Top 10 Greatest Indian Leaders

The one who tops the India Today list is not the most obvious, the Mahatma, but the Martyr. In our poll, the action hero who struggled to give a revolutionary rejoinder to the British Empire pushes the savant of passive resistance to the third position.

And next to Bhagat Singh is another rebel and adventurer who too didn’t take the Gandhian road to national liberation: Subhas Chandra Bose.

The top 10 subvert many assumptions about greatness and how it is perceived by a generation that is not entirely conditioned by the one-dimensional wisdom of the classroom.

The pioneer, the poet and the scientist coexist with leaders who were not conformists; and surprisingly, Nehru—nation-builder, moderniser, secularist, socialist—is at the ninth position, between Homi Bhabha and Jayaprakash Narayan.

With Sardar Patel at the fourth and Indira Gandhi at the sixth positions, the list is a celebration of nationalists with iron in their soul—or in their fist.

Is it that, as India, which at any rate is hardly Gandhian or Nehruvian in its political expression, strives for global power status, someone out there, someone disillusioned with the conformism of a smug state, is missing the romance of the revolutionary leap—and the martyr’s war cry, Inquilab Zindabad?

Is it that the mystique of the deviant, the transcontinental adventurism of the rebellious, is more alluring than the intimate humanism of the fakir? Is it that a steely nationalist like Patel and a strong, overpowering helmswoman like Mrs G are missing in an India of wishy-washy pretenders to the throne?

Is it that India is nostalgic about the moral power of a JP at a time when the so-called socialists, products of his ‘total revolution’, are an embarrassment to his memory? The hierarchy of greatness on the list reveals the mind of India. It brings out the way in which a nation comes to terms with its past and how it argues with the present.

Its iconography essays a people’s aspiration, their nostalgia, their disillusion, their hope, their joy—and the gaping absences in the bestselling story of India Rising.

Greatness, in the end, is a creation of the beholder. It is not the suspension of judgement that ensures the durability of the greatest. As in the following pages, the march of the 60 greatest is led by the questioning mind of an India inspired.