One afternoon, I visited Mandala Book Point to pick up a book for my interdisciplinary quest. The astute and humanist bookseller and publisher Madhab Lal Maharjan—who can read the minds of the academics and drifters who visit his bookshop—was there. As far as I remember, he has maintained a continuum as a bookseller from the hippie days to the present. I recall several moments when Madhab encountered book readers, including scholars and writers. I remember one moving and eloquent moment of such an encounter. Rishikesh Shah, the great Nepali historian, came to the bookshop as was his habit, and asked for some books published in Delhi. After getting the book, the frail-looking Shah said he did not have cash at that moment to pay for it. Instead, he fished out a gold coin and offered it to Madhab who, refusing to take it, said, “Shah-ji, please pay another time whenever you have the money.” Shah died a few weeks later. I recall that as a moment when a scholar and bookseller met in a contact zone imbued with the creative power of book reading and selling.

This time, Madhab pulled out a book from a disorganised pile of new arrivals and handed over the sizable volume entitled Leadership, written by Henry Kissinger and published by Penguin Press in 2022. At first, I thought it would be a farfetched interdisciplinary exercise for a literary academic to delve into the tome by Kissinger. But it turned out to be the kind of book I was looking for at this moment when we are discussing, in earnest, leaders and drifters. Leaders are indispensable, but a leader who holds his or her work seriously as a noble mission has become a rarity in Nepal. I must confess I have not seriously read any books by such a well-known historian and diplomat before. But this one struck me as essential reading. I was captured by Kissinger's poetic interpretation of history, and his riveting accounts of the roles that leaders have played. This is a study of leaders who have created conditions for the changes and transformations of societies. Kissinger's conviction is that the role of leaders is very important because “without leadership, institutions drift, and nations court growing irrelevance and, ultimately, disaster”. I was delighted to read this oeuvre by the 99-year-old former national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon administration, and later the erstwhile Harvard scholar and writer. After reading the book, I saw common patterns of the perceptions of a literary writer and of a diplomat historian.

Kissinger has selected six leaders for this study, most of whom he worked with and knew personally. They are Konrad Adenauer, the first post-war chancellor of West Germany; Charles de Gaulle, who is considered to be the saviour of France two times, after the Second World War and the Algerian Crisis; Kissinger's own boss Richard Nixon, who is said to have made breakthroughs in geopolitics; Anwar Sadat, who died in his mission to establish durable peace with Israel; Lee Kuan Yew, who made the small territory of Singapore a greatly prosperous country in the world; and Margaret Thatcher, who made great achievements in the male-dominated British politics. The mantra of the entire oeuvre is put at the beginning in these words, “Any society, whatever its political system, is perpetually in transit between a past that forms its memory and vision of the future that inspires its evolution.” Kissinger sees the indispensable role of a leader. Such conviction and faith of Kissinger in a leader may sound somewhat out of place today when, except for a few cases, the qualities of the leaders he admires are in short supply.

Leaders in Nepal

In Nepal, we are grappling with existential angst caused by the need for a leader who should take us through the period of transition. We need a leader who combines the qualities of the statesmen and visionaries that Kissinger describes. We, too, could cite the example of BP Koirala among a very few others who combined both statesmanship and prophetic quality. There are also many drifters in our times whose actions are limited in scope. Kissinger presents leaders as very responsible persons who are educators and guides, and who feel the pain and aspirations of society as their own. Kissinger summarises his argument by saying that leadership is the “result from the collision of the intangible and the malleable”. Intransigence and vote-denying have been ruining such a great creative collision in our times. In Nepal, like in the neighbouring countries, such malleability is becoming a rarity. Kissinger sees a leader as a managerial as well as a visionary person, and I would add, a creative writer whom we can see in his description of Anwar Sadat's style, “His policies flowed organically from the personal reflections and his own interior transformation.” Kissinger emphasises from the beginning the importance of the creative quality of a leader. He calls a good leader an artist who sculpts the future; he cites the philosopher Isaiah Berlin to emphasise that “the leader, like novelist or landscape painter, must absorb life in all its dazzling complexity”.

Henry Kissinger distinguishes between two types of leaders—statesman and prophetic or visionary. He says Vladimir Lenin, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill and Muhammad Anwar Sadat have gone down in history as prophetic leaders of history, but they had great managerial qualities too. He calls Jawaharlal Nehru not a prophetic like Gandhi but a statesman. In Nepal, we are bereft of leaders on whom we can rely, regardless of their principles. The choice of leaders and their selection criteria in contemporary Nepal makes us feel that we are not faring well in matters of finding good leaders. And that is at the heart of our problem. Kissinger says the six leaders had “profound differences”, but they all had “parallel qualities”, and “an ability to devise a strategy to manage the present and shape the future”. It has become common in Nepal to wait for a leader to emerge. I would call that our prophetic crisis in politics.

Henry Kissinger's book is a successfully made artistic interpretation of the qualities of the six leaders, but it shows how leaders of any society could interpret history with their vision, sense of mission and dedication. We should be optimistic about it. In the case of de Gaulle, Kissinger says, at first, “Nothing suggested that one day he would emerge as a mythic leader.” But de Gaulle did emerge as one. People also played a role there. Let us all be visionary, optimistic and realistic about the great phenomenon called leadership.