B-Schools Gone Adrift

 

Harvard Business School defines its mission as “(t)o educate leaders who make a difference in the world.” Tuck School of Business states its mission as, “Tuck develops wise, decisive leaders who better the world through business.” Stanford Graduate School of Business aims to “(c)reate ideas that deepen and advance our understanding of management and with those ideas to develop innovative, principled, and insightful leaders who change the world,” and MIT’s Sloan School of Management says “(t)o develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice.”  INSEAD, the business school for the world, has the mission: “We bring together people, cultures and ideas to develop responsible leaders who transform business and society”

IIMA aims “(t)o continue to be recognized as a premier global management school operating at the frontiers of management education and practice while creating a progressive and sustainable impact on society.” IIMB has an elaborate mission statement, “Nurture innovative global business leaders, entrepreneurs, policy-makers and social change agents through holistic and transformative education - Provide thought leadership that is contextually embedded and socially relevant and makes positive impact - Pursue excellence in education and thought leadership simultaneously without making any trade-offs.” IIM Kolkata states its mission as, “(t)o develop innovative and ethical future leaders capable of managing change and transformation in a globally competitive environment and to advance the theory and practice of management.”

It is clearly discernible from the above that the top-ranked Business Schools of the world are now about ‘leaders’ and ‘leadership’ where ‘management’ is sometimes mentioned in the passing and ‘business’ is practically absent. Some scholars argue that although management and leadership overlap, the two activities are not synonymous. Furthermore, the degree of overlap is a point of disagreement. In fact, some individual see them as extreme opposites, and they believe that good leader cannot be a good manager and the opposite is true.

It is also clear that business schools have substituted leadership paradigm for the managerial one in stating their mission or purpose. The consequential question that emerges is whether the leadership paradigm constitutes an adequate foundation for a professional business school. One of the central features of a bona fide profession is possession of a coherent body of expert knowledge erected on a well-developed theoretical foundation.

Despite tens of thousands of studies and writings on leadership since the days of the Ohio State Leadership Studies, several scholarly reviews of the literature on leadership have found little progress in the field. Most studies failed to even define the terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership.’ There are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept. Competing theories abound. We find great men theories, trait theories, environmental theories, person-situation theories, interaction-expectation theories, humanistic theories, exchange theories, behavioural theories and perceptual and cognitive theories. The dynamics of leadership have remained very much a puzzle. We still know little about what makes a good leader. Research that aims to decipher intrapsychic thought processes and resulting actions involves the study of "psycho-political drama" that relates managerial personality both to role behaviour and to the administrative setting.

In business schools in India, leadership is possibly being taught, using an ad hoc, convenience based amalgam of any of three distinctly different approaches, each of which possesses a certain validity but no one of which in whole or in part, make up for an element of a genuinely professional education. The first approach focuses on content and the transmission of explicit knowledge derived from academic theories in the fields of psychology, sociology, and economics. A second approach focuses on the development of interpersonal skills and their application to small-group situations. In this approach, leadership is conceptualized as tacit knowledge that must be mastered through hands-on practice rather than as a matter of explicit knowledge or content. A third approach associates leadership with personal growth and self-discovery and focuses on giving students opportunities for personal development. This approach gives students a great deal of freedom to explore personal values and use a variety of exercises and self-assessments, such as the MBTI, in an attempt to help students integrate discoveries about themselves into their career choices and professional lives.

Thoughts of leaders and leadership bring a wide array of images to mind, often conveying emotional reactions. Some leaders elicit thoughts of strength, power, and care; others recall the forces of terror, malevolence, and destructiveness. Our pervasive judgments of a leader’s degree of goodness or evil are reflected in epithets such as Ashoka the Great, Alexander the Great or Akbar the Great yet not everyone agrees that they were all great. For some, they were ‘the terrible.’

