Leadergiri: the Indian dream

There is a new Indian dream taking root, and it’s not a virtuous one. The ideal of upward mobility, usually achieved through education and enterprise, is now attained through ‘leadergiri’ – the pursuit of raw money and muscle power, exercised through politics.

In the last week, leadergiri’s rewards were on display. On October 6, Haryana Congress MP Birendra Singh stated publicly that politics was “a very lucrative profession even if you fail in other spheres of life….[where you] play not in millions but in billions, and try to crush the right people in politics.” The next day, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, who is on a mission to ‘democratise’ and ‘cleanse’ his party, legitimised undeserving leadergiri by stating that not more than two persons from within the same family would be given party tickets to contest elections.

Motivated by these lotteries, millions of young Indians are abandoning the straight and narrow of education and enterprise to pursue the easy gains of leadergiri. And what a life it is – hooliganism, protection from the law, flag-bearing 4x4s roaring through towns, access to easy money through political patronage, and in the end, maybe that ticket to contest elections and acquire those billions.

Balbir Singh, 20, is on the leadergiri track. He is the son of a farmer in Rajasthan with three acres of family land. Balbir went to an English medium ‘private’ school that taught him little more than broken English. He wanted to realise his dream of learning English well and expand his father’s small transport business, a dream shared by many others in his village. Handsome, strapping Balbir was their model. So he enrolled in a government college to study commerce. Once there, the student wing of a national political party offered the young man a ticket to stand for college president – the first step to becoming a politician. What captured his imagination was the chance to exercise dadagiri and become a party ‘commando.’

It was enough to deflect him. Balbir moved to the city, and outfitted himself for the job: a 4×4 bought with his father’s money, diesel fuel for the endless political runs around town, clothes and flashy mobile phones.

The lure of being a leader has taken away all his passion for learning English or taking his business to the next level. Instead Balbir is learning to rachet up popular angst, political loyalty and opportunism. For though the position does not officially pay, it is extremely lucrative, he says. Between the patronage gleaned from the process of admissions, teacher appointments, issues-based political mobilization, contracts, elections, being courted by various political parties and factions, there is much money to be made – and much power to be had. It works. In the process, Balbir will become an add-on to the bribery chain; the common man who normally paid a bribe or two to the local sarpanch, collector, police or politician, now has to grease the palms of the expanding network of such young netas, making even corruption unaccountable and ineffective.

The next step for Balbir is to become a contractor for government infrastructure projects, then move on to real estate broker, mafia manager, investor and finally to real power within the political party structure. Balbir does not know this, but he could eventually design public policy programmes that are slated to create the very development projects that, paradoxically, were supposed to keep youth like him away from living this low life.

Balbir is one of millions of young Indians of his generation who aspire to this path to success.

Being a party karyakarta is not new but it has acquired greater importance because of the lack of job and entrepreneurship opportunities for those who graduate from the many private schools and colleges, semi-literate and unemployable. Few want to learn the artisanal or farming skills of their fathers or mothers – skills which have not been given societal or economic value in modern India. There’s also the ability to siphon off or control the billions spent on entitlement programmes, money that passes through various leaky administrative layers from the centre to local councils. This is compounded by high land prices, which provides the back-up money for youth to intern as political karyakartas at their own cost – with a good chance of getting a quick and high rate of return.

For the unprivileged, leadergiri provides political protection for existing assets like property – so susceptible to land grabs – and from caste or gender injustice.

The irony is that most young people like Balbir start out with the right impulse, i.e. to improve their lives and community. There is a space for social and political participation, evident in the success of the anti-corruption movement, the massive protests against gender violence and rape, and the creation of new political parties based on genuine patriotism. This authentic engagement will grow when young Indians have a modicum of financial security, either through formal jobs or individual enterprise, through which they learn processes, discipline and the power of merit.

Getting to that position requires overturning the skewed proportion of organised to unorganised sector jobs in India. Just 10% of jobs are in the ‘organised’ sector with the dignity of benefits like healthcare and pensions, leaving 90% of the country to fend for itself in the informal economy. India’s political system is a mirror image of this skewed labour market, with just a sliver being the legitimate business of politics, while the rest is consumed with the testosterone-laden activity of …leadergiri.

In 2005, Rahul Gandhi promised to reform the youth Congress and use its energies productively. Presumably he meant well. Instead, the scope and depth of his party’s leadergiri activities – and those of other major parties – have grown in direct proportion to the 14 million youth entering the workforce annually without jobs, and are left to feed off the political system for daily survival.

There is still time to convert leadergiri activity into achievement. The karyakartas are hooligans but not yet hardened criminals. Leadership and leadergiri are two sides of the same coin: both require perseverance, mobilisation, loyalty, enterprise. The one which will win, will be the one we feed.

Akshay Mathur is Head of Research at Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

Manjeet Kripalani is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

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