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This is an archive article published on January 18, 2014

The Limits of Charisma

Let’s judge politicians not by how they appear, but what their parties do.

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This Lok Sabha election has been shrunk to a personality contest between two or three individuals. We view public appearances by politicians like theatrical productions, analyse rhetoric, costume, body language, audience engagement.

And certainly, at least one political party would like us to believe that the 2014 general election has a “presidential” cast. That all the bewildering variables in our elections are made irrelevant by the force of Narendra Modi’s personality.

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Modi has few competitors in the charisma department. His voice is a tuned instrument that dips conspiratorially, thunders in defiance and shifts to a sincere, matter-of-fact tone when he is doing the successful CEO routine. He seems to embody technocratic efficiency, nationalism and machismo.

There’s no doubt that he answers to a deep need, after years of a namby-pamby UPA and slowing growth, to surrender to a “decider”. This government’s inability to visibly take charge, or communicate its actions, has created this yearning for confident leadership.

But how far can charisma take you? Many of our most successful politicians have been inept public speakers, low-wattage personalities. Mayawati exerts great hold over voters, but is not credited with much in the way of rhetoric or stage presence. In 2004, Sonia Gandhi, considered to have near-zero public appeal, won over the extraordinarily popular Vajpayee. The late EMS Namboodiripad, veteran Communist leader for over six decades, had a serious speech impediment. When asked if he always stammered, he answered: “No, only when I speak.” While individuals do become the bearers of great hope in a presidential system, Barack Obama being the obvious example, the kaleidoscopic complexity of a parliamentary system like ours doesn’t seem to oblige larger-than-life leaders.

What’s more, politics is not a sound and light show, a matter of merchandise and holography, it is what affects people in their lives, or what resonates with their beliefs. A few of us might derive our voting preference from who has the zingier line, but for more citizens, it is about the substance of their platforms.

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Often, charisma is conferred in retrospect, after election victory — think of the changing assessments of Indira Gandhi or Margaret Thatcher. There’s the famous story about the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, when those who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon had won, but those who watched on TV were persuaded by Kennedy’s appeal. But as many have pointed out, there’s more to that story — Democrats had a clear majority in that period, and the surprise was not that Nixon lost, but that he nearly won.

This runs counter to our intuitions. Most of us feel, at a gut level, that personality matters. Politicians and their campaign managers certainly behave as if it does. The consensus among political scientists, though, is that the impact of leadership on outcomes in a parliamentary system is highly uncertain. While voters are more familiar with leaders than with policies, they vote on the basis of a more sophisticated calculus, based on personal experience and partisan loyalties — and simply cite the leader’s name as shorthand. Personalities matter in indirect ways, in the way they influence parties and governments and the occasional close contest, but it is not established that they count for any decisive advantage among voters.

But is a media-soaked 2014 different? If personal aura could carry an election, it says something troubling about our emotional state, our misguided expectations from politics. Those who trade on strength and charisma to get to office are scary — because it is a fundamentally undemocratic impulse to look to leaders as conquering heroes.

Most of our political leaders do understand this, and they speak of their party’s causes rather than themselves. Rahul Gandhi, for all his simplifications, tells us there is no hero on a white horse, sun streaming behind him, who can rescue us from our situation. Even Arvind Kejriwal, who cannot be accused of modesty of mission, always speaks of the people powering his movement. Modi, in stark contrast to everyone else, pitches himself as a solver and satisfier, he tells us to wait a few months until he can fix everything.

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No matter who you vote for this election, look carefully at what’s on offer, quite apart from the self-confidence and charisma of those offering. It is wonderful to feel like part of a dramatic transformation, but the high is illusory — democratic politics employs different energies altogether. Governing doesn’t call for cleansing upheavals, but for a practical dedication based on long-held priorities, taking a call on divisive issues, distributing finite resources with incomplete information and then defending those decisions, incrementally improving lives. We need a sense of proportion, and we need to get real in what to expect from politics.

Amulya Gopalakrishnan

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