Our most secret desire, the one that inspires all our deeds and designs, is "to be praised." Yet we never confess this because to announce such a pitiful and humiliating weakness arising from a sense of loneliness and insecurity, a feeling that afflicts both the fortunate and the unfortunate with equal intensity, seems dishonourable. We are not sure of who we are or what do we do. Full as we may be of our own worth, we are distressed by anxiety and long to receive approval from no matter where or no matter whom. Evidence shows that because narcissistic personalities are often driven by intense needs for power and prestige to assume positions of authority and leadership, individuals with such characteristics are found rather frequently in top leadership positions.

All people show signs of narcissistic behaviour, albeit of differing magnitudes. Among individuals who possess only limited narcissistic tendencies, there are those who are very talented and capable of making great contributions to society. Those who incline toward the extremes, however, give narcissism its negative reputation. Excesses of rigidity, narrowness, resistance, and discomfort in dealing with the external environment is very evident in those cases. The managerial implications of narcissism can be both dramatic and crucial.

Leaders may thus be seen to occupy different positions on a spectrum ranging from healthy narcissism to pathology. These are not distinct categories. These are factors that distinguish between health and dysfunction of the leader. To understand the different types of narcissistic orientations beginning with the most unreasonable and proceeding toward the more functional, it is easier to look at three sets (black, grey and white), which could be referred to as reactive, self-deceptive and constructive (adaptive). In practice, however, a distinction may be more difficult to make. The influence of each of these configuration on interpersonal relations and decision making in a managerial context are different. Does an MBA degree programme add to or mellow down the degree of narcissism amongst the graduates? 

Not having answers to the dilemmas that are described above does not prevent me from raising some questions, though I am not sure, to whom these be addressed to – leaders or managers, of business or business schools:

• Is it time to stop referring to MBA schools as Business Schools and rechristen them as LEADERSHIP SCHOOLS?
• Since the focus has shifted to Leadership, is it leadership in any specific walk of life, some limited facets of life or in every walk of life? Are politics, diplomacy, government, security included?
• Is crisis leadership (response in emergency and unforeseen situations like Mumbai terrorist attacks or shut-downs due to COVID-19) included or is immaterial being no different?
• Since the words ‘business’ and ‘administration’ are now out from the mission statements of these schools, should an MBA degree be rechristened as an ML (Leadership) in its most expansive form or MBL (Business Leadership) in its most narrow orientation or something in between?

 

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First published 11 Aug 21

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If Managers desire to be respected, they must first make their work virtuous

Every discipline or profession has its own self-glorifying vocabulary. It is how its proponents justify themselves, sell themselves, and think of themselves and what they do.

Professors arrogantly celebrate what they do in the noble semantics of truth and knowledge even when they spend most of their time and energy battling one another for position in superbly trivial but venomous campus politics and plagiarising to publish to escape perishing. But who would question their commitment to the truth, to illuminating young minds, and to protecting the values of civilization?

Politicians spread out in the concept of public service even while they pursue personal power and abuse the fears and prejudices of their voters. But who would question their virtue of devoting oneself to public service and public welfare?

Eminent ethical doctors feel terribly upset that the doctors, long known as saviours, play a key role in promoting kickbacks and bribes that oil every part of the healthcare machinery. Who would question the value of human life and well-being and Doctors as the angel-guardians who heal and save lives, an undeniably noble cause?

In the case of business, however, the language of self-description is hardly noble or self-glorifying. The simple phrase ‘the bottom line’ and the vulgar verb ‘making money’ summarize a one-dimensional image of business that is disgracefully uncomplimentary and, in the public perception, extremely negative.

We can readily understand why we should applaud people who devote themselves to public service, or search for truth and knowledge or cure illness and save lives. It is not so easy to understand why we should cheer for those who, as they themselves seem to claim, are out only for material gain for themselves. In many ways, business is an exemplary human activity, involving as it does mutual attention to needs, desires and demands, creative and productive activity, face-to-face negotiation, acknowledgment of certain rules of fair play, and the importance of trust and keeping one's word. When we talk about business as something less than fully human, or as degrading, then these virtues and concerns are lost from view and may even seem irrelevant. There is more than enough cynicism in the world about the callous attitudes in business. We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose. The business world is heavily influenced by images and metaphors that shape the strategies, structures and processes of organizations.

