The United States is the country I know best apart from my own. I first visited it 38 years ago and have been back many times since. My last visit was in the spring of 2023, when Joe Biden had been president for a little more than two years. I spent some three weeks on that trip and from conversations with friends – and my own observations – it was clear that the president had done an excellent holding job, helping Americans put the vicious polarisation of the Trump years behind them. It was equally evident that, given his age and infirmities, Biden should not seek a second term and make this announcement in time to allow his party to choose the best candidate to replace him.
Alas, Biden did not heed the signs and actively sought a second term. After his disastrous performance in the debate with Donald Trump, there was increasing pressure on him to withdraw from Democratic donors, Congressmen and Senators, and the party rank-and-file. The polls showed him slipping further and further behind his rival. Nonetheless, for several weeks, Biden dug in his heels, until he was finally forced to quit.
The current American president’s desperation to cling on to office is not a personal trait. Rather, it is symptomatic of how men who have enjoyed power and professional success behave in every country on earth. Even when their physical or mental capacities decline, when it is manifestly unclear that they can no longer perform their jobs well, or even adequately, men in authority persist in staying on, damaging the institution or society they serve and acting to the detriment of their own historical legacy as well.
In India, it may be cricket fans who are most painfully aware of this phenomenon. Once sportspersons cross 35, it becomes ever harder for them to perform as well as they once did. But few recognise the signs. One of the exceptions was Sunil Gavaskar, who quit the game after batting very well in a World Cup. His great mate, GR Viswanath, should have retired several years before he actually did. Kapil Dev went on for too long and so did Sachin Tendulkar, in each case putting individual ambition – most Test wickets taken in one case, and most Test matches played in the other – above the interests of the team.
This desire to stay on in power and to exercise authority, even when prudence and self-respect require one to give way to younger people, extends well beyond the realms of politics and sport. Several of our most remarkable entrepreneurs have undermined their past contributions by continuing to direct corporations they have founded even when it is evident that more capable younger colleagues should take over from them. The wish to stay on at the helm for as long as possible – whatever the reputational costs to oneself or to the institution one heads – is equally prevalent in the world of civil society activism.
This malaise has also afflicted intellectual life. Consider the case of the Economic and Political Weekly, a social science journal published out of Mumbai, which once enjoyed a genuinely international reputation. It was a journal every young scholar in India, as well as many elsewhere in the world, was once most keen to publish in as well as most keen to read. Journalists, civil servants, and activists devoured the EPW with as much interest as scholars and researchers. Yet, in recent years, the journal has undergone a steady decline. The essays it now publishes only occasionally break new ground. The journal, which once set the terms of scholarly debate in India, has become a pale shadow of its former self.
A major reason for the EPW’s reputational fall is that the journal is administered by a Trust whose members (like the American Supreme Court) enjoy lifetime tenure. The youngest of the eight Trustees is 68; the oldest, 92. Seven out of the eight are men. The average age of the Trust as a whole is much closer to 80 than 70. On the other hand, the best scholarship in the social sciences is generally done when the researcher is in his/her thirties or forties. How, with this serious mismatch in age between those who run the journal and those best placed to contribute to it, can the EPW ever maintain, still less enhance, its hard-won reputation?
The self-inflicted decline of the EPW is in sharp contrast to the self-renewal of another intellectual institution with which I am familiar. This is the National Centre of Biological Sciences in Bangalore. The NCBS is an off-shoot of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which was set up in the 1940s in Mumbai. In its first decade-and-a-half, TIFR was dominated by physicists and mathematicians. However, in the 1960s, it recruited a brilliant young biologist, Obaid Siddiqi, who, after working in the Institute’s main campus for 20 years, moved to Bangalore to set up a new institute for biological research.
Though I am myself a sociologist by training, I have a more than passing acquaintance with the world of Indian science. Several close family members (including a parent and grandparent) were scientists, while I have taught at the Indian Institute of Science myself. What strikes me about the NCBS is that it is the least hierarchical of any Indian academic institution I have known. It is marked by a spirit of collegiality, of open intellectual exchange, that is mostly absent in the 37 laboratories affiliated to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and not visibly present in the IITs either, where the older males who serve as deans and directors are treated with exaggerated deference by their younger colleagues who might, in fact, be doing more original research than them.
Having watched Obaid Siddiqi from close quarters, I have no doubt that he was instrumental in nurturing this democratic and participatory ethos. Unlike other top Indian scientists of his generation, he altogether lacked pomposity or a love of hierarchy. He knew the best science was done by the younger generation; his duty was to allow space and room for the flourishing of their talents, not to mould them in his own image. He was also deeply interested in the world outside science, seeking to exchange ideas with philosophers, historians, and social scientists.
Once Siddiqi’s term as director ended, he did not hover around the place he had founded, as most other Indians in his position might have done. He left the running of the NCBS to an outstanding younger colleague, while he unobtrusively carried on with his own research. This second NCBS director, in turn, seamlessly handed over to a fine scientist of the next generation who has now given way equally smoothly to a fourth director who – unlike the first three – has never worked in the NCBS before, thereby bringing fresh ideas and a different set of experiences to the institution.
Had Obaid Siddiqi not been such an atypical Indian male, NCBS might not have thrived as it has. Another reason for the institution’s enduring success is the structure of governance it has adopted. The director is in charge of the day-to-day running of the institution; placed above the director, and giving the incumbent guidance and support, is a management board that has 17 members in all. Eight are ex-officio, representing the government of India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, for example. Nine others are practising scientists, chosen from around the world. Six of them are women.
The term of an NCBS board member is of precisely three years’ duration; it can be renewed once, perhaps twice, but no more. Unlike the Trust that runs the EPW, no one is here for “life”. Nine years is the longest one can serve on the NCBS board, whereas some of the Trustees on the EPW’s Board have been there for 30 years and counting.
I should note in conclusion that while powerful and successful women are not immune from this “let us stay at the top for as long as possible” syndrome, it is far more prevalent among men. For his gender and for his country both, Obaid Siddiqi has been an exception. Countless Indian men in the worlds of politics, sport, business, civil society, and academia have acted – and will continue to act –just as the current American president wanted to. The costs of such short-sighted and self-centred behaviour are borne by their more talented junior colleagues and by society as a whole.
This article first appeared on The Telegraph.
Ramachandra Guha’s latest work, The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir, has just been released. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.
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