DELHI LETTER:The Nehru-Gandhi Congress Party tops the political dynasty chart by a long way
PREDICTABLY, INDIA’S recently concluded general election revealed that politics in the world’s largest democracy remains largely a family business and many parliamentary seats are family heirlooms to be passed on to a sibling or close relative.
Barring the Communists and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, almost all major Indian national and regional political parties and groupings, were doggedly dynastic in both their structure and functioning.
About 30 of 545 recently elected MPs belonged to well- established political dynasties.
Many analysts believe that their presence in the electoral arena subverted true democracy, replacing it with a feudalism in which voters were presented a fait accompli to opt for various contending aristocrats.
Of these 30 MPs, about 20 have been inducted into the federal cabinet at various levels of seniority.
Political commentator Neerja Choudhary believes that if this trend of political primogeniture continued, India’s ruling political class would become little more than a self-perpetuating dynastic elite, unmindful of democratic norms.
Others are of the view that a few hundred families, of which a handful were really in charge, controlled the fate of more than 1.20 billion people at their whim and fancy.
Topping the political dynasty chart by a long margin is India’s Grand Old Congress Party controlled by the Nehru-Gandhi family that has ruled the country for most of its 62 years since independence. Once again the Congress Party has secured the mandate and formed the government last week for the second successive five-year term.
It is a party dominated by Sonia Gandhi (63), the Italian- born widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. She, like all powerful dynastic heads, keeps her counsel, brooks no dissent, deals ruthlessly with it whenever it emerges and amply rewards unfettered loyalty.
Consequently, she remains the country’s undeclared political head and one of the 21st century’s most powerful female politicians, simply because she married into India’s first family.
Now her much celebrated and feted son Rahul Gandhi (38), credited with Congress’s electoral victory, is on the ascendant as the forthcoming heir to the family patrimony.
Earlier, Rahul’s father Rajiv, who was assassinated in 1991, had succeeded his mother Indira Nehru-Gandhi as prime minister at the age of 40 following her assassination in 1984.
She, in turn, had followed her father Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister while his father Motilal, the Nehru dynasty founder, twice headed the Congress Party in the 1920s.
“It is only a matter of time before Rahul Gandhi is elevated to the top political job after a suitable apprenticeship over the next few years,” according to social activist and journalist Seema Mustafa.
Rahul has been anointed India’s next ruler and his mother and the Congress Party are working hard towards ensuring his succession, she adds.
Even Dr Manmohan Singh, a dynasty loyalist who owes his follow-on prime ministership to Sonia Gandhi, has often said that India, where more than 50 per cent of the country’s vast population are under the age of 30, needed a “youthful leader”, hinting clearly at Rahul’s imminent elevation.
“The Gandhi dynasty has such a firm hold on modern-day India that any reference to the country is invariably associated with them,” Delhi lawyer Shashi Bahadur says. People struggled to name the many other prime ministers India had had who do not belong to the first family, he adds.
Political family scions, including Rahul Gandhi, justify their situation by declaring that it is an accepted Indian tradition for offspring to following in their parents’ footsteps. They maintain that if lawyers, doctors and journalists can do it, why not politicians.
They also aver that they were duly elected and not nominated to political office, an exercise that provided them voter legitimacy which remains the bedrock of democracy.
“Medicine (or law) is quite different from politics which is in the public domain where representatives are supposed to emerge from within the people and not spring forth from the loins of senior politicians,” the pro-Congress Party Hindustan Times newspaper wrote yesterday.
Prof Satish Kumar, historian and former professor of diplomacy at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, says political feudalism thrives in India as common people seek charisma in their leadership and having been ruled by maharajahs for centuries were swayed by dynasties and the concept of khandam, or family.
“To the masses, these families, irrespective of their many faults, inefficiencies and misrule, represent a continuity and stability that they hope will deliver them from their miseries and wretchedness and hence, they vote for them,” Dr Kumar says.
In the countryside, these political families are looked upon as mai baap (our father), much like the kings were in centuries past, he adds.
Other analysts say dynastic rule is firmly embedded in India due largely to the close association of elites like the Nehru-Gandhis with the independence movement.
“By carefully publicising and perpetuating this connection, the Nehru-Gandhis cornered the political space and financial resources available, leaving little or no room for newcomers to challenge them,” according to political scientist Anuradha Chenoy.
These brand names were built up and today are highly electable dynasties, she adds.
Alongside, reinforcing this larger-than-life image of their mentors, a group of “lesser” regional elites emerged as their life-sustaining vanguard, and in tandem the two successfully enthroned themselves.
To these regional players, political fealty was a vehicle for their own advancement, much to the detriment of grassroot political workers who were consequently denied the opportunity to enter mainstream public life and build up an alternate power base.
“Political dynasties are antithetical to democracy, but their eclipse will take time in India,” says former MP and journalist Kuldip Nayar.
However their perpetuation is an embarrassment for country where talent and ability, even political, is in abundant supply.
