16 years of Leader: When Rana Daggubati chose an unfiltered political drama over a ‘mass’ launch

Kammula wrote the script himself. The story follows Arjun Prasad, the US-based son of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Sanjeevayya, who is assassinated in the initial minutes of the film. Arjun returns, reads his late father’s diary, and realises that the political party his father led is corrupt from within. He decides to contest for the CM’s position, not out of ambition, but because he believes someone worse will take it if he does not.

Most Telugu political films of that era operated around a hero who fights the system from outside. Leader put its protagonist inside the system and watched what happened to him there. Arjun takes office with a genuine anti-corruption agenda. He moves fast. His own party’s MLAs push back. His cousin Dhanunjay, played by Subbaraju, works against him from within. Every move Arjun makes that is principled creates a new political problem.

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Leader’s most significant stretch comes in the second half. To hold his government together, Arjun agrees to protect an MLA’s son accused of raping and murdering a tribal girl. It is a direct compromise, he knows it, the audience knows it, and his mother Rajeswari, played by Suhasini Maniratnam, knows it. She does not forgive him. She dies without doing so. Kammula does not walk that back or soften it. The film holds the consequence of that decision and builds its entire third act around Arjun reckoning with what he gave up. He eventually resigns as CM, exposing the corrupt politicians around him, and contests a by-election as an independent.

What made Rana Daggubati’s debut work was that he did not play the role as a hero. Arjun Prasad has no theatrical moments, no mass scenes, no speeches written to generate applause. He is a man who thinks carefully, acts strategically, and carries the weight of his decisions without externalising them into anger or defiance. Critics at the time noted it as “a surprisingly mature performance for a debutant.”

Sekhar Kammula later described Leader as a film born directly from his everyday encounters with reality. In his own words, there are times when “everything you do is a reflection of what you encounter in your daily life,” and Leader was one such film.

The other thread running through the film was the idea of ideal leadership. Kammula drew inspiration from figures such as Mahatma Gandhi. Arjun Prasad, the protagonist, was conceived as a test of that ideal: what happens when someone genuinely committed to those values enters a political system structurally designed to corrupt them?

Leader was, by Kammula’s own admission, his “something else”, a film he made to step outside his established template of intimate personal dramas. He has since said he could have dug deeper, acknowledging that corruption was a convenient theme and that he was aware of the film’s limitations even as he was making it.

Leader was remade in Hindi in 2014 as Youngistaan, without comparable impact.