The Pirabakaran Phenomenon Part 2 http://www.sangam.org/PIRABAKARAN/Part2.

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The Pirabakaran Phenomenon

Part 2

Sachi Sri Kantha

9 May 2001

What is Leadership?
“...Every age develops leaders that bespeak its fears, its longings, its creative urges.
Established culture values represent in a peculiar way the groundwork of
leadership... A simple example of (Pirabakaran’s) innate intelligence was his choice
of Tiger as the symbol of his rebel group. What an astounding choice, which
reverberates with Tamil culture, militarism and glory!..”

Emory Borgadus (1882-1973) was an eminent American

sociologist, who has been eponymized by the ‘Bogardus social
distance scale’ he devised in the 1920s-1930s. In 1929, he also
published a research paper entitled, ‘Leadership and Attitudes’ in
the journal, Sociology and Social Research (March-April 1929,
vol.13, no.4, pp.377-381). To comprehend the Pirabhakaran
phenomenon, it is pertinent to scan this paper by Bogardus, on how
he defined and categorized leadership in human endeavors. Thus,
first I provide excerpts of this classic paper by Bogardus.
What is Leadership?
Bogardus began his essay by stating,

“Leadership is the special influence that one person exercises

over other persons. [A leader is a person (1) who surpasses his
fellows in achieving in some particular plane of activity, and
(2) whose achievement is recognized by his fellows as being
superior.] It is manifested when one human being arouses the
dormant attitudes of other persons, changes the attitudes of
others, or arouses new attitudes in others. In each of these
type-situations, the ‘other persons’ are as important factors as
the leader, and the process by which one person succeeds in
affecting the attitudes of others is most important of all. In
other words, there is always a social situation matrix wherein a
leader and leadership operate. It is within this organic social
unity that we must look if we would discern the meaning of
leadership.”

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Then, Bogardus proceeded to categorize the leaders into three

types.

“If the leader is one who arouses, changes, or creates new

attitudes in the lives of other persons, then the study of
leadership must deal with the attitudes of these ‘other
persons’. In fact they become one of the chief sources of
leadership. The natural history of all these attitudes and of the
antecedent experiences which account for them is needed.
These attitudes, experiences, and life organizations, and how
they have been aroused, changed, or created anew, tend to
become the main objects for leadership study, as much as the
leader himself. They are what the leader himself usually
studies.

It is often the potential followers who influence the leaders as

much as the leader influences the followers. It was Simmel
who was one of the first to point out how the leader is
subservient to the followers, how the followers may ‘walk out’
on their leader, how they may refuse to respond or to be led,
how they may choose imprisonment rather than obey the
orders of some autocratic leader, and how the leader fears any
negative or antagonistic responses that will lower his own
status. The well-established and relatively permanent behavior
patterns, the urge for status, and the innumerable attitudes of
the potential followers, are all dynamic and powerful forces
that any would-be leader must treat respectfully. None of
these may be wantonly violated.

[Type 1 Leader] To arouse the dormant attitudes of one’s

fellows and become a leader is relatively easy. By being
enthusiastic along traditional lines of activity, by ballyhooing,
by raising the cry of ‘danger’, and by the use of other cheap
devices, a member of a group may shoot up into the rank of
leader without much difficulty.

[Type 2 Leader] To change human attitudes requires greater

skill. The use of indirect suggestion, the setting of new,
appropriate, and attractive examples, the creation of a pleasing
atmosphere favorable to the desired change, the changing of
the followers’ environmental conditions in ways to arouse
pleasant feelings regarding the proposed changes - these are
some of the techniques that create leadership of a higher order
than is represented by the standpatter or ballyhoo type of
leader.

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[Type 3 Leader] To arouse entirely new attitudes and a new

creative type of followers is the supreme height of leadership.
To arouse unsuspected possibilities and originalities in other
persons makes for the greatest leadership. The techniques are
often those of the superior teacher, case-worker, parent, who
challenge and give heavy responsibilities, who set forth unique
opportunities, who make the impossible seem possible, who
by deed or word arouse their followers to superhuman effort.

It may be noted here that the three types of leadership

discussed in the preceding paragraphs represent an ascending
scale of difficulty but a descending scale of recognition.”

Then, Bogardus concluded his essay with the following paragraph.

“Every age develops leaders that bespeak its fears, its longings,
its creative urges. Established culture values represent in a
peculiar way the groundwork of leadership. Social momentum
or social stagnation are equally important desiderata. As a
social process, leadership is that social inter stimulation which
causes a number of people to set out toward an old goal with
new zest or a new goal with hopeful courage, - with different
persons keeping indifferent paces. The foremost is the leader,
but without the others he never would have started, or having
started he would not be a leader. Without the antecedent as
well as the ever-continuing inter stimulation, there would be
no leadership. The interplay of attitudes is the dynamic heart
of leadership.”

