My friend, like me I presume, has no claim to fame as activist. We are normal, working, struggling mothers of twos fighting hard to survive with dignity in a migrant situation, where even bringing up your kids also is a lonely struggle, a dependent situation on strangers, or the occasional elderly in the family, who would themselves, do better with care and company
Take any leader and you will see that this is so. If these things are not happening, then I would doubt very much if the said person is a leader.
A leader takes responsibility for the actions of the persons he supposedly leads. A leader does not say, “I don’t know”. The leader knows that the buck stops at him and takes full accountability for the same. Two examples from Indian history stand out in my mind.
Mahatma Gandhi (the original Gandhi) undertook a fast unto death after the Chauri Chaura incident. Why did he do that? It was because he felt (and this is important) he was culpable for his followers actions with resulted in the burning down of a police chowky and many deaths.
Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1956, offered his resignation after a railway accident at Mahbubnagar that led to 112 deaths. However, Nehru did not accept his resignation. Three months later, he resigned accepting moral and constitutional responsibility for a railway accident at Ariyalur in Tamil Nadu that resulted in 144 deaths. While speaking in the Parliament on the incident, the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, stated that he was accepting the resignation because it would set an example in constitutional propriety and not because Shastri was in any way responsible for the accident. Shastri’s unprecedented gesture was greatly appreciated by the citizens.[Wiki entry, here]
Look at history and you will see that leaders rarely share credit for victories but share all the blame when anything goes wrong. And incidentally both these leaders are with the party that today heads the government.
Today the two people from this very same party who head the government - one official, one unofficial – are leaders of a different nature. One has no idea what is happening under his watch or atleast claims to have no knowledge of what is happening under his watch. He has the certificate of integrity provided by all concerned. And the person he reports to, unconstitutionally, has nothing to say, except take potshots
at the opposition. What about the billions looted? Why was your government sitting on all these scams? And these reports were out by atleast one newspaper in 2008 itse
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