Robert C. Solomon (A Better Way to Think About Business: How Personal Integrity Leads to Corporate Success, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) lists some common metaphors used by business that he considers inappropriate to think about business.

Again and again we hear business described as a jungle, a fight for survival, a dog-eat-dog world, a game defined by its so-called winners and losers. “It’s a jungle out there” is one of the most pervasive metaphors that brings into business the classical Darwinian view of the survival of the fittest where the rule is kill or be killed. But this metaphor is grounded on fundamentally wrong scientific premises. Evolutionary systems theory shows that cooperation is an essential strategy in nature, and the jungle metaphor completely ignores this fact. Of course, some of the animal metaphors are charming: A nice boss is a "teddy bear" and a tough negotiator is a "tiger," but most of them are demeaning. Employees, executives, and competitors are described as snakes in the grass, rats and a wide variety of other rodents, and insects and arachnids. Corporations in turn are described as fish tanks, shark-infested waters, and snake pits, as well as the botanical image of the jungle.

Closely related to the jungle metaphor is the conception of business as war and the marketplace as the battlefield. War, a familiar metaphor in so many corporate boardrooms ("the war room"), conjures up more bloody imagery than Darwinian Theory. The war metaphor feeds on our collective insecurity. Few of us as individuals would initiate a violent conflict.

Self-proclaimed realists will tell you that the world is a rough place, that life is unfair, and that only the ruthless survive. But what they call "real" is only the projection of their own bad faith. Why are hostile takeovers considered good business, whereas taking care of employees is considered soft-hearted and un-business-like? Military metaphors are intrinsically nationalistic, alarmist, pessimistic, conservative, and authoritarian. This has grim implications for the mental health of a productive organization. Paranoia is not usually conducive to creativity or competitiveness.

Just as every discipline has its own self-glorifying vocabulary, it also has its heroes, its role models, those who are admired from afar, looked up to and emulated. University professors sing the praises of Socrates, Newton, Einstein, Vishwamitra, Tagore, Ramanujam and Raman. But in popular culture and films, managers are stereotyped as masculine, selfish, mercenary, conscienceless, greedy, fixers, or out an out idiots. In business, we have a cascade of best-selling books lauding the management secrets of Attila the Hun (a major tribal military ruler in 5th-century Europe, best known for his savage fighting) and Machiavelli (connotes political deceit, deviousness, sneaky, cunning, and lacking a moral code). They are full of enthusiasm for "Sun-Tzu" (the art of war), but they neglect his compatriots Confucius and Kautilya, who know the real "secret" of Asian prosperity: virtue, integrity, and a real sense of community. Now, what does all this say of a civilized modern executive that he should take such characters as a guide to business strategy? And what does it say about business, that it honours such "heroes"?

Less violent but as dehumanizing as the jungle and war metaphors is the idea of business as a money-making machine. The machine metaphor transforms everything human into something cold and mechanical. Emotions, affections, and relationships disappear, to be replaced by mere causes and effects. Corporations are no longer to be identified with the people and personalities that make them up but with the system in which people are replaceable parts and in which personality serves as a lubricant or as grist and inefficiency. The business world as a whole ceases to become a matter of human aspiration and is reduced to market mechanisms. The notion of "re-engineering," for example, captures in a word what is wrong with so much of our current thinking about business. Employees and managers are, after all, "human resources," to be replenished as needed. Do we expect the carburettor to be loyal to the engine? And what does the engine owe to the carburettor in return?

The sad truth is that the image of materialistic selfishness easily eclipses the many virtues of business and people in business, their dedication to their work and their companies, their surprising selflessness in facing the job to be done, their pride in their products and services, and their relationships with colleagues and customers. People do not just serve purposes; they first of all have purposes and personalities of their own. It is the "art of the deal" that gets celebrated, not the production and distribution of quality (even lifesaving) goods and services. It is the windfall profit, the "killing" in the market, the outfoxing of the competition, the cost-cutting and axe-to-the-max downsizing that make reputations and headlines, not the routine addition of jobs, the satisfaction of jobs well done, the camaraderie within the corporation, the unpaid (but not unrewarded) compensations of integrity.

