Rahul (2 page)

Rahul’s father, Rajiv, is another example of how Indian voters are quite capable of pulling the carpet from under any politician’s feet, exercising the power which ultimately rests with them: the power of the ballot. If Rajiv was elected with a sweeping majority because the people’s sympathies lay with him after the brutal assassination of his mother, he was also shunted out fast when the same people felt betrayed by the dynast whose ‘Mr Clean’ image had taken a beating after a series of scandals in the government.

On more than one occasion, Rahul has said that he cannot deny the fact that he is a dynast and that his great-grandfather, his grandmother and his father were all prime ministers of India. Speaking to students at Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand in 2008, he said:

If I had not come from my family, I wouldn’t be here. You can enter the system either through family or friends or money. Without family, friends or money, you cannot enter the system. My father was in politics. My grandmother and great-grandfather were in politics. So, it was easy for me to enter politics. This is a problem. I am a symptom of this problem. I want to change it.

Right from his early days in politics, Rahul has admitted that that is the point he is trying to make. But, that has not prevented him from invoking his family and making statements like: ‘I belong to a family which has never moved backwards, which has never gone back on its words. You know that when any member of my family has decided to do anything, he does it.’ He said this during a roadshow in Uttar Pradesh in April 2007. The irony of a dynast speaking against dynastic politics and striving to democratize his party by putting meritocracy above everything else hasn’t gone unregistered. Neither has the realization that what he has set out to do, or claims to have set out to do, is a tall order. Within the Congress, dynasty lurks in every corner. Its roots run deep; perhaps deeper than Rahul Gandhi is willing to admit.

Apart from its most prized dynast, the Party has scores of second- or third-generation politicians who have been given party tickets on the lone virtue of their being the sons or daughters of politicians. Patrick French, in his book
India: An Intimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People
, calls them HMPs, or hereditary MPs, whose lives have followed uncannily similar trajectories: early years in a boarding school; college in Europe or the United States; a stint in a bank or in some international company; and finally, ‘a return to the safe family seat in the late twenties’. The minister of state for communications and information technology Sachin Pilot, who became member of Parliament at the age of twenty-six, is the son of Rajesh Pilot. The senior Pilot, who was a first-generation politician, had held a similar portfolio in the 1990s. Minister of state for commerce and industry, Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia, is the son of Madhavrao Scindia who was railways minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government. Milind Deora, the MP from Mumbai South, is the son of former union minister for petroleum and natural gas, Murli Deora, a trusted aide of the Gandhi family. The minister of state for road transport and highways, Jitin Prasada, is the son of Jitendra Prasada, who was once vice-president of the Congress Party and political adviser to Rajiv Gandhi. His grandfather, Jyoti Prasada, was also a member of the Congress Party. East Delhi MP Sandeep Dikshit’s mother is Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit who has led the Congress to victory in the Delhi assembly elections thrice consecutively. Her father-in-law, Uma Shankar Dikshit, was closely associated with Jawaharlal, Indira and Rajiv. The Congress MP from Kurukshetra, Naveen Jindal, is the son of Congress leader O.P. Jindal who was minister for power in the Haryana government in 2005. The Congress MP from Rohtak, Deependra Singh Hooda, is the son of Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. Other senior Congress leaders like P. Chidambaram, too, have jumped on the dynasty bandwagon. His son, Karti P. Chidambaram, is also a politician. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s son, Abhijit, was elected member of the West Bengal legislative assembly on a Congress ticket within weeks of joining politics. A survey commissioned by French found that as of 2010, nearly 38 per cent of Congress MPs had reached the Lok Sabha because of their family connections. The startling reality is that every single Congress MP under the age of thirty-five has, in a way, inherited the seat. In the thirty-one to forty age bracket, too, there are about 86 per cent HMPs. While the Congress takes the lead when it comes to dynastic politics, it is not the only party where name defines a person’s position.

Political dynasties prevail across the country and in most of the political parties, barring a few exceptions like the Left parties which have, until now, succeeded in steering clear of them. Let’s begin with Jammu and Kashmir where the state’s largest political party, National Conference, has been a family affair of the Abdullahs who have been around for three generations. Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah was the first president of Kashmir’s first political party, Muslim Conference, later renamed National Conference. When it was time to appoint a successor, he chose his son Farooq, who passed on the family legacy to his son Omar. The Opposition, the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party (PDP), hasn’t been any better. Its founder, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, was only too pleased to have his daughter, Mehbooba Mufti, succeed him as PDP president.

At the southern tip of the country, in Tamil Nadu too, dynastic politics is the norm. The state’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has made politics an extended family business. DMK head M. Karunanidhi’s sons, M.K. Stalin and M.K. Alagiri, are prominent leaders of the Party. So is his daughter Kanimozhi. (She was sent to jail as an undertrial in 2011 on charges of being one of the principal beneficiaries of India’s biggest telecom scam.) Another political party from Tamil Nadu, Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), has its founder S. Ramadoss seeking a successor in his son, Anbumani Ramadoss. A similar pattern is visible in the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). NCP president Sharad Pawar’s daughter, Supriya Sule, and nephew, Ajit Pawar, are also politicians.

The two most significant political parties of Punjab, the Congress and the Akali Dal, also believe in keeping power within the family. In their case, the links aren’t just linear but have spread out into the extended family. Akali Dal supremo, Parkash Singh Badal, appointed his son Sukhbir president of the Shiromani Akali Dal, bypassing several senior and more accomplished leaders in the Party. With the senior Badal as chief minister of the state, Sukhbir was made deputy chief minister. Sukhbir’s wife, Harsimrat Kaur, is an MP from Bathinda. She defeated another dynast, Raninder Singh, the son of Punjab Congress leader and former chief minister Amarinder Singh and Preneet Kaur, a minister in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. Parkash Singh Badal’s nephew, Manpreet Badal, is also a politician and was finance minister of the state before he fell out with his uncle.

In Uttar Pradesh, Samajwadi Party president Mulayam Singh Yadav’s brother, Shivpal, and son, Akhilesh, are also examples of how politics has turned into a family occupation. There are several other examples—from the Thackerays and the Chavans in Maharashtra to the Patnaiks in Orissa, the Hoodas and the Chautalas in Haryana to the Sangmas in Meghalaya. Since Independence, the number of political dynasties in India has multiplied manifold.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—which has always lambasted its single biggest rival, the Congress, for its obsession with lineage, and takes pride in identifying itself as a democratic party—has by and large steered clear of dynasties. There are certain exceptions, though. Anurag Thakur, the MP from Hamirpur in Himachal Pradesh, is the son of BJP leader Prem Kumar Dhumal who has twice been chief minister of the hill state. The sons of senior BJP leaders Jaswant Singh and Vasundhara Raje have followed in the footsteps of their parents. Even so, the number of BJP MPs who are in the Lok Sabha because of their surname is only half that of the Congress. The Party and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), do not welcome the attempts of their leaders to push in their sons or daughters. To cite an example, when former BJP president Rajnath Singh tried to get one of his sons into politics, the move was nipped in the bud. Yet, the number of BJP leaders seeking tickets for their children increases with every election.

Expressing his anguish over the increasing concentration of power in the hands of a few hundred families, senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley said:

Post-1991, all new political parties which have come up in India are caste-centric and personality-centric … Some of the older parties have also moved in that direction … The whole emphasis in the last two decades has been on families and succession through the family—whether it’s the National Conference, Akali Dal, Samajwadi Party, etc.

In March 2011, while hitting out at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for saying that veteran BJP leader L.K. Advani ‘believed that being the prime minister was his birthright … and therefore he has never forgiven me’, Jaitley said, ‘Democratic parties which elect leaders on the basis of merit never accept the concept of birthright. It [is] only parties that believe in dynastic succession which are committed to the concept of birthright. Members of a dynasty acquire the right to govern as they are born into a family.’

Congressmen, however, would like to believe that the dynastic politics of their party is different from and more justifiable than that of the others. An average Congressman conditions himself to believe that merit lies only in the dynasty that runs the Congress. Mani Shankar Aiyar, a former diplomat who quit the foreign service to plunge into politics and join Rajiv Gandhi, his crony from school, would obviously be expected to defend the Gandhi clan’s continued dominance over the affairs of the Party. And this is what he had to say even when he was down and out in the Party:

The single greatest understanding of where the buck stops within the Party is at the Nehru–Gandhi family. The family is the still centre around which everything revolves and though it is seen as a weakness by others, this is actually the strength of the Party. They allow large freedom of expression and large participation. There is complete democracy except on a fundamental question like secularism.

Aiyar said these words to one of the authors of this book on his last day at 14 Akbar Road, his government-allotted minister’s residence. His status as a minister was downgraded in the UPA-I regime and he was eventually dropped from the ministry. Aiyar’s defence of the family, despite his having fallen out of favour, is telling. Though he was sulking at being sidelined within the Party, it did not stop him from eulogizing the Gandhis.

Stretch the canvas further and it emerges that dynasties have proved attractive not only in India but in several other South Asian countries. In Pakistan, after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, her husband Asif Ali Zardari had no trouble coming to power. Canny enough to spot political opportunity, he got his son Bilawal Zardari to add ‘Bhutto’ to his name and become Bilawal Zardari Bhutto. Martyrdom—the term used for political assassinations in this part of the world—is attractive. It evokes sympathy. Leaders who capture the people’s imagination are idolized. And if some tragedy befalls those leaders, it’s bound to sway public sentiment in favour of their families. After Benazir Bhutto’s father, former Pakistan prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was sentenced to death following a coup led by General Zia-ul-Haq, it was only natural for the people of Pakistan to welcome Benazir into politics. In Sri Lanka, Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike was elected prime minister soon after the assassination of her husband, Solomon Bandaranaike, while he was in office. Later, their daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, became the President of Sri Lanka. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of the country’s first President, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, became prime minister twenty years after her father was killed in a coup which involved his colleagues from the Awami League.

Rahul Gandhi is dealing with a mindset that extends beyond the boundaries of India. In such a scenario, what are the odds that he will succeed in reforming and correcting the system? Will the man who is himself a product of a deep-rooted dynasty succeed in breaking the mould for others and put merit first? Will he be able to change the culture of the Congress? Or will that culture derail his plans? How will dynasty represent modernity? The old guard within the Congress is quite effective when it comes to resisting change. The official history of the Congress speaks of how Rajiv’s attempts to rid the Party of vested interests—whom he called the ‘power brokers’—ran into a rock-solid wall and how his efforts to energize the Party by bringing in young blood and running it in a professional manner didn’t quite achieve the success that he had hoped for.

According to Aiyar, the only person before Rahul who tried to infuse democracy within the Congress Party was Rajiv.

Rajiv Gandhi once told me that his worst apprehension was that if the
mai baap sarkar
continued to fail to deliver, succeeding generations of young would be in danger of taking to violent means. That was his political raison d’être for emphasizing the importance of Panchayati Raj or what we today call inclusive governance. The only way of securing inclusive growth is through inclusive governance. Therefore, the Congress must become a champion of inclusive governance if it is to be seen as the standard-bearer of inclusive growth. That is the way forward. But if we come to be associated with being only the party of accelerated growth, then people will soon label us as the party of accelerated disparities; that would be the path to political disaster, not only for our party but democracy itself.

Aiyar said he was ‘deeply concerned at the continuing absence of the democratic process within the Party’, something that Rajiv had tried to correct.

He raised a lot of porcupine quills by targeting what he called ‘brokers of power’ within the Party—discrediting the Party from within. He formed the Uma Shankar Dikshit committee to democratize the organization. However, before the recommendations were operationalized, we suffered the election reverses of November 1989. He was so convinced that the only way to rejuvenate the Party was to adopt the Dikshit committee recommendations that he first convened the extended CWC [Congess Working Committee] meeting in April 1990 to endorse the Dikshit report and then the Plenary of AICC in June 1990 to ratify it.