In Manipur, our leaders do not always eat last. More often than not, they are the ones who get served first.
It is a small thing, this business of who gets served first, but sometimes the smallest things reveal what we have come to accept as normal. At a table, it tells us something about privilege, about who matters, and about who is expected to wait. In public life, the same arrangement can become a way of doing things, so familiar that we no longer think to question it.
In his talk Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek speaks about leadership as a responsibility to look after the people entrusted to us. The idea is simple enough. A leader is not someone who gets to enjoy the privileges of a position while others carry its burdens. The responsibility of leadership is to create the conditions in which the people one leads can feel secure, valued, and able to do their part. Eating last is not really about food. It is about understanding what the position demands of the person who occupies it.
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have turned that arrangement around. We have become rather comfortable with the idea that leadership comes with its entitlements, that authority deserves deference, and that the people must learn to wait. We notice the people who stand when a leader enters a room, the attention that follows, the access that others seek, and the importance attached to being seen in the company of someone who matters. We have learnt to recognise the signs of power. Whether we have been equally careful about recognising the responsibilities that come with it is another question.
But the problem of leadership is not only about those who occupy positions of power. It is also about us, the people who choose them, support them, celebrate them, and sometimes spend years complaining about them.
We elect people to lead us because we expect something from them. We want our concerns to be heard, our interests to be protected, and our lives to improve. We want someone who can speak when we cannot, act when we are unable to, and take decisions when circumstances demand them. There is nothing unreasonable about these expectations. That is what leadership is supposed to be for. The difficulty begins when the person we chose to stand before us begins to stand apart from us, when the distance between the promises made and the responsibilities discharged becomes too wide to ignore.
The person who once sought our attention now has to be sought out. The concerns that once formed the centre of the conversation begin to compete with the demands of office, the calculations of power, and the business of staying where one is. Admiration begins to turn into disappointment, disappointment into resentment, and resentment into anger. We wonder why those we elected no longer listen, why they appear inaccessible, and why the promises made to us seem to have lost their urgency.
Perhaps some leaders change after they come to power. Perhaps the position reveals something that was always there. Perhaps the demands of office are more complicated than we understood when we placed our trust in someone. There may be several explanations, but none changes the basic obligation. A person who accepts the responsibility of leadership must also accept the responsibility of answering for how that authority is used.
And yet, I wonder if we have been equally willing to examine the other half of this relationship. We speak readily about leaders who have failed us, but how often do we ask what we were looking for when we chose them in the first place? What did we value? What did we overlook? What did we hope they would do for us, and what were we prepared to accept in return?
These are not questions meant to shift the blame from those who hold power to those who do not. The responsibility of a leader is greater because the authority entrusted to that person is greater. A citizen cannot be held responsible for every decision taken by a government, nor can the failure of a public institution be explained away by pointing to the people it is supposed to serve. But if we are serious about understanding leadership, we cannot pretend that the relationship begins and ends with the person in office.
We choose leaders for different reasons. Sometimes we choose the person whose judgement we trust, or someone who understands our concerns and has demonstrated the ability to get things done. At other times, our choices may be shaped by loyalty, identity, personal relationships, promises of assistance, or the belief that someone who belongs to our circle will look after our interests better than someone who does not. Elections are rarely as simple as choosing between a good person and a bad one, and people do not always have the choices they would wish to have. Still, the reasons behind our choices matter because they tell us something about the kind of leadership we are prepared to accept.
We say we want honesty, but what happens when honesty exposes something we would rather not acknowledge? We want courage, but are we equally willing to admire it when a leader challenges our own position? We want decisive action, but what happens when the necessary decision is also inconvenient to us? We want leaders who can bring people together, but are we prepared to accept one who reaches out to people we distrust, or do we measure that leader’s loyalty by how firmly they stand against those we oppose?
It is possible to want good leadership and still make choices that work against it. We may want someone who can think beyond the immediate moment, but reward the person who promises an immediate advantage. We may want a leader who speaks the truth, but prefer one who tells us what we want to hear. We may complain about privilege while celebrating our own access to it. These contradictions do not make the public responsible for every failure of leadership, but they do make it harder for us to pretend that the problem belongs entirely to somebody else.
This becomes particularly difficult when loyalty enters the picture. We can be exacting in our judgement of leaders we oppose and remarkably patient with those we support. We demand explanations from one person while making excuses for another. Conduct that appears unacceptable in someone else’s hands can suddenly acquire a reasonable explanation when displayed by a person we regard as our own. The standard changes, not because the facts have changed, but because our relationship with the person has changed.
