Popular leadership
IN an article titled “Our Policy”, the Amrita Bazar Patrika, while explaining its own policy, makes certain interesting observations regarding popular leadership in India. We have no quarrel with the policy of the Patrika, which has been doing yeoman’s service to the country for more than half a century. As every reader of that journal knows, it has always been conspicuous for its outspokenness and courage; but in order to appreciate the good work of the Patrika, it is not necessary to minimise or overlook the work done by others. While explaining that its policy has been modelled on the teachings of the late Lokmanya Tilak, the Patrika complains that the present political leaders of the country ignore those teachings in that they have cut themselves adrift from the masses, whose interests they do not always keep in view. We quote Patrika’s words: “The virility is not there, the constructive genius is not there, the patience and forbearance which so distinguished Tilak are not there…. Leadership now is of a section of the intelligentsia, the anglicised section who have in their heart of hearts more confidence in every other people than their own and whose mainsprings of action are ideas borrowed from the West. There is no leader borrowed from the West. There is no leader in whom the masses feel their strength, from whom they derive inspiration to think politically as with the intelligentsia. Leaders are now more afraid of the masses than of the bureaucracy. Why are they afraid of the masses? Why do our great political leaders speak only of mass action as a threat, but at the same time keep themselves away from the masses as from a vice?”
