Abstract
Pandemic COVID-19 has transformed our understanding of established notions of leadership and management for tackling emergency situations where the public themselves becomes the cause and bears the effect of it. This study on Red Volunteers in West Bengal provides a ready example of how public management can be created at the local level (neighbourhood/para) to tackle the spread and veracity of a pandemic. The success of Red Volunteers lies on three pillars: (a) reflecting discontent with government initiatives due to corruption, nepotism and red-tapism, (b) presence of the youth which instils hope and confidence, and (c) factual happenings of service distribution at the ground level. The article concludes by arguing that the future public leadership for the pandemic must arise voluntarily taking into account its context and culture. The experience of a pandemic reflects that leadership must emerge from the society with a new grammar of management, namely, distributing services and goods tuned to sudden requirements of the public.
Introduction
Public leadership is an important sub-field in the domain of public administration which focuses on managerial skills of leaders (as individual self) at the level of society. From the perspective of public administration, leadership is seen in three forms—political, civic and service delivery (Hart, 2014). Public leadership in the years of the pandemic faced a tough challenge to maintain a combination of uninterrupted public service and worldwide interrupted economic service. As a result, a new introspection became the norm of the public leadership who searched for available options in their own country to manage, maintain and move public service to contain the spread of the virus (Boin & Hart, 2003). This new norm of created spaces in the analytical and academic spheres where community service, voluntary organisations and citizen groups came up as voluntary agents of political leadership to keep the public service delivery channels intact. Managing a pandemic of the magnitude of COVID-19 was never an one-institution or one-man or one-community battle to be fought. It required a concerted cooperative and collective effort, therefore, redefining the very meaning of public leadership, which over the years became intertwined and intermingled with political leadership in post-colonial democracies like ours. Political and public administration centred around an elected government was the established practice which saw its end with the pandemic that required not central general guidelines but specific acts at the local and neighbourhood levels. Therefore, the foremost requirement was not a panopticon gaze of the state but a caring approach for the people. This juxtaposition of the State and the people in matters of managing pandemic brought in newer methods of public management which are self-restrain or self-regulation practised at the individual level rather than at the institutional level. Citizens’ collectives were the need of the hour and Red Volunteers (RVs) in West Bengal, reflecting a particular political hue ideologically but transmitting services across political spectrum during pandemic is a case which needs a close analysis both for public leadership and public administration discourses. This article focuses on the role of RVs in West Bengal whose formation is intrinsically linked with crisis management. The lexicon of good governance promotes networking between government and non-government institutions for better management of the society. However, COVID-19 had hit hard on all these established notions which follow a set pattern of managing through common rules and goals.
The article is divided into four sections. The ‘Leadership for public management: theoretical perspectives’ section discusses the role of leadership in public administration theoretically. The ‘Red Volunteers in West Bengal: features’ section analyses the nature and features of the task of RVs in West Bengal during the pandemic. The ‘Comparison of volunteers in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala’ section compares RVs with similar such organisations in the three states. A concluding section focuses on the uniqueness of RVs as a form of public leadership during a pandemic.
Leadership for Public Management: Theoretical Perspectives
The most important aspect of public leadership is to take care of changing orientations of public value. In times of emergency/pandemic, public value orientation changes from progress to preservation, from change to consultancy, and from service delivery to service availability. Public value challenges are complex with many public value types. Leaders should rather embrace all the public value types and dimensions they face and mobilise with as much energy and action in pursuance of all these public values. Public leaders are in a position to help the people move beyond a frightening situation. According to Andrews, in a pandemic situation what is required is multi-agent leadership engagements where the role of team members acting as agents of the leader include authorisers, motivators, conveners, connectors, problem identifiers, idea generators, encouragers, resource people and implementers. Such an arrangement becomes effective when leaders act as champions or supervisors, authorising, convening and motivating to facilitate effective decision-making and communication, but requiring and empowering others to play respective roles (Andrews, 2020).
Morgan et al. in their edited volume explore three key elements of leadership success: (a) an understanding of our public service context, including history, values and institutions that comprise our leadership setting; (b) a set of tools designed to help leaders initiate collective action in wicked challenge settings; and (c) tools to support sound judgment, enabling leaders to do the right thing in the right circumstances for the right reasons changing public values and conflicting priorities at all levels of public organisations (Morgan et al., 2019). Boin et al. (2005) argue that crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how leaders deal with the strategic challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the errors they make, the pitfalls they need to avoid, and the paths away from crisis they may pursue. Highlighting the fundamental role that ethics plays in organisational life, Dobel (2018) uses insights from cognitive and social psychology to discuss how to anticipate and address threats to integrity and value-informed decision-making. This assumption of responsibility recognises the inherent discretion in all positions and claims that effective ethical management requires self-awareness, self-mastery, integrity and a working frame of one’s values and character. The forces of globalisation are shifting our world, including the public sector, away from hierarchy and command and control towards one of collaboration and networks. The way public leadership is thought about and practised must be, and is being, transformed. These leaders work in network settings, making connections and collaborations to create public value and advance the common good (Morse et al., 2007).
