The January 30th anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination came and went with little fanfare. It was marked by the scattering of a recently discovered trove of his ashes in the Arabian Sea; the opening of an exhibit of interpretative sculptures at an art gallery in London; several official Government of India tributes; and not much else, save for the regular ring of cash registers across India dealing in Rupee notes on which Gandhi's smiling face is plaster-cast.

Sixty years after his death, Gandhi has faded into the background of global consciousness. Such invisibility is odd for arguably the most globally recognizable man of the 20th Century. It is also odd at a time when people the world over are longing for a Gandhi-like persona to emerge and lead them out of deep political trouble.

Perhaps people imagine that Gandhi himself is irrelevant because they believe that historically such figures have arisen by a fortuitous combination of personality and circumstance. In fact, the opposite is true. Larger than life leaders, including Gandhi, are actually meticulously crafted and there are lessons to learn from examining the self-conscious creation of the Gandhi phenomenon by Gandhi himself via (and this is the crucial part) a high-caliber cadre of dedicated individuals who supported him at each step.

From the outset of his career in South Africa, Gandhi surrounded himself with a ‘motley crew’ of individuals who performed an impressive variety of tasks to keep his burgeoning political movement afloat. Henry Polak, Sonja Schlesin, Albert West and Herman Kallenbach provided Gandhi with consistent investments of financial and intellectual capital. And Gandhi’s own nephews, Maganlal and Chhanganlal Gandhi, provided the operational management necessary to run a farm, school and printing press at the experimental communities in which they all lived together.

When, after twenty years in Natal, Gandhi moved back to India, only his nephews came with him. But over time, he was able to fill the gaps in his team with additional deft and devoted followers. Among these, Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai (no relation to this writer), led Gandhi’s back-office brain trust: advising Gandhi on each decision he took, organizing his daily schedule, keeping meticulous records of his activities, conducting extensive correspondence on his behalf, and even reading books that Gandhi did not have time to read and issuing reports on them.

Such behind-the-scenes work of Gandhi's team is an example of the human infrastructure and organization upon which great accomplishments rest. While this operational apparatus was a key driver of the short-term success of the Gandhi phenomenon, ensuring that Gandhi had more popularity clout than any of his rivals, such success actually undermined the long term efficacy of Gandhi's political message. In the meteoric proportions Gandhi’s persona assumed lay the foundations of his ultimate limitations and eventual political impotence.

Through his highly visible but sparse fashion, magnetic response to the photographic medium, and lofty perch on the shoulders of his discreet co-workers, Gandhi the man became Gandhi the icon. The more this icon was disseminated, the more the real man and his activities were eclipsed by its power. By the end of his life, icon had given way to caricature. One Indian paper ran a cartoon of Gandhi as a “Mickey Mouse of a Man”, replete with the Disney character’s outfit in place of his own signature loincloth. As India unraveled into communal violence on the eve of Partition, the efficacy of its guiding light had been reduced almost to zero.

The lesson for America today is clear: relying on a politics of persona as a guiding principle for choosing the country's next president is courting disappointment over the long run. The next presidency, like the present one, will be made or broken as much by the team surrounding our nation's leader as by their boss. These, then, are the questions we should be asking of the candidates: do they have the vision to pick the best collaborators and will the people they pick have the capacity and integrity to win back from the brink a country and world that have drifted terribly off-course?

It may be too early for any of the candidates to answer such searching questions. But if in the absence of satisfactory answers we revert to endorsing popularity politics, no one will be well served, not even the contest's winner. The persona phenomenon can secure power, but it also has a tendency to become a victim of its own appeal. Just ask those great and extremely well-meaning pioneers of it: Gandhi and company.

Ian Desai is completing his doctorate in South Asian History at Oxford University, where is
he is a Rhodes scholar.