By Kedar Nath Pandey
A huge shift is taking place in India’s political landscape, and that is the emergence of dynastic politics. If public perception, as reflected in the Indian media and coffeehouse talk, is anything to go by, nothing can prevent Rahul Gandhi–son of India’s late former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Indira Gandhi, arguably the most powerful Indian prime minister, and great grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister–from becoming India’s next prime minister.
In fact, many believe that he is already the country’s de facto prime minister. His words are the law of the land. Senior ministers and civil servants give more weight to what Rahul Gandhi says and does than what is said and done by the de jure prime minister Manmohan Singh. More often than not, Singh and his government follow what Rahul Gandhi dictates. If anything, the development underscores the importance of the Gandhi-Nehru family in Indian politics. As it is, Rahul’s mother Sonia Gandhi has already created history. She has been the head of the party since April 1998. This has been the longest tenure on the part of any president of the Congress, which turned 125 year-old last year. In fact, in October 2010, she was re-elected for the record fourth term as the president of the party. The venerated Nehru-Gandhi family has four members in Parliament today–the mother-son duo of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi of the ruling Congress Party and the mother-son duo of Maneka and Varun Gandhi belonging to the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. Maneka Gandhi is the widow of Indira Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay Gandhi.
Incidentally, Rahul Gandhi is acutely aware of the contribution of the family name to his evolution as a political leader. On many an occasion, particularly during electioneering, he has promised to ensure that his Congress party would develop a new culture in which talent and qualification, rather than inheritance, would factor in getting party posts and governmental positions. But ironically, Rahul Gandhi, who also happens to be one of the general secretaries of the party and in-charge of the Youth Congress, the so-called youth wing of the party, “appointed” last year (2010) Rajiv Satav as the new president of the Indian Youth Congress. A lawyer by training, Satav is the son of Rajni Satav, a former minister and Maharashtra Women’s Commission chairperson. He got into politics because of his mother’s influence, which even reportedly worked to get him a ticket. Last year, Satav fought and won assembly election from Kalamnuri constituency in Hingoli district of Maharashtra.
In fact, the Congress-led government at the Centre has ministers who are essentially there primarily because of their family legacies: Milind Deora, Jyotiraraditya Scindia, G.K. Vasan, Sachin Pilot (all Congress), M.K. Azhagiri, Dayanidhi Maran (belonging to DMK, ally of Congress) and Agatha Sangma, the 29-year old and the youngest Indian minister, daughter of the former Lok Sabha Speaker P. A. Sangma (Nationalist Congress Party, another Congress ally). Even the Speaker of the Lok Sabha Ms. Meira Kumar is the daughter of late Jagjivan Ram, one of the tallest dalit leaders who remained in every Indian cabinet as a senior member from 1945(interim government) till 1980.
It is not that the family legacy has played an important role for only Congress leaders to enter the parliament. This trend is visible in other parties too. With the possible exception of the Communists parties, almost all the political parties have promoted or tolerated the family-cult in distribution of the party tickets both to the national and state legislatures. For instance, the first impression that one gets by looking into the composition of the present 15th Lok Sabha is a positive one in the sense that out of 543 elected members, there are now 81 members who are 40- years old or younger (although the average age of MPs remains stubbornly high at 53, despite nearly 60 per cent of the Indian population being under 35). The present Lok Sabha has also an unprecedented 59 women MPs. But under closer scrutiny, it is revealed that of the 81 young lawmakers elected this time, 50 came from political families, with 33 of the 50 MPs following in their fathers’ footsteps into politics. Meanwhile, of the 59 women representatives, almost two-thirds have close male relatives who are politicians. In fact, according to Patrick French, the author of The Princely State of India, as many as 156 members of the current 15th Lok Sabha come from the known political families. In total, 28.6 per cent of MPs have had a hereditary connection.
Equally important is the fact that the phenomenon is not limited to national politics. It is also deeply rooted at the state level. The list of blood relatives of successful and resourceful former state chief ministers becoming chief ministers is growing: Biju Patnaik-Naveen Patnaik, Sheikh Abdullah-Farooq Abdullah-Omar Abdullah, S.B. Chavan-Ashok Chavan, M.G. Ramachandran-Janaki Ramachandran, Lalu Prasad-Rabri Devi, Deve Gowda-Kumaraswamy, Ravi Shankar Shukla-Shyama Charan Shukla, Devi Lal-Om Prakash Chautala and N.T. Rama Rao-Chandrababu Naidu are some leading examples. In fact, the present Congress chief minister of Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chavan, who left his post in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet at the Centre and took his present assignment to refurbish the party image in the wake of the Adarash- Housing scam, enjoys a unique family tradition– in the history of Parliament — he was the third member of his family to have found a berth in Parliament uninterruptedly for over four decades, a distinction probably surpassed only by the Gandhi-Nehru family. His father, former Union deputy minister for defence and law Dajisaheb Chavan was an M.P. for 16- years and later, Prithiviraj’s mother, Premalabai Chavan, was also an MP for 17- years. Chavan himself was a member of Parliament for more than 10- years.
One is also aware of the likes of Mehbooba Mufti in Kashmir, Akhilesh Yadav and Ajit Singh in Uttar Pradesh, K. Muraleedharan in Kerala, Kuldip Bishnoi in Haryana, Sukhbir Singh Badal in Punjab and Jagan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh, who are focused on emulating their fathers in becoming chief ministers of their respective states. In fact, the junior Badal is already the deputy chief minister. Tamil Nadu’s former chief minister M. Karunanidhi has already revealed his “will” that his son Stalin, now an important minister, will succeed him. In Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena supremo, Bal Thackeray has recently anointed his grandson Aditya Thackeray as the head of newly formed youth wing of the Shiv Sena, Yuva Sena. And in Bihar, former chief minister Lalu Prasad, whose wife Rabri Devi was also a chief minister, had roped in his cricketer son Tejaswi Yadav in politics, just on the eve of the assembly elections in the state.
In this year’s elections in Assam, the Congress fielded 18 candidates having a family lineage in politics. Two among them were given party nominations for the first time: Deabrata Saikia, son of former chief minister Hiteswar Saikia, and Sushmita Deb, daughter of former Union minister Santosh Mohan Deb. In West Bengal, even Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, who had long kept his children away from the political limelight, pushed the Congress party to nominate his son Avijit Mukherjee to contest the assembly polls. He has won.
Dynastic politics is bad because it limits our choices. If strengthened, it will disconnect the politicians from the people. It will ban the outsiders from entering politics and by and by democracy will turn into some kind of feudalism. It will mean that lesser qualified people, by virtue of name recognition, get voted into office. It will stifle innovation and new ideas. It will promote, instead, divisive politics built around patronage. It will prioritise identity over policy, divisiveness over governance, continuity over change and alienation over inclusion. INAV