Rushdie once humorously said, “Indian Democracy: one man one bribe.” Jokes about corruption regularly do the rounds in Mumbai: A man decides to visit a new anti-corruption officer. On arriving at the government building he meets the officer’s secretary. The man asks to see the anti-corruption officer. “I’m afraid he’s not in today,” the secretary replies. “But I can put the light on inside his office,” the man says. “I may be able to let you see him, if you give me 50 rupees.” The man eventually pays the money and storms into the office: “Did you know that your own secretary is taking bribes?!” The anti-corruption officer opens his hands and says: “What to do? Even I had to pay 50 rupees to get into my office this morning.”
The transformation of any culture, is not merely transformation on a material and structural level (and continuously be revitalised if one’s vision is of democratic country), but an accompanying transformation of the collective psyche. This is of course where leadership of some substance is required. Psychoanalysis gives us valuable insights into what they might look like. Importantly, a leader’s presence, his utterings must primarily contain anxiety in order to lead the community or country through the natural human tensions in the dual desire for both change and for security and predictability. Nelson Mandela is a powerful example of leadership that understood his role in this way, leading South Africa out of a violent state of apartheid. He was visible, articulate, compassionate towards suffering and importantly, absolutely unwilling to shame those who clearly were perpetrators of the former regime.
Psychoanalysis reminds leaders that you cannot be a blank screen on which the community has to second-guess your thoughts, your feelings and intentions. It teaches us that through the strange mechanisms of the unconscious we will either project the worst aspects of ourselves onto you, or those of the most awful authority figures we may encounter in our childhood lives. Hence, why in leadership coaching, we drive home the importance of speech that includes sharing ourselves, personal disclosure, to fill the otherwise blank screen with something closer to the truth about who we are. So, in the absence of vibrant, committed leadership presence, and actual loud silence on important issues, it is easy to draw the conclusion that our leaders simply don’t care. Gandhi walked for miles, barefoot, touching the hearts and souls of the nation, but that now seems to be so distant from the leadership we have now in the country. I am sure this must be partly why Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is such a highly popular book amongst Mumbai students, in prominent position in virtually every bookstore I’ve visited in the City. This sad turning towards one of the most vicious dictators in history for guidance, for insights into some authority to govern the chaos that is India, (try Google: Mein Kampf+India), a profound hunger for visible, visionary, authoritative leadership of this country, to mobilise the popular imagination. Nelson Mandela’s creative leadership, demonstrated a willingness to commit to transformational processes as he did with the Truth and Reconciliation Process of South Africa. The process was designed to avoid attempts to blindly burying the atrocities of the past, in pretend-play that they somehow hadn’t happened, and instead, as Desmond Tutu put it, “to open up the wounds of hurt, to cleanse them, so that they did not fester”; to draw a line under the past, to make revenge, a sort of “you clobbered me, so I will clobber you” less likely to be in the psyche of the South African citizen and the country as a whole. Some 22,000 statements were submitted and heard in open court. One woman for example, simply spoke from her heart as a mother whose son was shot dead by the South African police and asked very simply to have a small grave to be erected in his memory.
There was, however, one application to the committee described as “intriguing,” from an unnamed Indian woman, describing her “apathy.” She essentially believed she hadn’t done enough towards alleviating the suffering of others. Under the terms of Commission, a person could apply for amnesty on the grounds that they:
“As individuals can and should be held accountable by history for our lack of necessary action in times of crisis…In exercising apathy rather than commitment we allowed others to sacrifice their lives for the sake of our freedom and an increase in our standard of living”.
Although her application fell within the guidelines of an “omission”, amnesty was not granted as it was not deemed politically motivated by any particular organization. The writer Jacqueline Rose, who brought this specific case to world attention with her psychoanalytic lense on world affairs, points out this case addressed “that what you don’t do as a political subject can have effects, and might be important in the transformations of the world as what you do”, yet “only rarely and reluctantly – hence the strangeness of this moment – do people admit to it (apathy), although they are very ready to diagnose it in others.” She goes on to describe that the conditions of the court hearings could not, within it structures, handle a confession of apathy. It would require answering questions such as “What is the time of apathy? How would you date it? What are the means and what the end? Is it in fact an intention at all? Is apathy something communicable, is it something we have a language for talking about? Or does it, more like a disease or shameful secret, rely on doing work invisible in the dark?”
