Save Me From Charismatic Leaders!

I do not have a vote in electing a US President but, being a citizen of the unofficial 53rd state of the United States of America, I have a large stake in it. If I did have a vote, I would vote for John McCain: not because he is wise and old, which he may be; not because I have become a Republican, which I am not; not because I do not want Americans to get out of Iraq, I didn’t want them to even go there; not even because I am against pro-choice or gay rights because I am not, but because I do not want Barak Obama to be the next President of the United States. I am not against Obama because he is Black because I think that it would be wonderful for the US to have a Black President; not because his middle name is Husseini, he is not Muslim and it wouldn’t matter to me even if he were; not because I do not like his policies because I like them to the extent that he has made them known; not even because he is flip-flopping because that only shows he has matured as a politician. I am against having Obama as the President because he has charisma and I have developed an allergy to charismatic leaders.

The first charismatic leader who disappointed me was Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. I was a little kid when India became independent and Nehru became its uncrowned king. We would deck ourselves in our finest attires on November 14, his birthday, which was celebrated throughout India as Children’s Day. When Nehru took over from the British, India had the most developed legal, administrative and economic infrastructure of all Asian countries, with the exception of Japan: it had one of the best Railways network in the world, its universities produced graduates in humanities, sciences and engineering; it had a science institute which had produced eminent scientists, including Nobel Prize winner, C.V. Raman; it had an efficient administrative service and a legal system; its cities like Calcutta and Bombay were thought to be the most cosmopolitan east of London; its factories were producing many industrial products, including steel; it had a healthy reserve of foreign exchange and the Indian Rupee was the legal tender in gulf countries and accepted as far as Hong Kong and Singapore.

After ruling over India as an unchallenged democratic dictator for seventeen years, Nehru left India in shambles when he died; its literacy rate was among the lowest in Asia and the poverty rate one of the highest; the foreign exchange situation was so precarious that one had to seek permission of the central bank to even get a passport and, if one got permission, one was allowed a foreign exchange of eight dollars – a Bollywood producer made a film titled “Around the world in eight dollars� – and a country of entrepreneurial people was spending all its entrepreneurial skills on how to obtain licenses for quotas and permits, which they could then sell in the black market without wasting all their energies on fighting and bribing the bureaucrats to actually produce anything. He inherited an Indian army from the British whose courage, bravery and prowess was acknowledged by friends and foes alike in the second world war when its soldiers won numerous medals and Victoria crosses; the same army, when confronted by the Chinese army in 1962, faced a humiliating defeat, with its commander, B.N. Kaul – a cousin of Nehru- fleeing the battlefield as soon as the first shot was fired. It was left to the dull and boring leaders like Narsimha Rao, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh to get the country out of the morass into which Nehru and his charismatic daughter, Indira Gandhi, had pushed into.


One of the young men who were mesmerized by Nehru’s charisma was the Junior Senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy’s candidacy was considered path-breaking in a similar way that Obama’s candidacy is being vwhen he defeated his Republican rival Richard Nixon. And when hiewed now: he was an Irish Roman Catholic in a country which had until then elected only Anglo-Saxon Protestants as Presidents; he was youthful and promised to usher in a brave new world. I was in India when Kennedy won his election for the US Presidency in 1960. We almost danced in the streets e gave his famous “ich bin ein Berliner� speech, we rejoiced as if he had said “Main Hindustani hooN� I came to the United States after his tragic assassination but soon enough to realize that his Presidency had produced a lot of sizzle but very little steak during his short tenure as its incumbent: his legacy can be summed up as (1) sexual peccadilloes which would make Bill Clinton seem like a monk (2) the bungled Bay of Pigs crisis which consolidated Fidel Castro’s hold over Cuba (3) pushing the US into the disastrous Vietnam war, and (4) the Cuban missile crisis when the world survived a world war by a hairbreadth though it is touted as his great success. The real reforms in the United States were brought about by his dull successor, Lyndon Johnson, who introduced dramatic reforms with his War on Poverty and the Affirmative Action Program to provide real opportunities to America’s black community.

