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Looking at Priyanka Gandhi during the election campaign as she was darting about like a slender, silvery fish in water or a young antelope in a meadow, I wondered to myself: “What is charisma? How does one identify it?”
In the dictionary charisma is described as “a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a statesman or military commander.” But how does one acquire this “magic”? Is it hereditary or can one work hard to develop it in oneself?
It can’t be hereditary, though it may often seem so. Priyanka certainly has inherited some of the charm of her grandmother. She has beauty and intelligence, a smile that captivates. No one who has seen her in recent months can help thinking that one day she may rule this country. There is more to her charisma than charm and beauty and intelligence. What is that extra something?
I think charisma is a quality that makes a leader feel at home in any crowd — except, of course, in an openly hostile one. It is the warmth that he or she transmits naturally to a mass of people while receiving the same warmth (or more) in return. It is the genuineness of the smile or gesture, the selflessness and naturalness of the act that sets such a leader apart from the rest of the political crowd.
Priyanka has all these qualities. You see her chatting with old women and young children in Amethi and Bellary and you feel that she is really enjoying the experience, that it is in establishing that rapport that she can get the affection of the common people.
It has been 15 years since Indira Gandhi was assassinated. She would have been 82 on November 19: There has since been nobody to match her charisma and personality, none with her national and international outlook on the political scene since her time. Her charisma was part inherited and part acquired. She inherited the elegant good looks from her father and the poise and grace that comes from being born and brought up in an aristocratic family. She was also given a programme of education, in school and at home, under the guidance of Nehru. She studied Sanskrit and English and went to a convent for French and violin lessons. She thus had a base for a cosmopolitan personality. And she was a voracious reader. Shantiniketan and Oxford and her numerous travels with her father (Africa, China, South-East Asia) — all these turned her into an international personality in course of time.
If dynasty alone could bestow charisma on a person, we would have seen many charismatic leaders in India. Why did Vijayalakshmi Pandit lack charisma? And Arun Nehru, does he have any? Even Rajiv Gandhi didn’t have much charisma in spite of his good looks and pleasant manners. He was a nice young man, but he was not on the sort of wavelength that drew people to him.
Priyanka is different: she seems to be able to establish immediate rapport with people everywhere. Unlike most of our leading politicians, she has no parochial links; her roots have no boundaries. It was so with her grandmother. She knew the whole country intimately. She was at home with all communities, all linguistic cultures, religions and tribes.
Charisma needs energy. Indira Gandhi used to say that the harder she worked, the more energy she seemed to have. Priyanka must be already learning that secret.
Indira Gandhi’s charisma grew with her own development. It saw her transformed from a shy, diffident school girl who didn’t mix much with her school mates, to a self-confident Prime Minister ready to battle her enemies and fight the causes she believed in. She became “Durga” after the Bangladesh war and earned universal respect. The Economist of London called her “Empress of Asia”. And it was about then that her enemies in India and abroad joined together in what she called a “single point programme” to bring her down.
While there is much talk in the country about dynastic succession, it is worth recalling that there was hardly any evidence that Nehru groomed his daughter to succeed him. Zareer Masani, whose biography of Indira Gandhi is perhaps the most objective and sympathetic to the subject, writes: “The blatant dynasticism with which Nehru has retrospectively been charged is alien to all that one knows of both his character and his political judgement. He was certainly proud of his daughter’s public standing and would no doubt have liked to see her in an important position; but according to his sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, his ambitions for Mrs Gandhi went no further than a Cabinet post. Nehru’s own wishes apart, he was enough of a politician to know that the country would have never accepted an immediate dynastic succession”.
In an interview for a US television network less than a fortnight before his death, Nehru refused to answer the question of his succession (writes Masani). “If I nominated somebody”, he explained, “that is the surest way of his not becoming Prime Minister. People would be jealous of him and dislike him.”
If Priyanka aspires to become Prime Minister one day, she cannot do it on the strength of her current wave of popularity. It can only be achieved by consistent hard work and dedication.