Master of the game

For understanding leadership and decision-making, Gandhi is a very powerful case study. Did he rely entirely on spirituality and morality?

What was the inspiration of his dreams? How did he shape them? He can be understood in terms of multiple images: a hero, a saint, an exemplar, a knight and also as a martyr. People worked for him without fear of punishment or for some reward. They worked for something that was meaningfully related to a chosen set of beliefs and values, which had been made part of their lives.

It’s really remarkable how lying in a small cottage in an isolated village in India, he could communicate silently with millions of people all over India and the world simply by resorting to a fast. It has been reported that on such occasions, people in London walking in the morning from the railway station to their offices would talk about “Mr Gandhi’s body temperature today”.

For studying Gandhi, Richard Attenborough’s Oscar winning film is very useful. The book by John Briley: Gandhi — A Screenplay, is also available. Some comments by Alyque Padamsee who played the role of Jinnah in the film are also available in his book: A Double Life.

The film starts with the scene in which Gandhi as a young barrister practising law in South Africa is thrown out of a train compartment, with his baggage, in which only the whites could travel.

Attenborough shows him lying on the railway platform on his knees and elbows like a quadruped looking at the train as it moves out of the platform leaving him behind. This is an event, which proved to be his crucible. As the movie proceeds, Gandhi finally reaches his dream of “Quit India Movement” gradually in stages as shown in it.

Leadership as Playacting

There’s another interesting portrayal in the film. Right in the beginning Gandhi is shown as a western educated barrister in a proper Saville suit.

In contrast, in the end he’s shown in bare loincloth. The film shows how gradually Gandhi managed to change his dress and, with it, his image gradually in stages. Perhaps, it wouldn’t be fair to say that he does it unconsciously. He was a shrewd manager of human feelings and deserves credit for projecting his image so meticulously to suit the changing situation.

Artful communication makes an impact. Alyque Padamsee, who himself has been a successful man in theatre and in the advertising world says: “It’ll seem like heresy if I say that Mahatma Gandhi was the greatest communications guru who ever lived, but it’s true.” Gandhi’s genius was evident in his staging events and through them — to dramatise situations.

He was one of the greatest event marketing man the world has ever seen and personally a great actor in a dramatic sense.

The greatest event staged by him was his salt march to Dandi. It’s really this event which really galvanised India into believing that the British were cruel taskmasters and they had imposed a draconian tax called the salt tax. He didn’t do it instantly. He let it all build up like a Hitchcockian suspense.

Slowly, he sent out a word that on a certain day he would be picking up a handful of salt on the deserted beach at Dandi. In addition to the technique of staging events, he proved to be a brilliant innovator of interaction.

He could easily have taken a train to Dandi, walked a few furlongs and got to the beach. Instead, he announced that he would start from Sabarmati Ashram on foot. He wanted to dramatise the event and interact with people on the way.

It took him several days to reach Dandi, and as he walked from village to village, the word spread that he was coming. Many of the villagers joined him in his march. Representatives from all over India and media persons from all over the world also joined him in his march.

The whole process was one of transformation of an act of defiance by an individual to a participatory movement of the people. As the march continued for days, the suspense kept on building up. Would Gandhi reach Dandi? Or would the government prevent him from reaching the beach? He did reach and proved successful.

Some Critical Comments

When one criticises Gandhi he has to first accept that he was a genius and one of the greatest leaders in world history. His puritanical approach of mahatmahood was his asset as well as his liability. It brought him his great victory: political independence, and, also his worst defeat: partition of India, which completely shattered him in the end.

VS Naipaul in his India: A Wounded Civilisation, has a section titled: Not Ideas, But Obsessions. He writes: Gandhi’s self-absorption was his strength. Without it he would have done nothing and might have been destroyed. But with this self-absorption, there was a kind of blindness.

For him the “outer world matters only in so far as it affects the inner. Gandhi swept through India, but he has left it without an ideology. He awakened the holy land: his mahatmahood returned it to archaism; he made his worshippers vain.”