It is grossly neglectful of the responsibilities of leaders not to give thoughtful consideration of the state of the collective psyche by singularly focusing on structural, engineering type transformations alone. Jacqueline Rose refers to an extract of the Commission report which comments that during the apartheid regime, “much of the country’s population went silent through fear, apathy, indifference or genuine lack of information,” in what they described as “diminished affective reactivity”. Many people in India are genuinely afraid to speak out against corruption. In the writings of George Orwell, he warned us that it is not the horse that needs to be whipped that you should worry about, but the horse that automatically obeys without needing to be whipped at all. In his fictional fable, “Animal Farm”, the animals betray their own rebellion against the human masters, as the pigs (now more equal that the other animals) compulsively repeat the same oppressive master-slave relationship. Animal Farm remains banned in China and most Islamic countries. It reminds us, that in overthrowing one form of oppression, perhaps in India’s case the British, one may risk creating an imitation that is just as insidious and divisive. It is this sort of reasoning that led to the transformational efforts at the subjective level in South Africa. Fascism, Orwell foretold, is essentially a belief in inequality and somehow making that inequality normal, invariably by dehumanising others.
There is popular mobilisation against corruption in India. Social campaigns and civic mobilisation are positive in the sense that they can breathe new life into parliamentary democracy, providing of course the governing leadership has the confidence to see it in such a way. Like the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, we don’t know where this will lead, as naturally we cannot, but it forces us to take stock of a moment in time, not only of what is going on around us, but what it evokes inside us. It is often the case that the sense of uncertainty such movements inevitably instil, breed a desire by those in positional power to view such activity purely in terms of a threat to their power.
Christopher Bollas, a psychoanalyst has written widely about what he calls the “Fascist state of mind”, as equally threatening one might say, as overt brutality, designed to undermine movements and other challenges to the status quo. What he suggests is that there will be attempts at distorting the views of the people posing a challenge to authority, an extreme form being such as slander, “he’s a fake”, “in fancy dress” and views taken out of context in a form of what he calls “rhetorical violence”. Then comes a caricaturing, a sort of cartooning of the other’s views, identifying them with a particular group, “he’s funded by the IDIOTS party”; an assassination, a sadist sort of gossip by placing fictions of facts in “non-judicial places” where the victim cannot speak for himself. Resorting to a sort of aggregating, by a name “well what do you expect he’s a Muslim”, or “from Bihar” or a "Jew".
The simple reality is that state building involves thinking about what the modern country should look like and how it should be run. For many countries around the world, this is seems like a tug of war between the politicians, who are seen as not being willing to change, are invested in maintain the lucrative status quo and civil society that is keenly driving that change. The question of course in any war against corruption is who will be targeted? One of the key issues of dispute in India, in drawing up the anti-corruption Lokpal agreement, is whether the most senior leaders of the country fall under its purview. If they are not, surely it merely becomes another instrument for manipulating patronage and by extension, an exercise in corruption itself. Loyalties then, continue like anything in a free market village that can be bought and sold in cash payments in convertible currencies, assets sold off at bargain prices and natural resources plundered or licences given to people to do so.
