Commentary/Vir Sanghvi

The leadership of India cannot be a race in which the hares decide to give the gold medal to the tortoise

The job went to H D Deve Gowda, a little known figure outside his native Karnataka, who commanded the loyalty of a grand total of 12 MPs (some of those were even trying to keep R K Hegde happy at the same time).

But by then the principle was firmly established. When you looked for a prime minister, you did not look for positive qualities. You looked for an absence of negatives.

Deve Gowda may have been a homely sort of fellow whose approach to every problem was to handle it as he would have in his Karnataka days, but he posed no threat to anybody. He had no national base and seemed in no danger of being able to create one. He entered Race Course Road as a man from nowhere. And at the end of ten months he returned to nowhere.

When the time came to choose Deve Gowda's successor, exactly the same logic applied. Mulayam Singh Yadav was out because he posed a threat to Laloo Yadav and vice versa. Chandra Shekhar was out because he was too strong a personality. Ram Vilas Paswan was out because the other Harijan-backward leaders did not want him to outshine them. Chandrababu Naidu was out because M Karunanidhi did not want another leader from the south to get the job. And so on.

Finally, it boiled down to three candidates: S R Bommai, Inder Gujral and G K Moopanar.

Of the three, Moopanar was the most politically-substantial figure. Naturally this ruled him out. Neither Chandrababu nor Karunanidhi wanted a south Indian at Race Course Road. And Harkishan Singh Surjeet, in his new avatar as the Red Rasputin of the United Front, was concerned that Moopanar would not listen to him.

That left Gujral and Bommai. By the end, Laloo Yadav was a fervent supporter of Bommai's candidature. When you consider that Bommai's Hindi is of the same calibre as Laloo's English, you recognise how much of communication gap there must have been. And yet Bommai was Laloo's choice; not because he was any good but because he posed no threat.

Fortunately, Laloo did not get his way. And the eventual choice, Inder Gujral, a good man with both experience and goodwill on his side.

My intention this week is not to berate Inder Gujral. He deserves a chance. And who knows? In 1991, a 70-year-old former foreign minister got a job nobody expected him to but still managed to change the face of India. In 1997, a 77-year-old former foreign minister might still manage to repeat Narasimha Rao's success as prime minister.

My point is this: Is it enough for us to just hope and pray that by an accident of destiny the right man has got the job?

Isn't it time we stopped choosing our prime ministers on the basis of their inoffensiveness? There is something seriously wrong with a country where S R Bommai comes within a whisker of the prime ministership. And the leadership of India cannot be a race in which the hares decide to give the gold medal to the tortoise.

Part of the problem is the lack of inner-party democracy. Mulayam Singh's supporters say he had 103 votes and could have been elected leader of the United Front in a free and fair election. Perhaps they are exaggerating. But the only way to find out is to test these claims. And the only way to do that is through an election.

You need men of competence and vision to run India. Our prime ministers need dynamism and charisma. If we are led by the lowest common denominator then that is where we will remain in the community of nations: at the lowest level, without any hope of catching up with the rest of the world.

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