatrical style of leadership without achievable visions and programmes can easily make Nepali politics vacuous — full of sound, rage and fury signifying nothing.  This turns the electoral choices of people artificial that only reflect the parochial bias of unthinking voters often swapping sides with no mission for social change.

Two factors have hobbled Nepali polity: leader-centered politics and growing domination of fractious leaders over political parties, parliament and polity, even the state institutions. This milieu risks the rise of idiosyncratic leadership prone to the rise of anomie, social struggles and power-fixtures. In Nepal, even political leaders with transformational zeal who had vaulted in the governmental power lost the lustre of democratic sensibilities. They are undergoing a phase of desperation: neither can they drift to the illusion of revolutionary change which was defied time and again nor revitalise the popular confidence in them with the motto of left unity for socialist vision.  The class-unsighted leadership is shifting into the sphere of crash avarice, not wisdom to navigate the nation to self-chosen path and leverage its strength.

The reformist-liberal ones are unsure of what kinds of constitutional engineering are essential, what its costs are and whether it helps to consolidate the base of democracy in the future. The National Election Commission of Nepal and political leaders are seeking to underscore the “rules of the game” to which political parties and people unite. But the paternalistic, clientalistic and partial consensus among key political parties in decision making have marred the prospect of democratisation and modernisation. Neither political education nor organisational culture, not even the economy of Nepal has attuned leaders to relish inner-party democracy.  As a result, one can see the surge of cultural activities vehemently asserting Nepali identity. 

Leadership supposes skills in management of public affairs and changing the life of people for better, not just acts impulsively and habitually. They can do so if they are capable of shifting ivory-tower solutions offered by their spin-doctors to real life problems of Nepalis. Virtuous leadership built on the vigor of grassroots civic institutions and democratic spirit can outlast them. Yet when these institutions are captured by them for narrow interest, national polity suffers from a legitimacy crisis leaving the future-conscious people suffocating. Nepalis are gaining awareness of their sovereign power and struggling to make their leaders fair. Popular sovereignty in the will of Nepalis means that they are the architects of their destiny. A good leader, by any canon, seeks to infuse ethics to public life and hones civic culture.

Burly leadership 

Nepali leaders have the tradition of showing burly leadership with pathological bent. Traditional Nepali voters still love father-figure in politics. The winner-takes-all type of game has helped the leaders personalise power and develop personal relationships between them and the electorates. This has fostered clientalism and syndicate in the preface of leadership structures. Democratic regime does not require great figures, in theory, who are keen to dominate the people but a sensible one, one with fellow feeling able to settle their problems and unify them who are no longer held together by politics alone. The first irony of Nepali politics is that top leaders have not cultivated their successors. They are facing a barrage of criticism and undergoing tensions.

 The second irony is that politics of leadership is severed from drafting public policy accountability. The third irony is that leadership orientation is directed toward not only subjective but also objective aspects. Nepali people vote for their leaders in expectation of not only good governance but also private benefits like jobs, promotion, development projects, etc. The imperative is trust-based transformational leadership who can offer collective benefits for Nepalis. It fosters a systemic approach to transform the root causes of vices of society and satisfaction of people from the democratic structures, processes and political culture that can refurbish the image of governing well.

(Former Reader at the Department of Political Science, TU, Dahal writes on political and social issues.)