COVID-19 pandemic has tested political leaders and healthcare systems worldwide, exposing deficits in crisis communication, leadership, preparedness and flexibility. Extraordinary situations abound, with global supply chains suddenly failing, media communicating contradictory information and politics playing an increasingly bigger role in shaping each country’s response to the crisis; the pandemic threatens not just our health but also our economy, liberty and privacy (Bhalla, 2021). It challenges the speed at which we work, the quality of our research, and the effectiveness of communication within the scientific community. It can impose ethical dilemmas and emotional stresses on healthcare workers. Nevertheless, the pandemic also provides an opportunity for healthcare organisations, leaders and researchers to learn from their mistakes and to place their countries and institutions in a better position to face future challenges.
Leaders at all levels of government are put to test during times of crisis, uncertainty and collective stress. The regional and global dimensions of COVID-19 crisis, exert immense economic and social challenges on various sectors and offers an opportunity for a careful analysis of the performance of our leaders in times of crisis. There are five tasks to manage during a crisis—early recognition, sense-making, making critical decisions, cooperation and communication. The three groups—leaders, agents and followers—can be cohesive if they are bound by a common purpose to achieve a common goal. Equally, they may be at cross-purposes. In the context of interactions between leaders, agents and also followers, three situations can be postulated, which will determine the nature of outcomes: (a) full consensus among the three players. This is a precondition for an optimal outcome of success; (b) two out of three players in sync: here, the outcome might be indeterminate and ambiguous—a case of partial success or failure; and (c) complete lack of unity among all the three players (Beilstein et al., 2021). This will lead to a negative outcome—a failure to contain and control the success and failure in controlling the pandemic depends more on the combined and synergic response of leaders, agents and followers—not on enlightened leadership alone. While a leader’s charisma, pragmatism and commitment are important in leading the way, the actions of public and private agents in planning and preparation, mobilisation and deployment of medical and health resources, and enforcement of rules are equally important. Finally, followers’ behaviour—trust and confidence in leaders and agents and self-discipline and acceptance of rules—are significant factors in achieving successful outcomes in terms of low deaths per capita and infection rates (Jong, 2021).
Leadership is routinely admired, vilified, ridiculed, invoked, trivialised, explained and speculated about in the media and in everyday conversation. Despite all this talk, there is surprisingly little consensus about how to answer basic questions about the nature, place, role and impact of leadership in a contemporary society. Hart and Uhr (2008) bring together a broad array of social science approaches to understand the nature of leadership in public domain. Their work on political, administrative and civil society leadership represents a stocktaking of what we need to know and offer original examples of what we do know about public leadership. Leadership research, as a separate perspective in the study of public leadership, discusses the benefits of further embedding the public leadership research domain within leadership studies and constructing a cross-fertilisation (Ospina, 2017).
This theoretical context sets the background for analysing the new type of public leadership as put forth by the RVs in West Bengal during COVID-19 pandemic, which gave a new meaning to the relations between leaders, agents and followers. Experience of RVs showcases how leaders themselves become agents in designing and implementing the pamphlet message and the social media message for donation drive to fight a battle against pandemic and thereby forcing the public to be their followers. Therefore, an action-driven public leadership managing a crisis is reflected which can be the basis of a new grounded theoretical enterprise.
