A void opens up in the lives of people when the good men in politics, in office or in retirement, pass from the scene. In times where politics is a ceaseless battle waged by its practitioners, the objective being to create a better world for their people, it is not always every politician who walks away from it all with his reputation intact.
Manmohan Singh and Jimmy Carter, two of the most decent men who have dominated our lives, have both now passed on. Singh, the man once referred to as an accidental prime minister, bade farewell to life at age ninety-two. A few days later, it was Carter, a hundred years old, who closed his eyes upon the world. These two men, in their politics and in the way they pursued life, gave us all to understand that humility touched with intelligence instilled a dash of grandeur to politicians. Neither man began life in politics. Singh was an accomplished economist and Carter was an engineer. And yet they were both drawn, over stretches of time, into the political world.
That the two men have left indelible impressions on the world is an image which is right there before us. They had their successes and failures in the way they governed their nations. But it was the human qualities in them which have now left us feeling their absence. They observed the world calmly through their prisms, taking little note of the criticism which often came their way. Singh went bravely into the job of reforming the Indian economy, opening up the country to the world.
Carter experienced misery over Iran but then had his statesmanship shape the Camp David treaty between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. It sealed his place in history. Singh led a quiet life after ten years as India's leader. Carter, in his post-presidency, reinvented himself through his Carter Centre and branched out into social work as well as helping nations to resolve issues related to elections.
Manmohan Singh and Jimmy Carter have now passed into the ages. The world is poorer without them, as it was left poorer when Willy Brandt died in 1992. The enduring image of the late German chancellor kneeling in Warsaw in 1970 before a memorial to victims of the Holocaust instantly informed the world of the sophistication coupled with a deep understanding of history which underpinned Brandt's politics.
It was a tragedy, unforeseen in the extreme, which led to Brandt's resignation in 1974. But do note that as chancellor he was the man whose pioneering role in inaugurating détente through Ostpolitik changed post-war politics in Europe. He flew to Berlin, divided as it was, to meet his communist counterpart Willi Stoph. After 1974, much like Carter, Brandt reinvented himself through the Brandt Commission report and through the Socialist International.
Men like Singh, Carter and Brandt will remain in history as metaphors for educated leadership. They were not demagogues but leaders with feet firmly planted on the ground. Much was the criticism hurled at them by their rivals and by others, but they kept the focus on their nations' need to be regarded as people of self-esteem. They changed history in their different ways but without the pomposity which other leaders in other countries have demonstrated in their governance of their people.
In this club of leaders with ideas one can certainly admit Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who honestly believed that glasnost and perestroika would give communism a better and more respectable image. Gorbachev's misfortune came in his failure to understand that his politics threatened to tear the Soviet Union apart and lead to the collapse of the system which across the decades had turned his country into a superpower.
Gorbachev is dead too, not much remembered in Russia. He is reviled for his role in the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But that does not take away from the fact that he assumed power in Moscow at a time when socialism had already begun to creak. The economy was in bad shape. Besides, the West had begun to encourage Gorbachev's rivals in undermining his policies. Gorbachev did not survive, but decades hence he will be remembered as the leader who intended to make a difference but was perhaps ahead of his time. Historians will treat him with respect.
And respect has always been there for another of the men who exercised power with decency in his times. Alexander Dubcek's 1968 Prague Spring was brutally put down by the Brezhnev-led Warsaw Pact forces. Dubcek remained banished for more than two decades until his rehabilitation in the aftermath of Vaclav Havel's Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.
Despite his removal from power, Dubcek's campaign to give socialism a human face was demonstrative of his ability to gauge the feelings of his countrymen. Those feelings were simple: if socialism and communism were to survive, they would need to go through liberal engineering. Dubcek captured the imagination of the world. His quiet demeanour camouflaged a steely interior. His struggle in 1968 was to be the precursor to Havel's success in 1989.
All these men, having carried out their responsibilities in history, have now gone the way of all flesh. In their politics was vision, a soft yet quiet determination to make their contributions to change in their countries and in the wider world. They were not mediocre politicians but statesmen who looked beyond the narrow confines of the present to the broader and widening landscape of the future. In their conversations was softness. In their manners was humility.
They did not raise their voices and yet those who heard them, in public or in the confines of conference rooms, could not fail to comprehend that grit which enhanced their political appeal. They did not engage in meaningless propaganda, did not harangue. In their expressions of opinion they brought reason to bear on the arguments they put across.
Greatness was and will be theirs. They led lives where pettiness was absent. They were polite men, all of them. It has always been the tradition that quiet, polite men in leadership have had the most profound impact on history.
And those are the reasons why they will shine through the difficult, winding passages of moving time. Those are the reasons why we will miss them, will hunt for the books which will always take us back to studies of their times and the challenges they were confronted with and sometimes failed to overcome in their days in power.
These men exuded power, without the arrogance of power.
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