Competition is extremely valuable and often necessary in business, but it is not as such the purpose or goal of business life. There is healthy competition, and there is sick, debilitating, depraved competition. There is constructive, positive, even inspiring competition, and there is mutually destructive, negative, inhibiting competition. War and jungle metaphors give us the latter, along with all zero-sum games whose point is to punch out your opponent, debilitate the competition, and win at his or her expense. Business competition, by contrast, offers us the best example of the former, in which competition serves as a spur to one's own excellence and productivity. It provides incentives to improve, creating new heroes, ideals, and possibilities.

How we do business, and what business does to us, has everything to do with how we think about business, talk about business, conceive of business, practice business. If we think, talk, conceive, and practice business as a ruthless, cutthroat, dog-eat-dog activity, then that, of course, is what it will become. And so, too, it is what we will become, no matter how often, in our off hours and personal lives, we insist otherwise.

If, on the other hand, business is conceived, as it has often been conceived, as an enterprise based on trust and mutual benefits, an enterprise for civilized, virtuous people, then that, in turn, will be equally self-fulfilling. It will also be much more amiable, secure, enjoyable, and, last but not least, profitable.

Unless we transcend the dominator paradigm (to control, govern, or rule by superior authority or power), which seems to permeate the thinking and actions of people in Western civilizations, it will be difficult to come up with alternative metaphors and new visions like ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम् the world is one family)’ to guide the evolution of the business world and the emergence of evolutionary corporations. Let us be reminded of Trimurti or Trideva (त्रिमूर्ति trimūrti, "three forms" or "trinity"), the triple deity of supreme divinity in Hinduism, in which the cosmic functions of creation, maintenance, and destruction are personified as a triad of deities, typically Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. Let us not forget that the Supreme-Manager is Bhagwan Vishnu and let us draw out the symbolic and inner meaning of each of His incarnations (https://www.amrita.edu/news/inner-significance-dashavatars).

 

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First Published 28 Jul 21

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Some Unsought Advice for the Prime Minister Shri Modi !!

The situation where you are running from pillar to post to find a hospital bed or an oxygen cylinder for your loved one, and there is nowhere to go, you feel frustrated, helpless and angry.  If you are the lucky one to find some place, the ban on visitors makes you more edgy because you could not be with your loved one to offer comfort and support when he/she needed it most. The thought of not being able to see or comfort a loved one who is living with an advanced illness is heart breaking.

Time seems to freeze when you learn that someone you love has slipped from medical care to critical care in a COVID-19 facility. Maybe you instinctively pushed the news away, or perhaps you cried, or swung into action. You and your loved one may have pursued promising treatments and perhaps enjoyed some respite from the illness over the last few days.

The loss of a loved one is life's most stressful event and can cause a major emotional crisis. All kinds of emotions, denial, disbelief, confusion, shock, sadness, yearning, anger, humiliation, despair, guilt, can flood people’s minds.

 

SUCCESS, WHICH THE GOVERNMENT IS TRUMPETING

The data given out by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare website https://www.mohfw.gov.in/.

COVID-19 CASES IN INDIA as on: 15 May 2021, 08:00 IST (GMT+5:30)

Active – 3673802   Discharged – 20432898    Deaths - 266207    

Until date (15 May 2021), 24372907 people have been identified to be infected, of which 15.07% (3673802) are Active cases right now, 83.83% (20432898) have successfully survived the infection but unfortunately, the balance 1.09% (266207) could not survive and have died.

Yes, your government is right that Indian has done exceedingly well, on an aggregate basis, in management of the COVID-19 crisis as compared to any of the countries in the world. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the mismanagement of second wave of COVID is hidden behind the exemplary management of the COVID. Your government was successful in flattening the curve of cases and deaths of the first wave over a period of 11-months, something which the Western world could not do. The same cannot however be said for the second wave.