I came to Canada during the winter of 1968 when it had a boring Prime Minister, Lester B Pearson and an even more boring leader of the opposition, Robert Stanfield. During his five years of heading a minority government, the colourless and boring Pearson gave the country its national flag and national anthem, a universal healthcare system of which we are so proud, a bicultural and bilingual commission that laid the foundation of an officially bilingual Canada, and an Expo in Montreal of which Canadians from coast to coast were hugely proud.

When Pearson resigned, a contest for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada was held and the Justice Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, emerged as the candidate of French Canada when the more prominent French Canadian, Jean Marchand, decided not to run for the leadership because of his poor grasp of the English language. Pierre Trudeau captured the imagination of Canadians unlike any other leader had done before then or since: he was youthful, free-spirited and unconventional in his shirt sleeves and sandals; he was an awesome speaker in both English and French and displayed a healthy disdain for conventional politics and media. When he defeated his seven rivals for the Liberal leadership, the whole country was swept off its collective feet by the Trudeaumania that followed his election as Liberal leader. A general election was called in which an otherwise decent and intelligent Conservative leader, Robert Stanfield, who could not throw a ball straight, proved to be no match for the Charismatic Trudeau. He reminded me of Nehru in more ways than one – both men shared an unhealthy contempt for America, an equally unhealthy fascination for Fabian socialism and socialist countries and a love for a daily fresh rose in their lapels.

When Trudeau came to power, he inherited a country, which had a healthy economy but was facing troublesome separatist forces in Quebec; English Canadians thought that Trudeau was the Messiah who was going to end separatism and bring his fellow French Canadians firmly into the Canadian federation both emotionally and politically; and he did, indeed, bring French power to Ottawa but was unable to close the widening gap between the “two solitudes�. Viewed as a champion of civil liberties, he invoked the War Measures Act to introduce the most draconian restrictions on civil liberties in Quebec in the Canadian history; Canada had to pay dearly for those measures when an entire generation of francophone Quebecers grew up resenting those draconian attacks on their civil liberties. He patriated Canada’s constitution without the consent of Quebec, an action whose consequences we are feeling even today; a people who once called themselves French Canadians now call themselves only Quebecois. As if strengthening separatist feelings in Quebec was not enough, Trudeau also alienated the West by his nonchalant remarks to westerners like “why should I sell your wheat?� and, more significantly, with his National Energy Policy, which caused a permanent distrust in the West of Eastern politicians.

Canada’s constitution and in particular, its Charter of Rights, is generally touted as the greatest achievement of Trudeau; in reality, most of those rights were already enjoyed by most Canadians under the Bill of Rights promulgated by John Diefenbaker in 1962; Trudeau merely enshrined those rights in the constitution and made them litigable, making us more like the Americans and creating a goldmine for a whole army of lawyers.

Trudeau’s economic legacy was even more disastrous: the healthy economy that he inherited was soon saddled by ever increasing deficits, unproductive mega projects and wasteful regional and job creation and training programs that trained people for non-existent jobs. His successors inherited an economy which was saddled by large deficits and national debt, inefficient companies propped up by individual and corporate subsidies and declining productivity. While he decried our overdependence on the US for our exports and promised a ‘Third Option’ of greater opening to Europe and Asia, Canada’s dependence on the US markets was the same, if not more than when he assumed office.

Trudeau is held in especially high esteem by new immigrants to Canada because of his sponsorship of multiculturalism in this country; but even here his contribution is over-rated: the multiculturalism introduced by Trudeau was very different from the multiracial and multi-ethnic multiculturalism of today’s Canada; when he introduced multiculturalism, it was to win over Canadians of Italian and Ukrainian descents who were some of the most vociferous opponents of official bilingualism; that its greatest beneficiaries have turned out to be Canada’s visible minorities is an unintended consequence of those policies.

There is, however, something about Charisma: it beats reality. All these three leaders, Nehru, Kennedy and Trudeau, are still fondly remembered by their countrymen as people who gave them new visions and made them dream new dreams. This may be true but I have seen too many promised dreams remain unfulfilled. Having been bitten thrice, I am now quite shy. This is why I say, “Save me from Charisma�.