Red Volunteers in West Bengal: Features
Amidst a scene of rising COVID-19 cases in West Bengal, a group of young people could be seen, in nooks and corners of the state, searching for oxygen, hospital beds, medicines and so on. They seemed to have taken the onus of restarting sanitisation drives, providing masks in marketplaces, and to ensure that telemedicine help provided by different medical organisations, including the Association of Health Services Doctors, reach the people. They were mainly workers, members and supporters of CPI(M), DYFI, SFI and other Left front parties in the state. But, all of them had one identity—‘Red Volunteers’. In their official website,
The Left may have been wiped out in the state’s legislative assembly election in 2021, but its Youth Brigade has been a force on the streets, especially during the second wave of COVID-19. Even for sanitising entire localities, people called up the RV. ‘The municipality/corporation usually sanitises affected buildings. But after 17 people in Sarsuna in Behala, where about 4,000 people live, came down with COVID-19, we had to step in. Everyone else was terrified’, says Nihar Bhakta of the RV. Spread across 23 districts of the State, RV teams (10–15 members each) focused on specific areas, be they in cities, towns or the hinterland where there were more active cases—daily spikes of 3,000 cases or above. They had registered 80,000 members, not all of whom were affiliated to the Left. Many young people joined the teams out of a sense of civic responsibility. Every day, the RV attended to over 3,000 distress calls from all over the state. 2 The Bengal poll results showed that no Left parties had any representation in the Bengal Assembly for the first time. However, that did not demoralise the RVs. The RVs’ Facebook group created in July 2020 had over 75,000 members and was flooded with distress requests, around 3,000 each day. Praises about their work also flooded that page. One Paromita Roy wrote on the RVs’ Facebook page that she had always been ‘a TMC supporter’. But she lavished praise on the RVs. ‘Apart from helping the people they’ve kept in touch with the patients …. I bow down to these boys and girls today’. 3
Desperate to increase its vote share in the KMC polls, the party had thrown in its RVs into the fray. Kallol Majumder, CPI(M)’s Secretary for Kolkata district, said, ‘Our Red Volunteers did extraordinary work during the pandemic and we believe it would stand us in good stead during the KMC polls and also help us recover the lost ground in Bengal politics. Even if they don’t win us seats, they won’t shy away from the fight.’ Saswati Dasgupta, another RV contesting from Ward 30 said, ‘This is nothing new for us as we are involved in social work as CPM cadres. We may win or lose elections but what’s more important for us is to have the people on our side. And, we will continue to work for the people regardless of how we fare in elections’. 4 RVs appeared to be a path to redemption for the Left, sources in the CPM said. The young men and women came together without any strong back-up from the party and offered help to anyone in need, irrespective of his or her political affiliation. In the process, they were able to establish a relationship with the electorate, the party believed (Majumder, 2021). The results of the then-concluded assembly elections did not dither the activists; on the contrary, it acted as a catalyst to inspire them to devote themselves to the cause of humanity. They were omnipresent, omniscient, always on their toes and at the beck and call of every resident of the area. They performed all those services that were the responsibility of the government (Choudhury, 2021).
On the basis of a brief statement of the works of RVs and existing literature on public management and public leadership, it can be said that the pandemic reflected new dimensions of care, commitment and concern in leadership and administrative circles which for long was a top-down approach based on centrally administered general guidelines which were implemented by agents of local-level institutional agents of the state machinery. The features which RVs displayed in West Bengal during the pandemic were crucial for public leadership and public management in ways as follows:
Bottom-up management approach: In managing public affairs, a long-term practice in West Bengal was institutionalised local-level management through three-tier Panchayati Raj system initiated by the Left Front government. However, with the passage of time, these institutions were politicised to a large extent. As a result, even in the implementation of government welfare programmes, the criticism of party supporters getting the desired welfare more remained the usual news. In the pandemic period also, the news report of confiscation of welfare funds by ruling party leaders at local level was aired across the media, particularly in distribution of post-Amphan cyclone welfare public goods and services. In this context, RVs in urban and rural areas across the state tried to help people by involving people in getting rid of emergency situations. The RVs asked the common people to come forward with any amount of donation and piece of information about affected people and their needs. In this way, the people got involved in co-managing the pandemic and legitimised the social leadership of RVs. Leadership as management: The public leadership theories highlight leadership as emanating from political power and social power of the society. However, RVs viewed leadership as synonymous with management, meaning that their leadership emanated from managing the society rather than managing politics. Even being linked to the Left political spectrum, RVs managed the social pandemic without aiming at any kind of leadership status. It was only due to their committed effort that RVs were acknowledged as good managers of the social pandemic rather than good leaders of politics. Management as engaged awareness building: During the pandemic, much of the effort of the state government directive was focussed on making the public aware of the sanitisation process and other important directives. RVs initiated their campaign about managing the pandemic by involving the people, that is, the main stakeholders themselves. Therefore, the public was made aware by first-hand experience about the disastrous effect of the pandemic itself which had more effect than stereotypical directives of the government. Health management as new leadership ethics: Public leadership