When that happens, accountability becomes selective. We stop asking whether a leader has acted responsibly and begin asking whether that leader has acted in our favour. A leader may protect the immediate interests of a particular group and still fail in the larger responsibilities of office. A person may speak forcefully on our behalf and yet have little to show for the authority entrusted to them. Representation matters, but it cannot be the whole purpose of leadership.
This is a difficult question for Manipur, where the meaning of leadership cannot be separated from the need for security, trust, justice, and a future that people can believe in. The problems before us are not small, and no single leader can resolve them through force of personality or a series of speeches. There are fears that must be addressed, grievances that cannot simply be wished away, lives and livelihoods that need rebuilding, and institutions whose credibility must be earned rather than demanded. These are matters that require sustained effort, difficult decisions, and a willingness to remain answerable when progress is slow or decisions are questioned.
In such circumstances, leadership cannot mean merely standing firmly with those who already agree with us. It must also mean having the courage to listen when listening is difficult, to acknowledge suffering without first calculating whose suffering it is, and to pursue a way forward without pretending that justice and accountability can be set aside for the sake of an appearance of peace. Bringing people together does not require them to forget what has happened to them. It requires creating the conditions in which they can seek answers, rebuild trust, and begin to imagine a future beyond the present.
That is a heavy responsibility, and it belongs first to those who hold authority. They cannot blame the public for their decisions or use our expectations as an excuse for failing to exercise judgement. Sometimes leadership means refusing to give people exactly what they demand because doing so would cause greater harm. Sometimes it means telling supporters that they are wrong. Sometimes it means making a decision that brings no immediate applause. The worth of leadership cannot be measured only by how many people are pleased with it at any given moment.
But neither can we expect leaders to be accountable if we ourselves are unwilling to hold them to a consistent standard. The freedom to question a leader must survive the moment that leader wins our support. We should be able to respect an office without treating the person who occupies it as beyond criticism. We should be able to recognise a genuine achievement without excusing a failure, and acknowledge a mistake without turning every disagreement into a declaration of hostility. Loyalty should not require us to surrender our judgement.
Perhaps this is where we have misunderstood the relationship between the leader and the people. We sometimes behave as though electing someone is the end of our responsibility, as though the act of choosing transfers not only authority but also the burden of thinking, questioning, and judging. We wait for leaders to solve our problems, then become angry when they do not. We may be right to be angry, but anger alone does not tell us what must change. Nor does replacing one person necessarily change the expectations and habits that shaped the relationship in the first place.
The question is not whether people should be less demanding of their leaders. If anything, we should demand more: greater honesty, greater accountability, sounder judgement, and a clearer understanding that public office is a responsibility held on behalf of others.
But we must also be willing to ask what our own choices reveal about the standards we claim to value. We cannot insist that leaders place the public interest above personal advantage while rewarding them primarily for the advantages they secure for us. We cannot complain about the misuse of authority and then defend it whenever the person exercising it happens to be on our side.
A leader may be served first and still serve the people well. The order at the table, by itself, proves very little. What matters is whether the person who occupies the seat understands that the position is not a personal reward, that authority is not ownership, and that the people are not an audience gathered to applaud. The responsibility remains even when the applause stops, when the questions become uncomfortable, and when the right decision is not the popular one.
Perhaps we, too, must learn to look beyond the seat at the head of the table. We must ask not only who is sitting there, but why we chose that person, what we expected of them, and whether we are prepared to judge them by the same standards we apply to others. The person at the head of the table owes us an answer for how the food is distributed. But we must also be willing to question an arrangement in which getting our own share has become more important than asking whether everyone has been served.
In the end, the problem of leadership is not simply that those entrusted with power sometimes forget whom they are meant to serve. It is also that we can become so preoccupied with having someone represent us that we forget to examine what representation is supposed to accomplish. We want leaders who will stand for us, but we must also expect them to take responsibility when standing for us requires difficult choices. And we must be prepared to question them when they fail to do so, even when they are the very people we chose.
Perhaps the most important question is not whether our leaders are willing to eat last. It is whether we still understand what they were elected to do, and whether we have the courage to hold them to it.
And when the time comes to choose again, will we look for someone who promises to serve us, or someone whose conduct gives us reason to believe that they will?
Sam Khumanthem writes about home, identity, and the quiet complexities of life in Manipur. His work reflects a deep connection to place, shaped by both love and uncertainty.