Wonderful thoughts on leadership, by a reputed sociologist. When I

read the above seven sentences repeatedly, written in 1929, I felt
these sentences explained succinctly how the political leadership of
Eelam Tamils passed hands since 1944 from Ponnambalam
(1944-55) to Chelvanayakam (1956-77) to Amirthalingam
(1977-83) to Pirabhakaran (1983-to date). Now, where can one
place Pirabhakaran in the Bogardus rating of leadership scale? I
present my case as follows:
In the past two centuries, among Tamils in India, Eelam, Malaysia,
Singapore and elsewhere, there have been thousands who raised
capital, and worked that capital to financial fortunes. They belong
to the Type 1 leaders of Bogardus category - “those enthusiastic
along traditional lines of activity”.
Then, Type 2 leaders of Bogardus category are those handful of
Tamils who raised a political party and led that party to success.

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C.N. Annadurai and M.G. Ramachandran in India are two leaders.

Rajaji raised his Swatantra Party in 1959, but it couldn’t produce
success. Kamarajar or Karunanidhi or Jayalalitha cannot claim that
they ‘raised’ a political party; rather, they inherited the parties they
led, from their founders. E.V. Ramasamy Naicker (Periyar) qualifies
partially in this category, as a founder-leader of the Dravida
Kazhagam - a new, self-respect, social movement (which he
refrained from transforming into a political party) for Tamils. In
Eelam, G.G. Ponnambalam, S.J.V. Chelvanayakam and S.
Thondaman are the three leaders who qualify in this category.
Amirthalingam and Kumar Ponnambalam do not qualify, since they
inherited the parties they led, from their founders. These Type 2
leaders, according to Bogardus, were successful in “the changing of
the followers’ environmental conditions in ways to arouse pleasant
feelings regarding the proposed changes”.
Then, in a class of their own, are the Type 3 leaders. Only
Pirabhakaran among the Tamils of the past two centuries can claim
that he raised an army and led his followers to success. His equals
in India were only Mahatma Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose.
While Gandhi was a successful leader of his non-violent army,
Bose’s army, tagged as Indian National Army (INA), couldn’t
produce success. In the words of Bogardus, the achievement of
Type 3 leaders is “to arouse entirely new attitudes and a new
creative type of followers...who challenge and give heavy
responsibilities, who set forth unique opportunities, who make the
impossible seem possible, who by deed or word arouse their
followers to superhuman effort.” In this Type 3 category,
Pirabhakaran is in the league with Mao Ze Dong and Fidel Castro.
His interview to the Time magazine in 1990, presented in part 1 of
this essay, shows how he qualifies for the criterion of Type 3
leadership, as categorized by Bogardus. Of course, Pirabhakaran is
criticised for many of his actions by some Tamils and non-Tamils.
The Tamil proverb, ‘Kaayaa marathukku kal eri vizhuma?’ [Does
the barren tree gets bombarded with stones?] may explain partly
why he is the target of criticism.

Intelligent and ‘semi-literate’

One of the wisecracks used to ridicule Pirabhakaran, repeated
ad-nauseam in the partisan press in Sri Lanka, is that he is a ‘semi-
literate’; thus, incapable of leadership. Literacy is a much misused
and misunderstood word. Many equate the meaning of ‘literate’ to
‘intelligent’, which in reality is as different from chalk and cheese.

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Let me explain the difference.

The dictionary defines the word ‘literate’ as 1. able to read and
write. 2. educated, cultured. (derived from the Latin root, litteratus
< littera =letter). The same dictionary defines the word ‘intelligent’
as 1. having an active, able mind; acute. 2. marked or characterized
by intelligence. 3. endowed with intellect or understanding;
reasoning. (derived from the Latin root intelligere = to understand).
Literate people need not be intelligent. Similarly, intelligent people
need not be literate. I will mention some well-known examples.
Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton are more literate than Muhammad
Ali, but Ali is more intelligent than either Kissinger or Clinton.
One’s literacy doesn’t provide any immunity for foul-ups in
leadership. Kissinger’s or Clinton’s problems in leadership attest to
this. Compared to these two, Muhammad Ali was able to project a
successful leadership in sports and social activism due to his innate
intelligence. In the Indian subcontinent, Subramanian Swamy is
literate but not intelligent. Contrastingly, Kamarajar and MGR were
more intelligent than Swamy. Thus, it is more or less a rule that to
become a successful leader and hold the affection of his or her
followers, one need to be intelligent rather than being literate only.
Among the Tamils living now, there are tens of thousands who are
more literate than Pirabhakaran. For instance, Lakshman
Kadirgamar [who is laughably posturing as a leader of Eelam
Tamils for the past six years] is literate, but not intelligent. So, he is
devoid of any followers. But, as viewed from the criteria set by
Bogardus for leadership, Pirabhakaran qualifies more ably than the
hundreds of literate Tamils, because he is more intelligent than
others. A simple example of his innate intelligence was his choice
of Tiger as the symbol of his rebel group. What an astounding
choice, which reverberates with Tamil culture, militarism and glory!
I reproduce excerpts of my 1996 letter, which appeared in the
Asiaweek magazine, to buttress this point. This was written in
response to a critical feature by Anthony Davis, entitled, ‘Tigers
Inc.’, which appeared as the cover story in the same magazine of
July 26, 1996.

