It’s been nearly 30 years but I still wince when I think about my lone one-on-one interview with Indira Gandhi. It had taken me several months of buttering up the prime minister’s elegantly erudite media adviser H.Y. Sharada Prasad to get 30 minutes with her for a French newspaper (La Croix), whose New Delhi correspondent I then was.

Just about 10 minutes into the interview (face to face, across the imposing desk in her office) and I had run through my 45 questions. Kaput, my mind went blank and the clock was still ticking.

Sure, the PM was mostly monosyllabic, returning my diffidently posed questions like Roger Federer’s smashes. But it wasn’t just that. There was this je ne sais quoi…of power, of a halo of imperiousness hovering over her.

Suddenly, I felt I was back in the first standard, in the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Delhi – standing a bit over four feet tall, in my white shirt and divided skirt, accessorised with red buttons and red socks and facing the legendary and fearsome Miss Powley. She had silenced generations of CJM-ites. And if there was any visual avatar of terror, it was this teacher.

Heavens no, the senior Mrs Gandhi was no holy shrieking terror – unless you were a political opponent or just happened to be in the way or had done her some wrong. And that unfortunate morning when she left me dumbstruck, she was nothing if not inordinately polite – and soft-spoken.

But she was just being herself. She did not utter one more word than necessary. Perhaps, her minimalist approach to conversation imbued her with that ineffable note of authority.

It could be that you silence people by being silent. Perhaps, that’s one of the more astute ways of hanging onto the semblance of power.

The younger Mrs G does not have a patrician nose – as did her mother-in-law. Nor was Sonia Gandhi born into a family for whom power had come as a birthright. In fact, she was none too keen that her husband, Rajiv Gandhi, take over the reins of the country after Indira Gandhi was assassinated.

However, over the years that power has come her way and settled in cozily, this Mrs Gandhi has grown quite accustomed to it. She wears it rather well. The current head of the Congress Party is said by those who know her well to be reserved – even a bit shy. She has obviously used this very attribute to convert the reticence into an air of mystery that envelops her like a cape of invincibility.

Sphinx-like is an adjective often used to describe Sonia Gandhi by the pundits of the press. I wonder, if she were to babble on would she exude as much of an air of authority as she now does. By rarely letting down the drawbridge to the inner sanctum in her court at 10 Janpath, she has successfully cultivated the persona of an inscrutable woman-in-charge – of both herself and, ostensibly, the country.

Interestingly, those who form part of her informal, personal court simulate a similar remoteness; a few of them with an unseemly smugness appear all puffed up with vicarious power. Using the power of this particular proximity could, however, prove disastrous – as would breaking the code of silence – Omerta. It doesn’t take much to be banished from this little Camelot.

Power also has to be worn astutely. As the boss of the ruling party Sonia Gandhi may be the ‘most powerful person’ in India at the moment, even though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh heads the government. However, she tucks away that entitlement or perceived entitlement gracefully into the folds of her impeccable saris.

Sonia Gandhi never leaves the room at a function or event until the PM has left. Aides close to her say that she is so acutely conscious of the fact that others take the cue from her.

Down the centuries men have generally not been very flattering about women incarnating power in the public domain – or even in the corporate world until fairly recently. Power does not become them – that’s a refrain often uttered by those who would rather have women confined to their roles of wives, mothers and homemakers.

Such women – the ones who brought home the bacon in addition to being competitive and occupying positions of power in the workplace – were described as unfeminine, aggressive, shrill. They are the very same qualities that would have been considered praiseworthy in the male of the species.

So powerful was Indira Gandhi in her prime that she was widely described as ‘the only man in her cabinet’. How wrong they were – those who attributed her success as a forceful political leader to her masculine attributes – her inner man as it were.

More likely it was the inner woman that came to the fore in her case. Power is androgynous. Don’t forget this is also the land of Durga and Kali. Indira Gandhi was regularly asked about how it felt to be a woman and the leader of such a huge country. She once memorably said that she was not conscious of her gender while she was working.

Sometimes, however, I do wish that some of our star women anchors on the small screen were more conscious of their gender. They don’t need to emulate their male counterparts who are increasingly shrieking and shouting to get across their points of view.

Perhaps the star journos of our electronic media take their cues from our MPs in Parliament who think that lung power equals real power. The women would do better to watch the Speaker Meira Kumar whose dulcet voice does manage to restore order in the House.

A woman can be a mistress of more than one universe. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once famously said that ‘there are two types of women: those who want power in the world, and those who want power in the bedroom’.

I’d say why not women who want and can have power in both spheres?

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