In politics, authenticity matters is Maithri a personification of authenticity? 


2016-01-28

eadership in politics has been a subject many psychologists and social scientists have attempted to analyze, dissect and write about over and over again. These analysts and writers have ascribed strong leadership in politics to many a politician and history alone stands as the sole judge as to the validity and legitimacy of those claims.  

However, when leadership is challenged, when it is questioned and probed, those who come out as deserving and great are those who have taken unparalleled risks under most trying conditions and come out on top to the wonder and amazement of many pessimists and skeptics. Furthermore, one must guard oneself against reading too much into the simplicity of a persona of a leader, for more often than not, simplicity could be a shield, or a false façade against a more complex and sinister character that a leader tries to conceal. Yet a majority of people fall for that outer veneer and take that as the authentic nature of a leader whom they long to emulate and look up to as a messiah of sort.

But there is one sure way of judging that authenticity, that profound sense of honesty and simplicity- and that is to see if the particular leader is making one gesture after another, one political gaffe after another in order to express his or her own judgments and inner feelings irrespective of the extremely unfriendly consequences those judgments and feelings may entail. 

Authenticity is not a calculated notion or a premeditated phenomenon. Yet on the other hand, a calculated and premeditated move by a political leader could be seen as an authentic response from him and that trait of calculating and the premeditated persona is time and time again associated with his past courses of action and thought.

  If the critics of the current President Maithripala Sirisena take few moments to look into such details of political analysis- whether scientific or not- they would invariably find in Sirisena a man who is not in conflict with himself and who is not in disagreement with his inner conscience in the implementation and execution of duties as the leader of a most difficult political coalition to manage and steer well out of crisis points. His authenticity is not yet questioned by his closest bedfellows -- Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and his UNP Cabinet colleagues. In fact that shade of suspicion and uncertainty seems to spring from the President’s former Cabinet colleagues of a defeated UPFA Government. A set of politicos whose mindset was entrenched in a corrupt system of nepotism and cronyism are finding hard to stomach, firstly the electoral defeat they suffered at the hands of their former Cabinet colleague -- Maithripala Sirisena and secondly, resigning themselves to a stewardship of state by a person they consider quite ‘junior’ in the ranks of the political echelon of the time. 
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