Gandhi’s Crew, A Morality Play for Our Times ─ the Great Person Theory of Leadership Ignores the Other Critically Important People Who Made It Work

© 2010 Peter Free

 

19 October 2010

 

Looking backward sometimes illuminates our procedural way forward

 

Americans seem to wish for a leader to fix the nation’s problems.  By focusing too much on one person, we tend to ignore the team recruitment and group interaction necessary to make good things happen.

 

In this regard, historian Ian Desai recently published an overview of Mahatma Gandhi’s rise to leadership in India during the first half of the Twentieth Century.

 

Gandhi, often seen as a political saint, is too often solely credited with the transformation that India underwent during those years.  That distortion of history makes for unrealistic expectations regarding leadership generally.

 

Americans take note.

 

Gandhi’s team ─ Mahadev Desai

 

Desai’s essay, Gandhi’s Invisible Hands, demonstrates that Gandhi could not have done what he did without the almost fanatical devotion to the larger good displayed by the many people who worked with him and contributed to his thinking, planning, and implementation.

 

Indeed, Gandhi depended on others to shape his thinking:

 

[Mahadev] Desai was the heart of this intellectual operation, helping Gandhi refine his philosophy over the course of his career and providing him with concrete information to use in his ideological struggle with British imperialism.

 

 

© 2010 Ian Desai, Gandhi’s Invisible Hands, Wilson Quarterly 34(4): 30-37 (Autumn 2010)

 

(Historian Ian Desai is not related to Mahadev Desai.)

 

Three more critical contributors to the group effort

 

In addition to Mahadev Desai─ Kasturbai (Gandhi’s wife of 64 years), Pyarelal Nayyar (secretary), and J.C. Kumarappa (economist) were critical members of Gandhi’s inner circle.

 

Illustrating the teamwork theme ─ the 1930 Salt March

 

At one point, 200 people lived with Gandhi at the Satyagraha Ashram.

 

His 1930 Salt March could not have taken place without the plans and implementation done by these people and hundreds of volunteers.

 

“By effacing their own efforts, Gandhi’s associates reinforced his image as a simple and self-reliant crusader.”

 

When the two critical components of the inner circle died, the Gandhian effort lost momentum

 

When M. Desai and Kasturbai died in 1942 and 1944, “Gandhi’s enterprise lost its twin engines, and sputtered as it tried to support the Mahatma during the dramatic run-up to independence day in 1947 . . . .”

 

The moral for Americans?

 

(1) Solitary cowboys generally do not change the momentum of History.

 

(2) Constitutional mechanisms that insist on the ability to veto team member choices may work against getting anything significant done.

 

(3) As a result, transformation in the United States is more likely to come from leadership exerted outside the formal political structure, such as in a Gandhian or Martin Luther King-like movement.