From Rahul Gandhi to latest entrant Deepender Singh Hooda, fond parents continue to hand over political power to their progeny on a platter, much in the manner of family property. Small wonder that political parties, with few exceptions, have become a thriving sonrise industry,
writes Shastri Ramachandaran

The English have a parliament. Our British cousins gave their rights away. The Hapsburgs, and the Hoehenzollerns too. The Romanovs will not. What I was given, I will give my son.

— Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

THE world has changed much since then. What has not changed with the spread of democracy, certainly in India, is the practice of our leaders flourishing in the feudal mould of handing over political parties and parliamentary spaces to their family members. A party organisation, electoral constituency and even government, is seen as just another zamindari, a permanent settlement or physical estate to be handed over as property to another family member.

This practice is not limited to Congress President Sonia Gandhi and her son, Rahul. Like corruption, venality and intolerance of democratic checks and balances, the business of bequeathing a political legacy to sons, daughters, wives et al is common to almost all the parties. The only exceptions are the Communist Parties and the BJP, though the practice is not uncommon among prominent players in the latter.

The regional parties, which sprouted and grew in opposition to the centralising and dynastic tendencies of the Congress, are even worse offenders. Not only do the leaders of these outfits – from Shiv Sena’s Bal Thackeray and Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal to Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party to Om Prakash Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal – function like petty territorial chieftains but treat the party as a piece of estate to be passed on to dependent family members. As a result, our democracy is becoming captive to an oligarchy of privileged families that are usurping representative politics.

Arguably, the original sinner was that great democrat Jawaharlal Nehru who gave India’s grand old party to daughter Indira Gandhi to preside over. She showed her anti-democratic tendencies soon after by dismissing the world’s first elected communist ministry, of E M S Namboodiripad, in Kerala in 1959. Congressmen, and women, obviously, didn’t bother much about Nehru’s warning of communalists being more dangerous than communists.

However, given Nehru’s colossal achievements and the fact that his very political daughter being his closest associate would, in any case, have contrived to manouevre her way up the power ladder, history may grant him the benefit of doubt. What cannot be condoned is that after Nehru, a Congress party of stalwarts who ought to have known her imperious nature, willingly enthroned her and suborned themselves as courtiers. And that is where the rot began to set in, where root and branch of participatory politics came to mean one’s own offspring.

Defenders of dynastic democracy come up with a cunning question: Just because the mother or father is a politician, does it mean that their family members have to abjure politics?

The answer is an emphatic "No". A son, daughter or spouse need not opt out of politics merely because the parent or husband is already active. What is decidedly unhealthy is to import a family member who is an outsider to politics and impose her or him for the fact of being born in that household; where the one and only merit the son or daughter has is of birth and parentage.

This difference is what sets apart, in the judgment of many, Nehru’s bringing in Indira Gandhi, and she herself foisting, first, Sanjay and, later, Rajiv Gandhi on the party, the government and the country. Today, the same distinction needs to be made between DMK President M. Karunanidhi’s son M.K. Stalin and Samajwadi Party boss Mulayam Singh’s son Akhilesh Yadav.

Stalin, who was victimised during the Emergency, started out as an ordinary party member and activist, charting his own course and winning and losing his own battles for political office; Karunanidhi did not anoint him to any position of power. Whereas, Akhilesh Yadav, son of Samajwadi supremo Mulayam Singh is a rank outsider, not just to politics but even to the country in recent years. An environmental engineer from Australia, with real estate investments Down Under, Akhilesh Yadav got elected as an MP from Kannauj only because he is Mulayam Singh’s son. So much for socialist Mulayam Singh, a passionate champion of Hindi, who felt the language is not good enough for the education of his son.

Many of these new generation kids of politicians are "modern" and even anti-politics in the sense of setting themselves apart from the great unwashed masses who they claim to represent. Not a few of them have been contemptuous of politics and shunned it. But when papa or mummy asks them to play neta and go through the charade, they are only too willing; after all this is family business, makes good investment sense, puts them in the limelight and offers good prospects of both fame and fortune while keeping intact the clan’s feudatory.

Top of this heap is Rahul Gandhi, who at least in this respect is following in his father’s footsteps. Rajiv Gandhi was an airline pilot and foisted on the party. Once there, the government was deemed to be his natural inheritance after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. He was not a politician and, in the view of many, didn’t become one even after he was appointed prime minister and led the Congress in elections. His contribution, and they are not inconsiderable, does not in any way detract from the fact that he was imported and imposed.

Now, Sonia Gandhi who renounced the prime ministership not once but twice – the first time being after the 1991 elections when Congress sycophants sought to prevail on her – is preparing her bachcha to don the mantle. Rahul was as far from Indian politics as any other student of economics in Harvard or any financial consultant in London. Yet, his discovery of India (and its politics) is the biggest political production underway now to make India feel that it has discovered Rahul. To many Congressmen he represents the hope of a quantum leap from (the party’s) shadowy Rahu kalam to Rahul kalam.