“Within the limits of not antagonizing the political and

military-intelligence establishments in India, Pakistan and Sri
Lanka, Anthony Davis has done a good profile of Tamil
guerrilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Prabhakaran is not an
angel. But he is not a devil either, as projected by the Sri
Lankan political establishment for the past 13 years. Davis
insults the intelligence of the majority of the Tamil diaspora

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with the claim that Prabhakaran can extort money from them
at whim. He remains their hope against the duplicity of the
Indian Intelligence Service (RAW), who used the Sri Lankan
Tamil issue to advance Indian expansionism.

Those who have read the history of the liberation struggles in

the US, China, Israel and Palestine can grasp that
Prabhakaran’s profile as presented doesn’t differ much from
those of George Washington, Mao Zedong, Menachem Begin
and Yassir Arafat. And don’t forget that designated ‘terrorists’
like Begin, Nelson Mandela and Arafat could metamorphose
into ‘statesmen’ and even receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Davis’s source, Rohan Gunaratna, has figured out that the

Tigers may be harvesting revenues worth nearly $24 million
per annum. But this figure is 1/25 of the current Sri Lankan
annual defense expenditure of nearly $600 million.
Prabhakaran may be deficient in university education, but he
surely has heeded one of Albert Einstein’s maxims: ‘Organized
power can be opposed only by organized power’. If you count
the number of Sri Lankan service chiefs who have tried to
outsmart Prabhakaran since 1983, one can only marvel at his
skill.... [Asiaweek, Aug.16, 1996]

Formula for success

With affluence, contacts and luck, one can enter the portals of
Oxford or Harvard universities to become literate. But that does not
assure attainment of intelligence. On the contrary, one can achieve
intelligence and the acclaim as a genius, by proper blessing of genes
as well as by hard work and use of common sense. This is what
Thomas Edison prescribed.

“When I want to discover something, I begin by reading up

everything that has been done along that line in the past -
that’s what all the books in the library are for. I see what has
been accomplished at great labor and expense in the past. I
gather the data of many thousands of experiments as a starting
point and then I make thousands more. The three essentials to
achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second,
stick-to-it-iveness; third, common sense.”

Though he has not entered any university in a nominal sense, those

who had met Pirabhakaran have recorded that he is ‘well read’. The
difference between Pirabhakaran and his competitors for Eelam

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Tamil leadership (including the TULF) lies in these three criteria

presented by Edison.
The TULF leaders and other rebel groups (TELO, PLOTE, EPRLF
and later EPDP) all had ‘liberation of Eelam’ as their prime motto
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Because they lacked common
sense to a higher degree, they allowed themselves to be
manipulatable puppets of the Indian Intelligence-wallahs. Also, due
to lack of intelligence, they came to forfeit the much-vaunted ‘stick-
to-it-iveness’ attitude which Pirabhakaran showed in abundance.
Pirabhakaran also endeared himself to his followers, by the third
ingredient in Edison’s formula for success - hard work. As is
evident for anyone, ‘hard work’ cannot be purchased like military
hardware in global arms bazaar or granted like a degree certificate
by any university following payment of tuition fees and completing
the course work.
Like Edison, Pirabhakaran was (and still is) an innovator par
excellence, as one could see from the battles he had fought so far.
Like Mao, he also has grasped the skill of when to retreat and when
to attack for maximum gain. He has been a thinker and tinkerer in
military tactics. Raising an army from zero point and continuing to
maul his opponent who outspends his outfit by 25 to 40-fold,
demands intelligence of exceptional caliber. Pirabhakaran’s
adversaries may boast of training from Sandhurst (UK), West Point
(USA), India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Israel. But one should marvel
at how he is adopting to changing circumstances by using
adventurous plans. “No plan survives the first five minutes
encounter with the enemy” is a well-known military dictum of
Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891). But the
success rate of Pirabhakaran’s plans are higher than his adversaries.
Like great military minds, he also possesses the ability to learn from
mis-steps and defeats. [Continued].

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