Heed this 67-year-old tryst: The Hindu


http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/Heed-this-67-year-old-tryst/article17093837.ece

Heed this 67-year-old tryst
Gopalakrishna Gandhi

Excerpts:
“Isolated power
While supremacists love their own very particular crowds and those crowds love them, they are, as persons, very lonely. And loneliness finds two friends: secrecy and arbitrariness. A mist of trail-less circumstances surrounds a supremacist’s decisions. And these decisions come to be taken impulsively, whimsically. Sometimes they can be inspired, but on most occasions they create more problems than they solve and can also cause havoc. Isolated power is isolated from the advantages of consultation, from the benefit of an equal colleagueship. It is isolated, therefore, from the great bonus of republican partnership. So fond does he become of the dulcet tones of his own voice, that his auditory powers atrophy. Even when he seems to be listening to others, the personal supremacist is, in fact, listening to his own voice reacting to what he is hearing. He is his own singer, his own song and his own listener. The self-centrism of an elected leader is, in democratic terms, an irony. In republican terms, an anomaly. It scarred the period 1975-1977. It must not, in the same or modified form, in de jure fact or in de facto spirit, be readmitted into our polity, our political culture.
There are signs of it wanting to.”


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