Leadership and dharma
Leadership, in the older memory of this civilisation, is not celebrity. It is the responsibility to restore a livable order when that order is failing, and to connect private life to a larger whole without pretending wisdom is only born at the centre.
In the same July 2026 conversation about leaders and society, I found myself returning to a simpler claim than the modern industry of leadership literature usually allows. We already know what we worship when we are not pretending to be sophisticated about it. Figures held in cultural memory as leaders, including deities such as Shri Ram, are held that way because they orient a people toward lasting prosperity and safety, not because they win an attention contest. Leadership, in that memory, is service under consequence.
The Gita’s line on manifestation when dharma decays and adharma rises (4.7) I read in that spirit: as a statement about responsibility under disorder, not as material for political theatre. When the order that lets ordinary people flourish is failing, someone must take on the cost of restoration. That is a sterner idea of leadership than charisma or preference. It assumes that disorder is real, that virtue without structure is not enough, and that the work of leadership is sometimes to intervene when drift has become dangerous.
This sits with a broader conviction I cannot shake. A nation needs more than private virtue. Private virtue is necessary and insufficient. It needs people and institutions capable of connecting local life to a larger whole, without the false comfort that one centre invents all wisdom or that local life will spontaneously produce national will. How those people are formed, and how a culture keeps forming them, is part of the long work I care about.
From X
Derived from posts on X as devendrasm: