Implosion: India’s Tryst with Reality

by John Elliott

  Pilot says he had never thought of entering dynastic politics, but with hindsight it seems to have been inevitable. He told me that he made his first political speech when he was 12, at a village meeting held by his mother, who was standing for Rajasthan assembly seat. ‘They called me to speak, so I did, for about one and a half minutes. So I got recognition and later an opportunity to run in elections.’ His father, Rajesh Pilot, was a minister in the Congress governments of the 1980s and 1990s and had been considering challenging Sonia Gandhi for the party leadership not long before he was killed in a car crash in 2000. Sachin was in college in the US at the time, and his mother took over Rajesh’s parliamentary seat while Sachin finished his studies. In 2004, it seemed natural for him to stand in her place, and since then he has campaigned for the poor and especially for the Gujjars, who want to enhance their official tribal status – he was briefly jailed in 2007 when he joined mass Gujjar protests that blocked a highway to Delhi.

  In 2009, he became minister of state for communications and information technology and in 2012 was promoted to be minister of corporate affairs. At the age of 36, he successfully enacted the new companies legislation by first gaining support from coalition parties and then steering it through parliament. The bill, which repealed 57-year-old laws, had been pending for about a decade and, after receiving cabinet approval at the end of 2012, it needed someone with Pilot’s energy and drive to make it become law.

  In an older generation, there is Naveen Patnaik, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) chief minister of Odisha, who is in his mid-sixties. He is a rare example of dynastic success rather late in life, and he might be the last of the line. Naveen was a dilettante international socialite, mixing with people such as Jacqueline Onassis and Mick Jagger, until he fell unexpectedly into politics and became an MP in the late 1990s on the death of his father, Biju Patnaik, a former chief minister of Odisha. Naveen’s elder brother Prem, a Delhi-based businessman, was not interested in entering politics, nor was his sister Gita Mehta, a well-known author partly based in New York.

  I remember Naveen talking emotionally at Delhi dinner parties about how ineffectual he felt (and was) in the face of the state’s appalling rural poverty, which he was personally encountering for the first time. He later became the state’s semi-reclusive chief minister and astounded both supporters and critics by being elected consecutively three times.8 He has managed to maintain a clean image with his electorate by reducing their exposure to petty corruption, despite allegations that his government (and specific ministers) accept bribes on large mining and other projects. He has never married, so has no heirs to succeed him. Perhaps conscious that a rival Patnaik family had lost elections because voters had tired of their dynasty, he has played down his own family links, and his brother and sister are rarely seen in Odisha. So, unless one of them changes their mind and decide to cash in on the family legacy, Naveen might close the dynasty, at least for a time.

  Few have the sense of service of Scindia through his royal lineage or Pilot through his rural background – both of whom are following on from their fathers, who were two of the most respected Congress MPs of their generation and set high standards for their sons to follow.

  Dynastic Surge

  There has been a surge of dynasties in India during the past decade, most of whom do not have the strong public service credentials that can be attributed to the Gandhis and other young politicians mentioned earlier. Defenders and apologists for what has been happening argue that dynastic politicians have to go through the hoop of being elected, and that their only advantage is the family brand, which eases their entry into politics.

  The best survey was conducted by Patrick French, an author and historian, when he was writing a book, India: a Portrait9, with the help of regional journalists and a young statistics cruncher, Arun Kaul. They found that, led by the Gandhis, more than a third of the Congress party’s MPs elected in 2009 had come into politics through a family link.10 Literally all the MPs (not just Congress) aged under 30, and more than two-thirds of those under 40, were from hereditary political families, whereas less than 10 per cent of MPs over the age of 70 were dynastic. He classified 27 MPs as ‘hyper-hereditary’, including 19 from the Congress, meaning those who had multiple family connections and several family members with political careers.

  Regional state-based parties had a higher incidence of hereditary MPs than national parties. All five MPs from Uttar Pradesh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal Party (National People’s Party) had family links, including Ajit Singh, the party leader and son of Charan Singh, who was briefly (1979–80) prime minister. This was also true of six out of 14 MPs belonging to the Orissa-based Biju Janata Dal led by Naveen Patnaik and three MPs from Jammu and Kashmir’s National Conference headed by Farooq and Omar Abdullah.

  Seven out of nine MPs from the Maharashtra-based Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) – founded and led by Sharad Pawar, a powerful national and regional politician who split from the main Congress party in 1999 over Sonia Gandhi’s emerging role – hailed from political families. Only one MP from the NCP did not have a politically significant family background. Pawar’s acolyte, Praful Patel, is one of the country’s richest MPs.

  Although it did not figure in French’s research, the DMK in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, has a complex web of family and business relationships, rivalries and intrigues. The network is headed by the state’s veteran former chief minister M. Karunanidhi, one of whose sons, M.K. Stalin, has been mayor of Chennai, a state government minister, and then deputy chief minister between 1996 and 2011. Karunanidhi’s nephew, the late Murasoli Maran, and one of Maran’s sons, Dayanidhi Maran, have both been MPs and central government ministers in recent years. Murasoli had developed close political links in Delhi over four decades,11 and the family runs a large media empire. Among the posts Dayanidhi held was that of telecommunications minister, which he lost in 200712 because of a family feud, and textiles minister, a post from which he resigned in 2011 over telecom corruption scandals.

  Dayanidhi was succeeded in 2007 by A. Raja, a DMK MP who was at the centre of the 2011 telecom scandal and was closely linked with Karunanidhi’s daughter, Kanimozhi, a member of the Rajya Sabha. Both Raja and Kanimozhi were imprisoned in February 2011 (Raja for six months and Kanimozhi for 15 months). Tamil Nadu’s other main political party, the state-based All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) has had a different sort of dynastic succession based on the film industry’s massive popularity – its leader and chief minister, J. Jayalalitha, was the mistress of the late M.G. Ramachandran, a former chief minister who broke away from the DMK and set up his own party.

  Rivalries spurred by the pursuit of riches and power have disrupted many dynasties like the DMK family in Tamil Nadu. This was spectacularly evident during the 2012 state assembly elections in Punjab, where politics have been controlled by six landed families since Partition. The best known are the current two rival party leaders – Captain Amarinder Singh, 69, of the Patiala Royal family and leader of the Congress party, and Parkash Singh Badal, 84, of the Shiromani Akali Dal, who in 2012 unexpectedly defeated the Congress and became the chief minister for the fifth time since the 1970s. Amarinder Singh’s wife Praneet Kaur is a Congress MP from the family’s home constituency of Patiala and became a minister of state for external affairs in 2009. Amarinder Singh liked to show he was born to rule – I once saw him browsing in a bookshop in Delhi’s Khan Market while his fleet of about ten Ambassador cars and Maruti jeeps, packed with gun-toting security guards, arrogantly blocked traffic at the entrance to the market.

  One of the most famous – and infamous – examples of self-serving dynastic greed, aggrandisement and infighting is provided by Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri.13 An MP at 29, Lalu Yadav became Bihar’s chief minister in 1990 and was forced to resign in 1997 when he was facing jail over a series of corruption allegations, notably a ‘fodder scam’. He was accused (and later convicted) of being involved in syphoning off Rs 950 crore from the sta
te government’s animal husbandry department. He then planted his uneducated wife, Rabri Devi, in the chief minister’s chair, and their relatives fought for prestige and wealth across the state. Between them, the husband and wife dominated Bihar’s politics for 15 years till 2005 when they were swept from power in state assembly elections (and again rejected in 2010)14 by a desperately poor electorate who realized that this backward-caste champion was doing nothing for them in terms of development. Yadav had come to power on a wave that should have led to a new deal for the poor. Instead, he showed little interest in the job of government and concentrated on building up his own image and only helped his family and Yadav caste to improve their lot.15

  French surmised that, since the tendency to turn politics into a family business was being emulated across northern India at the state level, with legislators nominating relatives, there was no reason to believe it was not spreading to districts. Other sources suggest that in Mumbai’s 2012 municipal elections, where for the first time 50 per cent of the seats were reserved for women, many of the women candidates were ‘stooges for their politically ensconced kin’, representing men in their families ‘who are the back room boys’.16

  Evidence found later by French supports my theory that wealth and greed are linked with the growth of dynasties.17 Aaditya Dar, one of his postgraduate researchers, merged their survey findings with a report on the 2009 financial and criminal records of Lok Sabha MPs prepared by the Delhi-based Association for Democratic Reforms.18 Based on MPs’ official (though not always complete) declarations of wealth, this showed that hereditary MPs were four-and-a-half times wealthier than those with no significant political background. Hyper-hereditary MPs (those with multiple family connections, such as Praneet Kaur from the Patiala dynasty mentioned above) were the wealthiest of all. Their average total assets were roughly double those of the hereditary MPs, and they exceeded even MPs with a business background. Of the 20 richest MPs, 15 were hereditary politicians and 10 were in the Congress.

  India’s dynastic surge may well be the effect as well as the ongoing cause of a sharp decline in the quality and effectiveness of Indian politics and governance that began in Indira Gandhi’s time as prime minister. Standards of public life have worsened even faster in recent years as personal greed has replaced many politicians’ concern for the country – especially among regional parties, whose role has expanded dramatically since the 1980s.

  Notes

  1. JE, ‘In Asia, the dynasties still rule’, New Statesman, 8 November 1999, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/136052

  2. Mark Tully, No Full Stops in India, Viking-Penguin, 1991

  3. ‘Waiting in the Wings: An Exclusive Interview with Chelsea Clinton’, Vogue, September 2012 http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/waiting-in-the-wings-an-exclusive-interview-with-chelsea-clinton/#8

  4. JE, ‘In Asia, the dynasties still rule’, New Statesman, 8 November 1999, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/136052

  5. ‘Yesterday the palace, today the suburbs for deposed king of Nepal’, The Independent, 12 June 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/yesterday-the-palace-today-the-suburbs-for-deposed-king-of-nepal-845055.html

  6. NDTV – Full transcript: ‘Your Call with Farooq Abdullah’, 18 March 2012, http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/full-transcript-your-call-with-farooq-abdullah-186907

  7. Conversations with JE, May 2012 and September 2013

  8. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/orissa%E2%80%99s-reclusive-enigma-looks-set-for-an-election-victory/

  9. Patrick French, India, A Portrait – An intimate biography of 1.2 billion people, Penguin Books

  10. Patrick French’s news website that he launched when India, A Portrait was published http://www.theindiasite.com/family-politics/family-politics-how-nepotistic-s-the-indian-parliament/

  11. Gopu Mohan, ‘Maran & Bros’, The Sunday Express, 12 Oct 2011, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/maran-&-bros/860364/0

  12. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/dynasties-rule-ok/

  13. Sankarshan Thakur, The Making of Laloo Yadav – the Unmaking of Bihar, HarperCollins India, 2000

  14. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/bihar-election-shows-a-better-future-as-evidence-of-india%E2%80%99s-corruption-spreads/

  15. JE, ‘Feudal Failings’, book review, Biblio, January 2001 –http://www.biblio-india.org/showart.asp?inv=16&=JF01

  16. http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/mumbai-civic-polls-only-8-percent-of-women-candidates-are-graduates-175835

  17. Patrick French, Father, son and unholy politics, The Week, 4 May 2012, http://week.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/theWeekContent.do?tabId=13&programId=1073755417&categoryId=-1073908161&contentId=11528955

  18. Aaditya Dar, ‘The business of family politics in India’, 2 April 2012 http://theopendata.com/site/2012/04/the-business-of-family-politics-in-india/

  13

  Nehru and the Gandhis

  ‘We are distraught – what can we do but vote for her son?’1 That was the cry I heard in the run-up to the December 1984 general election that gave a landslide victory to Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress party. A few weeks earlier, on 31 October, I had been in the Himalayan hill station of Mussoorie listening, along with British diplomats and other journalists, to Tibetan refugee children singing at lunchtime for Princess Anne, who was visiting from the UK as president of the Save the Children Fund. The drivers turned on their car radios and heard the news – on Pakistan Radio – that Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister, had been shot. We wondered if it was true, or did Pakistan Radio put such disinformation out every day! Mark Tully overheard two policemen talking about the shooting, so drove back to Delhi where his BBC colleague, Satish Jacob, had been the first person to broadcast news of her death over the airwaves. There were no easily available telephone links, so the rest of us, including Michael Thomas of The Times, decided it must be true rather more slowly, and started a seven-hour drive back to Delhi. Our cars were plastered with news sheets mourning Gandhi’s death as we passed through towns on the way south.

  I was back in my Delhi office that evening in time to write the lead story for the front page of the next morning’s FT, reporting that Indira Gandhi’s son, Rajiv, had been sworn in as prime minister, and that violence was spreading.2 The next day, I was among the crowds thronging around the steps of Teen Murthi House, a museum that had been the home of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and Indira’s father, where her body, face uncovered, lay in state on a gun carriage. ‘Tears and Tear Gas, Fighting and Flowers’ was the headline the FT put on my story reporting how thousands of young people had fought and jostled for a view of the body. They were beaten back by police with vicious lathis and eventually tear gas when the teeming crowds threatened to overwhelm the body.

  An era ended that day and another began. One of India’s most notable politicians and strongest leaders was dead, shot by her Sikh security guards, leaving behind a controversial legacy that is still debated.3 Indira Gandhi was gone but in the spirit of ‘the king (or queen) is dead, long live the king’, Rajiv Gandhi had quickly been made the Congress leader and prime minister so as to ward off potential rivals. That succession established the Nehru-Gandhi family far more firmly as a political dynasty than it had been before, leading to the rise later of Rajiv’s widow, Sonia, and their children Rahul and Priyanka.

  While leaders of India’s other parties have changed, with a flood of dynasties only appearing relatively recently, the Nehru-Gandhis have resolutely stayed at the top of the Congress and of politics. The party has been out of power for only about thirteen years since the country’s independence in 1947. Members of the dynasty have headed the party for all but nine years and have provided three prime ministers – Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi – plus Sonia Gandhi, who is the undisputed chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition elected in 2004 and 2009.

  This raises various questions:

 
; Have successive members of the Gandhi family sought to perpetuate the dynasty, or has its survival been dictated more by events?

  Has the family been good, or not, for India since it began to wield influence in India’s struggle for freedom from British rule nearly a century ago, and has it slowed down the country’s development?

  Can such a dynasty continue to perpetuate itself at a time when people’s instinctive loyalties to long-established icons are changing and they become more aspirational and better educated, demanding economic development, not sops?

  Are the Nehru-Gandhis the only people who can hold the Congress party together and enable it to win general elections?

  The Dynasty Begins

  Jawaharlal Nehru’s father, Motilal, a patrician Hindu Pandit and prominent lawyer whose family came from Kashmir, was active in India’s freedom movement and in the Indian National Congress in the 1910s. He linked up with Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi, India’s leading independence campaigner, and also brought Jawaharlal into politics. Gandhi spotted Jawaharlal Nehru as a budding young political leader around 1918–1920 and ensured that he became India’s first prime minister in 1947. (None of Mahatma Gandhi’s descendents have claimed a stake in politics, though a civil servant grandson, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, became High Commissioner in Sri Lanka and later Governor of West Bengal from 2004 to 2009.)