 

FAILURE, WHICH OVERWHELMED INDIA

You do not have to go to any other source of data to see this. Failure, which overwhelmed India, is buried, not too deep, in these very numbers.

Please have a relook at the data given out by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare website https://www.mohfw.gov.in/.

COVID-19 CASES IN INDIA as on: 15 May 2021, 08:00 IST (GMT+5:30)

Active – 3673802   Discharged – 20432898    Deaths - 266207    

COVID-19 CASES IN INDIA as on: 15 April 2021, 08:00 IST (GMT+5:30)

Active – 1471877   Discharged – 12429564    Deaths - 173123    

Of the 24372907 people identified as infected so far (over the last 15 and one half month – the first case was reported on 30.01.2020), 10499082 (43.08%) cases came during the last one month. Out of 266207 deaths recorded so far, 94122 (35.36%) deaths occurred during the last one month.

This is not a joke or a mere spike. It is a deluge.

·        Of all the cases – 43% came in last one month;

·        Of all the people dying – 35% died in last one month.

COVID-19 began 𝗁𝗂𝗍𝗍𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗐𝖺𝗒 𝗍𝗈𝗈 𝖼𝗅𝗈𝗌𝖾 𝗍𝗈 𝖾𝗏𝖾𝗋𝗒𝗈𝗇𝖾'𝗌 𝗁𝗈𝗆𝖾. What were merely numbers for people during the first wave, started turning into names and those names 𝗂𝗇𝗍𝗈 real 𝗉𝖾𝗈𝗉𝗅𝖾 whom people know?

 

WHAT WENT WRONG

With micro-situations continuously evolving and rapidly changing, managing Pandemics at the ground level is a very complex phenomenon involving case-by-case tactical and urgent decisions that need ‘thinking fast’. However, the policy level, at which the office of the Prime Minister sits, the foresight and strategy based thereon, is an important decision that allows wider consultations, reviews and ‘thinking slow.’

At the strategy level, dealing with pandemics involve only two sub-strategies, ensuring that the pandemic does not spread (Restriction strategy) and ensuring that those infected are able to recover from the disease (Treatment strategy).

Restriction is about reducing the number of cases, which is accomplished through controlling the spread of infection (Appropriate Behaviour and immunisation through vaccines). Where the disease is contagious, isolation and quarantine of the prospect (contact tracing) and the suspect case (symptomatic cases) is as important as that of the confirmed case. In case like COVID, where not every infected person shows the symptoms of being infected (asymptomatic cases) the inter-people-contact has to be clamped down.

Treatment is about reducing the mortality rate among the cases through proper and timely diagnosis and treatment.

 

YOU HAVE RIGHTFULLY TAKEN CREDIT FOR MANAGING THE FIRST WAVE

You had the foresight and the promptness in March-April 2020, in using the Restriction strategy, when the first wave of the pandemic broke out, which resulted into definitive reduction in spread of infection and reduction in the mortality rates. Numbers speak for themselves.

However, the second wave, which started knocking at our doors towards the end of February 2021 and is peaking now, has left much to be desired at your level.

 

SHOW THE GRIT IN ACCEPTING THE DISCREDIT FOR MISMANAGING THE SECOND WAVE

COVID-19 patients tend to be sick for a long time, spending weeks in the intensive care unit in some cases. Patients improve up to a point, and then it can be several weeks before one would see them continue to improve. Families need to prepare for that, as well as peaks and valleys seen so often in the sickest patients. Hospital restrictions that prohibit visiting COVID-19 patients have been major stressors for families, as well as those in the hospital. In the unfortunate events of patients losing the fight against COVID-19, not every one of their families and friends have the emotional strength of suffering the pain sagaciously or silently. Patients, their families, and other caregivers have little patience or tolerance, and their short fuses can explode on the very people trying to care for them.

