Landslide Victory

GZ 71 180215 Landslide Victory 

Recently we have seen an extra-ordinary mandate for a particular party in New Delhi assembly elections. This was immediately categorized as one of the historical landslide victories on the Wikipedia page with the name “Landslide Victory”. Not many are there. Why the mandate given by the real people always surprise the so called great psephologist has always been a mystery. Every process of elections has many lessons to learn, both for the political parties and for the people at large. This time when a seasoned administrator with a long experience was positioned against a labeled anarchist, most people thought that inclination of the masses will be shifted towards experience. For a moment I also thought so. Then comes a report that the same experienced administrator was asking party workers to go out of the room if they don’t listen, or don’t reach for campaign on exact time. I could immediately understand the negative under current. On the other hand there was some kind of under current in a positive direction in favour of the other contestant when I heard the views of the youth on various social forums. The message for all of us was loud and clear that the leaders need to be like their followers and not the ones of exceptional extra-ordinary qualities that the followers will never be able to assimilate in themselves. 

I checked back many books on the subject of leadership. Most will recommend a person to develop such kind of personality traits which are quite bookish in nature. A practical and real life leader can rarely match these books. I tried to match these qualities with undisputed historical leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. What I necessarily find was that even the key qualities like great communication skills and great decision skills were questioned by their contemporaries. Today also the challenge of leadership is the real people and real world. The only pattern that I could observe was that all leaders were little more persistent for the cause they picked up. This property is found even in the negative leaders like Osama and Baghdadi. Here I would like to the quote the great leader from the field of science, Albert Einstein expressing about himself as, “It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems a little longer”. 

Dr. Sunil Ji Garg