Unlike father Rajiv, Rahul has others of his ilk – also pitch-forked into politics only because they are their father’s sons – for company. There’s Jyotiraditya, the polo-playing son of Madhavrao Scindia who came down from the high life with Morgan Stanley in New York to fulfil his father’s dream of becoming an MP from Gwalior. Jitendra Prasada’s son, Jiten Prasada is a regular corporate guy from the wonderland of investment firms who inherited Shahjehanpur in UP after his father’s death; similar to Congress poster boy from Rajasthan, Rajesh Pilot’s son, Sachin, the 28-year-old Dausa MP who flaunts his Wharton background. In this GenNext group high on power is also the young MP, Milind Deora, son of Mumbai Congress leader Murli Deora. A comprehensive list would run to several pages.

Clearly, Congressmen believe that what’s good for the first family of Indian politics is also good for them; and, such opportunism finds sanction because when the "high command" fosters this syndrome how can other Congressmen and women be restrained from perpetuating their bloodline in the political arena?

The BJP cannot boast of many who have attained this level of ‘family welfare’. Few at the very top have sought to promote their children in politics, though there are prominent exceptions. Former External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh’s son, Manvendra Singh, to most observers has little to recommend himself for membership of Parliament except his parentage; and that this is a thriving tradition in the Congress party. Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia is twice blessed: she gets to be chief minister because her mother Vijayaraje Scindia was a pillar of the BJP and, earlier, the Jana Sangh; and, in her place, son Dushyant Singh, gets to become the MP from Jhalawar. Perhaps, hotel management, which he studied in Switzerland and New York, is not entirely irrelevant in catering to the interest of the masses. The BJP was not averse to promoting Maneka Gandhi’s son, Varun.

One reason for the BJP’s poor record in making politics a family affair – like the Communist Parties, who score no marks in this area – may be that they are founded on cadre-based strength and driven by ideology. However, ideology has not precluded a host of others from joining the trend.

Like Mulayam Singh, Lalu Yadav too is a self-proclaimed socialist and an avowed follower of Jayaprakash Narayan and his movement for "total revolution". When he could not continue as Chief Minister, he simply handed over the party and government to wife Rabri Devi. The Shiv Sena is another "ideological force" which has been reduced to agonising over how supremo Bal Thackeray will apportion his political property between son Udhav and nephew Raj. Likewise, the egalitarian DMK’s ideology did not prevent the induction of Murasoli Maran’s businessman son, Dayanidhi, into politics and ministership.

In neighbouring Kerala, former Congress Chief Minister K Karunakaran split the parent party because it would not accommodate the ambitions of his son and daughter.

On this issue of politics as a family affair, India is one from Kanyakumari to Kashmir; no state or party is immune to this parivar affliction. In Jammu & Kashmir, the Abdullahs have maintained their fiefdom into the third generation, though Omar Abdullah is in politics also on his own steam. In present-day Punjab, the princely states may have been merged, but only to be replaced by new political principalities of certain families. Former Akali Dal Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal’s son Sukhbir Singh assuming the mantle is the most illustrative. Even good men, like former Prime Minister I.K. Gujral, no more fall among Fabians (how can they, when the Fabians too have fallen so low) but played paterfamilias to get a Lok Sabha seat for son Naresh.

And, how can one omit mention of Haryana, land of Kurukshetra and the Mahabharata, and cradle of our civilisation. It is a trendsetter and literally the cradle of contemporary political culture. India might have adopted the Westminster model of parliamentary government. But the methods, mindset, muscle and sinews that everyday define our democracy and its growing deficit are rooted in Haryana. The state gave birth to Aya Rams and Gaya Rams; developed defection of legislators from crude trading to successful political business; popularised rig veda as a winning election exercise; but, above all, institutionalised the tradition of politics as a family estate.

The Lals (Devi, Bansi and Bhajan) may be off-stage but the ethos of a politician importing and imposing his lal as a political heir is a flourishing practice. Thus, we have, Deepender Singh, son of Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, being fielded for the Rohtak Lok Sabha seat vacated by his father. And none— from the Om Prakash Chautala, Bhajan Lal or Bansi Lal households—can point a finger, for they did the same for their children.

Surprisingly, campaigns for empowerment and against corruption make no mention of select families encroaching and squatting on our political ground. Yet, this corruption of the parliamentary process cuts at the very root of inclusive politics; it disables and discourages wider democratic participation.

These so-called new, young and modern faces are chips of the same old entrenched blocks of power. They are determined to keep politics the exclusive preserve of a privileged but elected elite, no less alienated from the reality that is India. At the rate this tendency is growing, far from becoming a modern nation-state, India may well become a nation-family and even without help from the Sangh parivar.

HOME