Doctors and nurses are withstanding the worst of a much angrier, more frustrated, and weary bunch. Medics falter when they witness rudeness and other bad behaviour. It interferes with their working memory and decreases their performance. Frustrated patients are making health care workers’ jobs even harder.

No medical-care infrastructure, in terms of both physical dimensions and human dimensions, can have the capacity to deal with such deluge.  No society can cope with such agony and death. Yes, Treatment Strategy has limitations in dealing with such tsunami of cases.

However, you have faltered in making use of the Restriction Strategy once the coming of the second wave was clearly visible towards the end of February 2021. This failure has resulted into the ‘unforeseen’ deluge of cases and deaths. In ability to see these coming, is itself a failure of leadership and his advisors.

Overtly or covertly, this failure is being attributed not to any lack of your foresight regarding COVID, but to your political ambitions in West Bengal and other states. I am not a political strategist, but the results tell us a story.

 

FAILURE IN STATE ELECTIONS 2021

Ever since you brought in the US Presidential style of electioneering to Indian politics in 2014, people vote for the leader as much as they vote for a party. Your inability to win Rajasthan, Punjab, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh had shown an association in your inability to project an unambiguous leader who could campaign in the same style in the state as yours in the national elections.

When you or any of your central leaders campaign in a state election, the electorate asks themselves – are you or any of those central leaders going to be their Chief Minister? Even when they wish to vote for your party, they do not know who is going to rule them. As they say, a known foe is better than an unknown friend is, the electorate ends up making choices, which may look poor from a larger perspective, but they are the best picks that the electorate could make from within the choices available to them.

Let us not forget that a day after the first round of polling took place on 20 May 1991, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated while campaigning. The remaining election days were postponed until mid-June and voting finally took place on 12 and 15 June. When the surge in COVID cases was so visible by the end of March for everyone to see, not postponing the elections was neither good strategy nor good politics. The votes polled in your favour in successive rounds of polling have shown a negative association with the rising COVID-cases in the country. Who knows, if the state elections were postponed for a better time, their results for you could have been better.

 

WHAT NEXT

Dear Prime Minister! As a leader, please accept the fact that you won the battle against the first wave but lost the battle against the second wave. You do not win all the battles. It is important that you win the war – war against COVID-19.

You won people’s mandate because they trusted you. You used your high visibility and high credibility in winning over their emotions. Trust is after all an emotion.

All Indians are one but they are not the same. Similar people are grouped into states. That we have 29 states shows similarity of people within the states but dissimilarity of people across the states. Indians are not like Americans, who have little diversity in language, culture or religion.

The unified central-command structure of decision making which you could use so successfully in running the Government in Gujarat may not be an optimal design for running the Union Government. Please remember that the entire bureaucracy that you handled in Gujarat was a unified Gujarat cadre but when you handle the union Government, your bureaucracy is not one cadre. The rules of engaging with the opposition leaders and bureaucracy within Gujarat are not suited to engaging with the opposition leaders and bureaucracy in the matters of the Union.

They still trust you but the untold agony and death, which they have seen over the last one month, has broken them emotionally. Fear & grief of COVID-19 is overwhelming ordinary people and your political rivals and bruised media (you have taken away many of their free bees) are adding fuel to this fire. Emotions are contagious. Our brains are wired to mirror the body language and emotion of others. In an era of social media, opinions occlude information and truth becomes matter of opinion. Absolute truth makes way for pre-truths, half-truths, developing truths, post-truths, my truths, your truths and no-one-knows whose-truth.

There is no denying that you are suffering from a loss in your credibility. Your high visibility and waning credibility is untenable in public space. You cannot be complacent or disheartened. You need to make a serious course-correction.

You have to rise as a leader and restore the confidence of people in their ability to overcome and succeed under your leadership. Please work towards decreasing the COVID-19 test-positivity rate & case fatality rate and increasing the EMOTIONAL POSITIVITY among the people of India.

To everyone locked inside their homes, in fear or anxiety, and to everyone locked out from the joys of life as usual, please put a confidence in them that the sun will come again. Remind them of the vibration that passed all over their lives, make them remember everything that they shared with their loved ones, thank the Gods who helped them face the untold grief over the last one month.

