Some Social and Economic Determinants of Leadership in India

In the less developed countries of Asia, the question of leadership has been studied in the context of social change and the modernization of traditional societies. After world war II, when many of the less developed countries of  Asia emerged from colonial rule, the national leadership realized that political freedom without freedom from economic, social, and cultural backwardness was meaningless.

In all these countries the major obstacles to economic development and human growth were mass poverty, illiteracy, and disease. The breakthrough to modernity was conceived by the national leadership as the strategic path to economic and social freedom after the achievement of political independence.

In this perspective of social change and modernization, leaders were considered necessary for the smooth transition from the traditional to the modern society, and the smooth transition from the traditional to the modern society, and the role of local and nation national leaders was envisaged as the dissemination of new value institutions and structures that would embody this new set of value.

The approach adopted will be selective rather than exhaustive, concerned with trends rather than specific situations. It would be useful to keep in mind that, though India, is not a paradigm of Asia, the issues crucial to human development in India and the strategic role of the now leadership in responding to the new social and economic needs of the people are more or less similar in all the less developed countries of Asia. Like India, these countries of Asia have had an experience of colonial domination and have only recently attained political independence. Like India, these Asian countries are agrarian societies whose social satisfaction is rigidly segmented and marked by pervasive social and economic inequalities.

A striking feature of the underdeveloped countries of Asia is that they are hierarchical societies in which the patterns of social stratifications are characterized by social and economic inequalities which are no longer legitimized by the officially accepted system of values. In India, the relations between the social strata were organized according to the hierarchical values of the caste system which provided ideological legitimating for the traditional patters of social stratifications.

However, after Independence, the traditional societies of south Asia are publicly committed to the creation of egalitarian societies, or what in India, is called “a socialistic pattern of society”, in which there will be greater equalization of opportunity and a more equitable distribution of income, power, and privilege.

In India, as in the other less developed countries of Asia, only the leadership can be considered effective which is socially responsive to the dehumanizing situations maintained by the social, economic and political structures of society, and strives to create with the people the conditions for integral human growth.

Planned development in India tended to be the function of the administrative bureaucracy and little attention was paid to the need of securing people’s participation as patterns in their own development. Though the official rhetoric emphasized people’s participation in their social and economic growth, the local leadership was, as we have seen earlier, dominated by bureaucratic officials who told them what to do and how to do it. The primary task of the leader is, therefore, to manage an educational process of “conscientization” through which the people become aware of the structural factors responsible for the dehumanizing conditions of their life.

Finally, Like India, these countries are in various stages of the process of industrialization.

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