"Lead India" is looking for a Sher Shah

The Times Of India's Lead India program has been on for some months now. I havent followed it very closely, because over the past few years, I have become completely disillusioned by this country's fourth estate. Whether it be life or death, heroic acts or cowardice, nationalist fervour or communal tensions, the press these days seems to brazenly commoditise everthing.

And so Lead India seems to me to be another attempt at selling India to Indians, with a cheap wrapper on it. We need a true leader of men, they say. So they go around camera-totting and trying to find tommorrows leaders amongst middle-class intelligentsia in our urban jungles.

Now, how bizarre is that for a country that has 72.2% of its population (as per the 2001 census) still living in its villages? Ofcourse we need a true leader of men, but would he be more likely to emerge out of an NDTV studio or from the fields and factories of India's rural areas?

First however, we as a nation, need to get our basics about leadership correct. And thats tough. Our track record here has been abyssmal. Our history textbooks confuse good orators, politicians, saints, warriors, agriculturists, economists, doctors, lawyers, in short anyone with some reknown in there proffession, as a leader of men. A Phd in nuclear physics, or a political degree from UK, is no garantee for a peasant not going hungry, or a woman not getting raped.

For any nation and more so for India, a leader needs to have a thorough pulse of the men he is supposed to lead, and understand the land he is supposed to govern. In our 5000 year history, jut one name stands out, that can claim credence to such a tall order.

Sher Shah, the lion king. .
Ruling for a brief span of five years, this descendant of an Afghan warrior family, left a mark on the administration and governance of the nation, which the Mughals and the British could do nothing but humbly copy and continue.

To qoute from Abraham Eraly's The Mughal Throne "Travellers and wayfarers, during the time of Sher Shah's reign, were relieved from the trouble of keeping watch; nor did they fear to halt even in the middle of a desert... They encamped at night at every place, desert or inhabited, without fear: they placed their goods and property on the plain, and turned out their mules to graze, and themselves slept with minds at ease and free from care, as if in their own house; and the zemindars, for fear that any mischief should occur to the travellers, and that they should suffer or be arrested on account of it, kept watch over them".

As Eraly informs us: "With peace and security came prosperity. From his early days ... Sher Shah had given high priority to caring for the peasant. Where the peasant is ruined, the king is ruined, he believed. He therefore took great care to ensure that the protectors of peasants - the army and the revenue officials - did not, as often happened, become their oppressors."
Whether it was tax collection or road construction, peasant welfare or dispensing justice, here was a man who knew what his empire needed and how to get that done.

Sher Shah finds mention in our history books as a rebel king, a Afghan warrior who drove Humayun out and as a man who built the Grand Trunk Road. What we dont really impress on our readers (and young students of history), is that we never really had a true leader of men since Sher Shah. Never again came a man who wanted to, and was succesful in bringing good governance and peace at a national level to our grassroots. A phenomena, that never happened again in our country. Today, we desperately need a Sher Shah Suri.

"Lead India", do you think you will find our Sher Shah Suri for us?