You have to rise from the ashes of the second wave. YOU HAVE TO WIN ALL THE FORTHCOMING BATTLES AGAINST THE THIRD AND THE FOURTH WAVE. YOU HAVE TO WIN THE WAR.

 

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First Published 17 May 2021

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Demystifying Politics in Democracy

Democracies are governance by the people, presumably for the people. They are also supposedly ‘of the people’ because to govern themselves, people elect some individuals out of themselves to represent them in government.

People elect representatives based upon their personal opinions and motivations, both of which are subjective. Voting someone to office is an emotional response of people.

While people carry on with their lives working as wagers or professionals or businesspersons, some choose to take up politics as their livelihood and put themselves up for being elected to office by the people.  Most democracies are federal structures, meaning thereby that there exist multiple tiers of governments. An individual citizen thus has a Member of Parliament, a Member of Legislative Assembly, and a member of Municipality or a Gram Panchayat to represent him at these tiers of Government. Then, people also elect representatives to self-help groups like worker-unions, student unions, charities, social groups, clubs, welfare groups, cooperative societies, religious bodies, and so on. Politicians have the choices of being elected to any of these tiers in the government as well as to these self-help groups. People get the opportunities to elect their representatives every five years or sooner.

Since the governance is itself a collective of the majority of the elected individuals, politicians are categorised into affiliate groups - chosen to govern or rejected to govern – for the time being. Depending upon the pro-incumbency voting or anti-incumbency voting by people, in the next round of elections, the politicians are able to keep or reverse the nature of their affiliate category.

Accordingly, the predominant policy of the politician from the group ‘chosen to govern’ is to garner pro-incumbent public opinion and inoculate the minds of people to protect them from any counter attacks of the politician from the group ‘rejected to govern.’ They trumpet their achievements and promises through events and seek amplification of their narrative through the media and press.

The predominant policy of the politician from the group ‘rejected to govern’ is to garner enough anti-incumbent public opinion before the next election, which would result into the incumbents being voted out and the group ‘rejected to govern’ would emerge as the group ‘chosen to govern’ after those elections.

Building up of anti-incumbent public opinion is achieved through developing a passive resistance to the policies of the group ‘chosen to govern’ and this requires continuing demonstration of active-resistance by the politicians from the group ‘rejected to govern’ to the policies and actions of the incumbents. Strikes, shutdowns, slowdowns, sit-ins, sloganeering are some of the tools used in such demonstrations. Resulting events create content for the media and the group ‘rejected to govern’ seeks amplification of their events and their narrative through the media.

Both the groups, group ‘rejected to govern’ and group ‘chosen to govern’ also indulge in comparative narrative involving disparaging each other and seek the help of media in their efforts. 

The fact is that the role, purpose and importance of newspapers and news broadcasts, as reporters and chroniclers of facts, which could count as proof, has diminished. Editorials and the opinions of experts in any media, print or television, which are objective, fail to catch the attention of people.

For their entertainment value, acrimonious debates between the biased and ignorant politicians and purposive shows catch the eyeballs, but the theatrical capabilities of the performers in such shows leave false impressions in the minds of the audience. The slant of the anchors towards a particular narrative works as subliminal messaging in shaping the impressions.

Media is becoming a peddler of the narrative of the politician belonging to either the group ‘rejected to govern’ or the group ‘chosen to govern.’ Social media noise and claims do not count as proof yet they strike the emotions of people and shape public opinion.

Width, depth and sustainability of favourable public opinion is the measure of success in politics. Maximising the width, depth and sustainability of favourable public opinion is therefore the real goal of any politician. Narratives, public discourse, public policy, bureaucracy, media, political workers, safety, security, justice, growth, welfare, progress, nationalism, equality, secularism, affirmative action, patriotism, peace and rule of law are just the means in achieving of these political goals.

One can fault a politician for any of the means that they use, but none can fault them for their unwavering commitment to their goals.

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First published 04 May 2021

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