is based on the ethics of public service and public welfare. However, it is based on public institutions’ capacity to deliver service and management. In a pandemic period, RVs focussed on the basic infrastructure management, that is, health management when health infrastructure of the state government completely broke down in tackling the emergent situation. Therefore, RVs highlighted that health management was going to be the new agenda of post-pandemic public leadership in post-colonial democracies like India. Social power devoid of political power: RVs relentlessly worked at the ground level during the entire pandemic period, but even being a cadet corps of the Left political parties, particularly the CPI(M), the volunteers did not spread a political message and did not act keeping electoral dividend of their political parties in mind. This was reflected in the Left political parties securing no seat in West Bengal State Assembly elections in 2021 at a time even when their volunteer corps got accolades from across the state. Multi-cites of management: The pandemic period reflected that governments across the world tried to create multiple centres of COVID-19 management. It required redesigning the already-existing government hospitals or institutions. This new approach of creating multiple management centres was ingrained in the functioning of RVs who acted as teams of readymade citizens’ collectives in all the districts of West Bengal based on their strength in that locality. RVs approached pandemic management in a similar way, so did the state government with a difference—while state governments depended on institutions, RVs depended on conglomeration of selfless individuals/community. Social networked governance: In tune with the new public management perspective of networked governance, RVs in their activity reflected networked governance by teaming up first with similar peers and then with the like-minded public in localities and finally with interested government officials in the localities. So once again, RVs acted in tune with the idea of networked social governance. Financial networking devoid of political networking: RVs as cadet corps of Left political parties networked with the people for financial donations but if someone could not provide donations, it did not deter them from getting the service of RVs in a time of need to manage the pandemic. This was unique because RVs delinked themselves from political networking in these testing times.
Comparison of Volunteers in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala
While RVs were passionately doing social relief work in West Bengal, experiences of Mumbai and Kerala showed a different picture. The hapless state of the poor and destitute in India in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic was a tragic story. People were dying of hunger. Migrant workers were walking across states to reach their village homes. In short, it was a dismal sight as the nationwide lockdown imposed to contain the spread of the new virus had come at a heavy price. There is no doubt about the fact that the grim reality of the state of the country at that moment was disturbing. But, in the midst of such a catastrophe, Maharashtra was blessed enough to find its messiah in a group of young volunteers, who were going from door to door to ensure that the needy were catered to. This group of young volunteers in Mumbai launched an initiative called Khaana Chahiye to serve food to the poor and needy amid the nationwide lockdown. Spread over several days, team the ‘Khaana Chahiye’ distributed 22 lakh meals to people across the Maharashtra capital and continued to do so till India was under lockdown irrespective of the continuous extensions. Apart from ‘Khaana Chahiye’, a ‘Ghar Bhejo’ campaign for migrant workers had been introduced by the volunteers as well. The project, helmed by Neeti Goyal, organised buses to send migrant workers’ home. Khaana Chahiye, also co-founded by Anik Gadia, Swaraj Shetty and Pathik Muni, was a citizen-led movement in partnership with Shishir Joshi’s Project Mumbai and Advocate Rakesh Singh’s Bharat Utthan Sangh (Ghosh, 2020).
In Kerala, the state government arranged community volunteers to assist the government in managing emerging crisis situations, particularly natural calamities like floods, cyclones and health emergencies including Nipah. COVID-19 pandemic had necessitated community-based volunteering to strengthen social cohesion. Moved by the immense response of the civil society, the government decided to form the Directorate of Samoohika Sannadhasena (Community Volunteer Corps), under the Department of General Administration for sustaining volunteerism as an asset of the Kerala society. It was conceptualised as a ready-to-act community-volunteer force in all crises of the society. To avail registration for the public, a web portal,
In a comparative assessment, it can be said while the Maharashtra/Mumbai model was a corporate-backed volunteer service, the Kerala model provided a government-sponsored-and-managed volunteer service. Only in West Bengal, a social sectoral management process evolved where the leaders were rooted in the society and made the public a part and parcel of the managing process by taking constant feedback from the public about how to make the management process more befitting to the demands of public in the COVID-19 period. So the experience of RVs in West Bengal as compared to the experiences of the Maharashtra and Kerala models was more inclusive and participatory, reflecting the public-based leadership rather than merely public leadership in the pandemic situation. Moreover, RVs uniquely transformed themselves between political leaders (in some cases contesting for the Left in elections and in most cases supporting and parading for Left political parties in public) and social leaders during crisis management of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic selflessly for the entire society, irrespective of political affiliations. Even defeat in one election did not stop them from relentlessly continuing with their social leadership role. After the 2021 Assembly elections when the Left political parties failed to secure a single seat even after fielding many of the RVs as their candidates, the RVs never backed out from their social commitment to provide relief through their presence whenever there was a partial lockdown situation. The public praised and participated in their social role even if they did not favour them electorally.
