The Hindu Business Line : Institute of political management

It used to be said of the famous Cleopatra that age could not wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. There are certain management-related themes about which the same can be said.

Articles about them keep appearing in some publication or the other, and they form the subject-matter of some seminar or the other — all the time.

You open the Web site of any academic institution or thinktank, you will find there is no way of escaping them.

At a pinch, I can rattle off leadership, time management, project management, conflict management, financial management and human resource management.

It is quite another matter that discourses and writings on them tend to repeat one another and often rehash and recycle their own earlier versions with little new by way of concept or insight.

Search in vain

My short cruise on the Web has not been able to unearth any institution exclusively devoted to political management, nor any course on the topic as part of the syllabus or course of a department or centre in any university, nor even any scholarly papers detailing the various issues and aspects that give political management its distinctive character.

The reason no doubt is that academics and experts, media commentators and political analysts, who do not have an intimate knowledge of the working of the psyche of ‘political animals’ and merely appraise the political class and establishment from the outside and from the behavioural standpoint, find themselves handicapped in making any meaningful contribution to the subject.

On the other side, the denizens of the political establishment, well-versed in the art and science of surviving and succeeding in the political jungle, do not have either the time, or the inclination, or the penchant, or sometimes the intellectual depth for putting down in writing their dispassionate analysis and real life experience of what it takes to manage political affairs.

The result is that a subject of vital importance in making the functioning of democracy smooth, participative and effective has not received the attention it deserves. Even politicians who have good educational credentials and gone through the political mill for many years commit appalling gaffes of a kind that are hard for a person of average intelligence to comprehend.

Uncharted domain

Training in political management is more necessary in the Indian context when politics is a free-for-all, with everyone beginning from filmstars to felons, from young colts to doddering curmudgeons to scheming adventurers making a go for it for all it is worth. It becomes all the more compelling when politicians have to enter uncharted domain which is entirely different from what the earlier generation, say, up to the 1970s dealt with.

Management of coalitions is by and in itself a formidable field of study. Getting work out of encrusted, entrenched bureaucracy is another area in which politicians can do with some savvy.

The intricacies of globalisation, the impact on politics of the competitive, combative and predatory nature of markets, the breath-taking advances in technologies reducing the world to the size of a pea, the complexities and diversities of interests to be balanced in diplomatic elations, the revolution of rising expectations and the consequent pressure on politicians to deliver — these are just a few of the new challenges that politicians have to contend with.

All that one needs to do to understand the difference that training in political management can make is to ponder the handling of the nuclear deal, inflation control and the crisis in Jammu and Kashmir.

I think that an Indian Institute of Political Management is an idea whose time has come. It will do no end of good to raise the calibre and quality of our politicians.

B. S. RAGHAVAN