India:The grooming of inexperienced Rahul Gandhi for the position of prime minister shows that India, like many of its neighbours, is still under dynastic rule, writes Rahul Bediin New Delhi.
The dominance of political dynasties across most of south Asia became evident once more with the formal grooming of a 37-year-old scion of India's Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty - which has ruled the country for most of its 60 years of independence - as the next heir to the family patrimony.
In the first step towards readying the politically inexperienced and unproven Rahul Gandhi for "higher and heavier responsibilities" in the ruling Congress Party, a euphemism for prime ministership, his powerful mother, Sonia, appointed him party general secretary earlier this month.
This was despite Gandhi's failed attempt at campaigning for his party earlier this year for the crucial Uttar Pradesh state assembly elections, in which the Congress Party received a drubbing. He is also accompanying his mother on an official visit to Beijing this week. Sonia Gandhi (60), the Italian-born widow who is the de facto ruler of the world's largest democracy of more than one billion people and one of the 21st century's most powerful female politicians, heads India's Congress Party by virtue of marrying into the country's first family.
Her husband, Rajiv Gandhi, followed his mother Indira as India's prime minister in 1985, who in turn had succeeded her father, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Jawaharlal's father Motilal, who launched the dynasty at the turn of the 20th century, was a prominent Congress Party leader who ensured his son's elevation to the country's top job after independence in 1947.
India's neighbours, too, labour under dynastic rule. Benazir Bhutto, who recently returned to Pakistan following eight years of self-imposed exile, is a leader whose legitimacy stems from her family. She has twice been prime minister and could be so yet again.
Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was prime minister of Pakistan in the early 1970s when his government was one of the few in the country's history that was not only not run by the army, but little influenced by it.
Interestingly, Benazir Bhutto's autobiography was originally published in 1989 as Daughter of the East, but a few months later its title was changed to Daughter of Destiny, thereby attributing enhanced dynastic lineage to her.
Born in 1953 in Pakistan's southern province and educated locally in a convent run by western nuns and later at Oxford and Harvard, Bhutto gained credibility from her father's high profile, even though she was initially a reluctant convert to politics.
Bangladesh also has two political dynasties - one headed by Hasina Wajed, the daughter of the country's founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and the second by Khaleda Zia, widow of Gen Ziaur Rahman.
Zia took charge of the country after Sheikh Mujibur and many members of his family were assassinated just four years after independence in 1971. All elections in Bangladesh in recent years have been a "battle of the begums".
The island republic of Sri Lanka has two political dynasties - the Senanayakes and the more prominent Bandaranaikes. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, widow of former prime minister Solomon Bandaranaike, became the world's first woman prime minister in 1960. Subsequently, her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga was elected president, from 1994 to 2005, and she made her mother her prime minister.