Perhaps there are lessons from the South African process, not so much the characteristics of actual process itself, but its innovativeness in the following ways. First of all, as a general point, laws alone, or redistribution of resources or other structural initiatives do not sufficiently effect lasting change. Subjective and psychic interventions are also required. Mandela understood this. Corruption harms people, it hurts people and it demeans the people of India on a daily basis and those of us who also live here. Yet transformation cannot occur without “buy-in” (to state simple leadership textbook jargon) from those who will be required to think and act differently in the new era, especially those with least to gain. The transformation of South Africa was a partnership of the collective psyche of Mandela, de Klerk and many others. The respective leaders were willing to change (i.e. grow), to exercise the painful and difficult work of working-through the outer and inner realties of their limitations in the best long term interests of the country as a whole, not merely from a perspective of singular self-interest. Let us not forget these were former adversaries (I may refer here to Mandela as a leadership role model, but the same must be said of de Klerk). Without such focus on the subjective level, a joining between adversarial groups, surely it is likely that the anti-corruption initiatives, are built on sand, in which no anti-corruption Bill can possibly stand-up with such inadequate foundations, however well scoped or written. This I think, is what Mumbai friends mean when they say “we have to get to the roots of corruption.”
The second point I want to make is the South African process took its injustices of past history extremely seriously in order to build a better future. If leaders of the country have, as is claimed by the anti-corruption movements, looted the country by approximately 1.3-2 trillion U.S. dollars that could usefully have improved the lives of the poor, they must stand accountable and arguably the funds returned and redistributed. In today’s Times of India, UNICEF suggested that 55 million children, 43% of India's children today, right now, in the India are estimated to be desperately underfed and underweight. Platitudes of “Let’s not look back” or “The past is the past”, quasi sorts of attempts at enforced forgetting on a nation will and always fail. We simply cannot issues commands to the mind in this way and expect them to work in any sustainable, lasting way. They simply don’t, instead becoming toxic cargo in the collective psyche, to explode at any indeterminate moment. Desmond Tutu, during the South African process, quoted the words “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” These words are also displayed at the entrance to Dachau, once the former death camp training ground for the S.S.
My third point is that the South African process was transformational in the characteristics of being (1) unexpected, (2) inclusive, (3) creative (4) intimate and (5) transparent. It was not the same old distant and dictatorial leadership the country was accustomed to. A common dissatisfaction in my consulting room is the neglectful distance leaders have from the people in the community they lead, and the tedious predictability of how they will behave. Who in any large organisation hasn’t felt a sense of “here we go again” when a boss sends a cold email issuing a complete change of business strategy, without the sensitivity to show any care of how this might affect individuals or the collective psyche. Do we merely want to be remembered as leaders who conditioned horses that don’t need to be whipped? Gallup estimated that about 40% of people, whilst continuing to sit in their chair in the office have actually psychologically left. They also estimate that about 90% of people who leave their organisations do so because they simply cannot bear to work for their bosses any longer. The South Africa process was profoundly inclusive and intimate in the sense that it said by its actions, to each and every citizen, “What happened to you matters, we will not deny or dismiss what you feel.” It was open to every citizen of the country to be involved and held transparently in open court for the world to see.
Nelson Mandela’s compassion, his dignity, his willingness to take leadership risks - without which no transformation is possible - mobilised the country across the apartheid divide. He had the leadership mentality that was not afraid to invite inquiry and reflection. Mandela's boundless enthusiasm guided the nation through its evolution, taking the imagination of the country by storm and building commitment from every corner of the world. All this, after 27 years in prison, finding the strength to give respect, forgiveness and partnership to the very people who incarcerated him. Of course, leaders like Nelson Mandela or Gandhi both achieved their vast reputations through severe martyrdom and one must question how political leaders might achieve the same repute simply by being good? De Klerk deserved to be honoured in this piece of writing. There is a story that is told by Alastair Sparks, a South African writer, that one day in his place of worship, de Klerk heard a message that said, “New roads must be found, new pathways must be sought. The only difference, between a groove and grave, apart from the spelling, is depth.” De Klerk listened. He found a new way, undoubtedly firstly within himself, within his mind and his whole being. Most of all, he found within himself the leadership substance to actually take reparative action.
If there is one especially important leadership insight here, I think it is that transformation begins with us, ourselves. Any country, corporate or other community transformation will be dictated by a leader’s willingness to take a long hard look at his anxieties, states of fear, resistances, deeper wishes, in all, to take a long look at himself and at the very least, think about what he wants to be remembered for.