Conclusion
Public leadership mostly develops into political leadership. RVs showed how the youth grouped together across a state as vast as West Bengal in India, raised funds online through appeals among peers and provided necessary requirements to the citizens at their doorsteps who were in dire need, without seeing party colour, economic status and social class positions, indices which often put hurdles for efficient implementation of government policies and programmes. While many efforts could be seen at Central and state levels in India to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, RV groups emerged at the social level to fill up the gap in government efforts. Youths, ideologically inclined to the Left, started this RVs group and the people from all walks of life with all types of political affiliations responded positively to such an effort. The effort of RVs reflected three-issue areas: (a) discontent with government initiative for corruption, nepotism and red-tapism; (b) the presence of youth-instilled hope and confidence; and (c) service distribution at the ground level. Future public leadership for epidemics must arise voluntarily taking into account the context and societal culture.
RVs operate as an organised collective, networking through social media, friends, neighbourhood networks and other groups, and various local units of the CPI(M). The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a massive ray of hope on the ground for the Left in West Bengal, thanks to the emergence of RVs, responding to the emergency and crisis situation in Kolkata and elsewhere. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) might have electorally lost both credibility to rejuvenate in a state where they ruled unilaterally for more than three decades, but these activists highlighted the way in which a demoralised and defeated Left could be real and visible doers in adverse circumstances. The pandemic, along with mass helplessness and despair seemed to have given the RVs impetus, inspiration and energy to carry out a physical campaign on the ground, which outstretched its limits. It indeed proved to be an eye-opener for people across the social and political spectrums in West Bengal on what the ‘best of the Left’ was capable of achieving. For one, they were totally non-sectarian. Two, they were open to reaching out, immediately and consistently, without asking questions or any quid pro quo. And three, they were highly effective, efficient and enterprising. It did not matter who you were, they would reach out and help. And if you were on the margins, their commitment turned into an act of great faith and idealism. Some were working through their own areas and neighbourhoods, while others dedicated full time and elsewhere. This network of reaching out to patients and those who needed medical and other forms of help was done with a hands-on approach, functioning smoothly and diligently, with no hiccups, 24 × 7. With the CPI(M) failing to win a single seat in the assembly elections and its vote share touching rock bottom, these volunteers carried the Left’s hopes of redemption by extending timely assistance to needy COVID-19 patients during the second wave of the pandemic (Mitra, 2021).
The entire functioning of RVs reflects a collaborative management of the pandemic which is central to new discourse on public leadership (Benlahcene & Abdullah, 2020). In our daily experience of leadership, elements of competition, power and self-interest can be seen running as undercurrents in practical post-colonial democracies. The flip-flop of RVs inside and outside of the electoral arena reflects the ‘community/(dis)engagement’ in managing community in the face of crisis and risk (Sinha, 2022). The event of pandemic created a new opportunity for the RVs to come into the limelight through selfless continuous service by delivering essential goods, both material and non-material, like the assurance of being there just a call away. In the post-pandemic period, RVs in West Bengal were active in community-specific areas. In West Bengal, the state government launched a programme called ‘paray-paray samadhan’ (neighbourhood solutions) with an aim to address citizens’ grievances in the neighbourhood, by opening government kiosks fortnightly in every neighbourhood. RVs, at present, are increasing their membership by engaging with mundane daily problems in any particular neighbourhood, particularly organising public health camps where check-up by doctors and medicines are provided at subsidised rates and running canteens to provide food at subsidised rates in various districts. Both the public health camps and canteens are running with permanent infrastructural facilities. So in this way, RVs have created a parallel ‘paray-paray samadhan’ (neighbourhood solutions) devoid of government support. It is true that they are not strictly NGOs and they are rooted in a particular political affiliation. But that has been a boon for them to keep their organisational, infrastructural, motivational and public service goals intact in the correct tempo. The quotient of their public service during the pandemic provided faith in the public about their intentions and hence donations kept coming for their work even in post-pandemic period. Public leadership is indeed a complex issue but the fact that it is parallel with efforts by the government, their activities attract positive popular perception and make one to admit that they have the potential to lead the public in times of crisis as well as in normal times. Suffice is to say that in the West Bengal public sphere, RVs have created a new idiom of public leadership based on values of care, concern and commitment.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I sincerely acknowledge the anonymous reviewer working on whose comments made the article more balanced in reading.
I am thankful to Mr. Kalatan Dasgupta, State-committee member, DYFI, West Bengal who gave several valuable inputs on the present working areas of Red Volunteers.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.