Magnanimity in victory is a virtue that a finger-count of victors have possessed. Magnanimity induces a sense of belonging to a nation while not setting arbitrary limitations upon human creativity and innovation. In many ways, it also creates a broad consensus by secluding outliers, while giving them opportunity under the bell-curve.

Ideological moorings are, more often than not, determined by an individual’s yearning for recognition and attendant benefits. Individuals scorned and/or abused/threatened invariably seek solace in opposing ideologies, indeed become full-time turncoats. When magnanimity turns into arrogance, it engenders resistance from individuals who were hitherto on the Victor’s side or his/her voluble well-wishers.

Arrogance, in turn, gives birth to extremism of the mind that manifests itself in a toxic potpourri of violent religion, caste and gender-based expression, vocal and physical. The Age of Unreason thus dawns on a nation. This transmutes fact into fiction, dark into light, colour into neutral shades, and often by the collective effort of individuals acting as a community with no more commonality than unreasoned and pathological hatred towards the opponent.

Over time, this Age descends into the Age of Chaos as more players enter the scene and influence political choices. Middlemen, philosophers, scientists, crony capitalists, and other professionals, create or join a group. This is occasioned more by perceived economic gain. Human avarice and ambition and the following that such middlemen claim, are a bridge between a nation’s top leadership and rival interest groups. It is an invariable truth that intermediaries form the kingpins in the governance of a nation. No ideology can do without them.

It is here that the integrity and ability of the Victor become coterminous with magnanimity in victory. A low level of education is the greatest virtue while qualifications are the vice in the hurly-burly of politics. However, when such a leadership betrays no magnanimity and effort to reconcile different shades of opinion before imposing its own decision (that is rightfully his/hers), self-nullifying conflict and systemic resistance are inevitable.

In turn, unilateral decisions, often devoid of reason and pandering more personal egos than the national good, take a regime to a point of no-return, from which there is no honorable exit. Historians were never honest chroniclers of events. Hence the re-interpretation of history as alibi for stoking personal ambition is nothing new. Yet when history, tradition, custom and contemporaneity are sought to be faked and/or wiped out altogether, it portends fractious danger to a polity, and in parallel, to society and the economy. Reconciliation begets merit, positively exploits individual skills and opens immense choices for the Victor. Conversely, public abuse, mob rage and assault on personal freedoms cause existing faultlines to widen and resistance to emerge.

For, as Dorothy Thompson aptly put it, “The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness.” Even bona fide decisions of the Victor are selectively distorted both by the Resistance and cheerleaders, sometimes exposing ugly truths in the process and engendering greater resistance to reform. The net result is that the theoretical distinction between right and wrong, Left and Right and black and white disappears altogether.

Mediocrity in the ranks of the regime does not possess either the intellectual capability or even a proper understanding of the system of public service delivery that is so essential to good governance. Rank and mediocrity can facilitates more facile, yet subtle, penetration of the system for individual economic gain. Accountability institutions are irreversibly destroyed, again by a surrogate leadership, surrogate to intermediaries that usually rule the roost enjoying great authority without responsibility. In this cross-fire of unreason and manipulation, it is the common people who suffer because they have neither the education nor the ability to comprehend political manoeuvering. Faced with increasing resistance from within the political system, the Victor becomes the loneliest man/woman in his/her chair.

He withdraws himself from the professional competence of qualified individuals in the national cause, refuses to enter into any debate to defend himself, and is surrounded by mediocre appointees and intermediaries whose primary interest is personal gain rather than national prosperity.

The Victor’s low tolerance towards a different opinion feeds down the line and causes a semi-comatose condition to erupt in governance. Communication becomes a oneway traffic and feedback irrelevant, even non-existent. Those who have the intellectual capability are cowed into submission, often preferring an honorable exit, if one is available at all, or just flow with the tide without incriminating oneself, and without proffering the faintest proof of their superior intellectual and administrative capabilities.

Mediocre appointees who hold critical posts filter the flow of information to the Victor, basing upon which he takes major decisions (oftentimes without rationale), many of which evoke public contempt, stoke anger and resentment and cause anxieties to rise about the Victor’s integrity and political intent. A series of such decisions are enough to cause considerable damage to a nation’s polity, society and economy and undermine institutions that still have faith in a tenuous democracy. This tendency to undermine can assume various forms such as abuse and lies on social media platforms, broadcast, print and online media, insinuations and counter-arguments ranging from biological aberrations to absurd philosophical heights. Each side uses invectives and unreason, irrespective of education levels, to belittle the other.

At this stage, any ‘victory’ of even an insignificant section of a fragmented opposition sends alarm bells ringing in the regime as it rushes to save their Victor’s bastion. Kill the messenger first becomes the new normal response to such opposition ‘victory’; rank mediocrity does not permit the luxury of any reasoned response beyond invectives and abuse. Promises made before the last elections to ‘hit the ground running’ aroused legitimate expectation of well-being light years faster than the Victor’s predecessors.

To be subsequently told that they will have to wait for succour, like all nationalist citizens, for ‘some more’ time is nothing short of an affront, indeed, an insult to voters who elected the Victor. Policy decisions therefore become a matter of sustaining a string of failures and payback to those who fund elections as the next vote draws near.

Thus the stage is set for the descent into the Age of Darkness, in line with the rapidly declining political fortunes of the Victor’s regime. The result is often disastrous. Inherently unstable coalitions, again backed by the same set of intermediaries, jostle with each other for dominance. Eventually, governance is the casualty and the voter decides to vote for single-party rule yet again.

(The writer is a senior public policy analyst and commentator)