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COVER STORY  CURRENT ISSUE APRIL 12, 2004 | |
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| cover story POLITICAL POWER | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Family Business | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Every sixth candidate in the electoral fray is a product of hereditary politics. Over 100 families are competing for power in 250 constituencies as sons and daughters redefine politics more as an enterprise, less as a vocation. By Prabhu Chawla | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Welcome to the greatest family show on earth, with a cast that is defined by bloodline alone. In this performance dominated by fathers, sons, and holy ghosts, power is not acquired but inherited; and the frisson is generated by the clash between the principles of democracy and the preferences of genealogy. Politics, in this saga of permanent privilege of the family, is the first resort of the chosen one, the upholder of tradition, the keeper of the hereditary flame.
As in E 2004. In India's first general elections of the 21st century, the most visible entity on the stump is the Family. Maybe nothing new in today's India where the name Gandhi evokes more a wannabe son of the nation than the father of the nation. But the force and size of the Family in this election sets a kind of record: every sixth candidate in the fray owes his or her ticket to hereditary politics, and about a dozen families, not counting the Gandhis, can swing the verdict either way in 250 constituencies. From Kerala to Kashmir, it is a story of how a new set of family values has come to power the electoral politics in India.
Not so different from India's corporate values, for, no matter how competitive the market is, the real stakeholders in corporate India are a few families. Political India Private Ltd, too, is growing, reaching out to new markets and unleashing fresh scions, and fathers, when it comes to building legacies, prefer biology to ideology, and their vision can't break the family wall. When a family takes over politics, ideology is a natural casualty. There is hardly any qualitative difference in the language and lines of the manifestoes except the origin, caste and colour of the lineage. Around 120 families are contesting the Lok Sabha elections. One image of a young man sharing a cold drink with a trusted family retainer somewhere in Amethi provides the most defining thematic portrait of E 2004. Candidate Rahul Gandhi taking a break from his first campaign in the comforting company of Satish Sharma is not only a fleeting moment in the return of the dynasty. It also vindicates an Indian truism: the Family may fade; it won't wither away. As the newest Gandhi adds more colour and star value to the blockbuster of an election, India can't miss the message: the family business won't go bankrupt as long as there are sons and daughters to keep the ancestral mandate intact. After all, it is the First Family, the Gandhis, whose singular legacy is the institutionalisation of the dynastic impulse. Stretching from Motilal Nehru to Rahul Gandhi, it is the most engrossing-and decisive-generational epic in Indian politics. The Brahmin family with a Kashmir ancestry would make Allahabad the capital of Asia's most illustrious dynasty and, post Independence, turn Delhi into its birthright, till the intervention of a new India born out of the wreckage of the Congress century. Today, as the Family introduces a fresh Gandhi to India, Rahul is overshadowed by heritage. Three prime ministers (Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi), 38 years in power-it is not an ordinary family story, whose progression is marked by the best and worst moments of India: the struggle for and the romance of liberation, nation-building supervised by a visionary leader, totalitarian temptations of another, the techno-fantasy of the reluctant son. In post-Congress India, Sonia Gandhi has no power to transfer to the son; rather, she wants the son to regain it for the family's sake. Today, as far as the First Family values go, aspiration has replaced idealism.
Rahul apart, the decline of the First Family is inversely proportional to the rise of little families, and the trend is most evident in E 2004. The Mulayams and the Laloos, the Scindias and the Chautalas, the Karunakarans and the Karunanidhis, the Abdullahs and the Amarinders-the great Indian family portrait is getting crowded. Together, they have changed the aesthetics as well as sociology of family politics as it is practised in India. Old hierarchies are broken, new values are added. What is happening is a great deal of democratisation of the family rule in which bloodline is today as important as caste. Take Uttar Pradesh, the state that has produced the maximum prime ministers; the state that more than any other decides the permutation of national power. The land of the first prime minister, the family terrain of the Nehru-Gandhis, has undergone a tectonic cultural shift. The Congress has lost Uttar Pradesh long ago, and the state has already become a breeding ground of other dynasties, that too hardly Brahminical. For, in the wake of the Nehrus, the Brahmin became the arbiter of power. It was as if only the lofty leader-loftiness awarded by religion-had the mandate to rule. He was wiser, and the management of power was the privilege of those who were the sole custodians of wisdom. Hence the rise of leaders like Kamlapati Tripathi and G.B. Pant, who would create their own dynasties, feudal but inclusive. Today power flows from the House of Mulayam, the First Family of Uttar Pradesh. Mulayam Singh Yadav, the erstwhile socialist, the self-professed secularist for whom the most dependable ally is caste, draws his power from the ruins of Congressism, and he wants to pass on power to son Akhilesh who is contesting the election from Kannauj. The chief minister's brother, Ram Gopal, too, is a candidate from Sambhal. In Uttar Pradesh, a new dynasty is in the making, and one in which the Brahmin is not a member. In E 2004, the political space in the state is not determined by the dynastic line from Rajiv Gandhi to Rahul alone, but by the distance between Motilal and Mulayam as well. And that says quite a lot about the cultural progression of the new dynasties. In neighbouring Bihar, it is a familiar farce, conceived, choreographed and performed by the other Yadav. The politics of social justice has come to be a family entertainment, which is not yet a flop because the leading characters, the husband-and-wife team, continue to improvise the script and the show, being the only source of fun in the badlands of Bihar, has a captive audience. Laloo Prasad Yadav, the leader of the ruling Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Lok Sabha candidate from Madhepura, and wife Rabri Devi, the proxy chief minister, have already proved that the media-friendly salvation show cannot be staged without a family backdrop. Ah, social justice as family kitsch, with due apologies to Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia, two inspiring idols of social engineers, and two men who never tolerated the dictatorship of the dynasty.
Across the nation the dynasties continue to create new family idols. In Punjab it is Parkash Singh Badal and Amarinder Singh, who won't let go their family retainership in state politics. In Haryana, Om Prakash Chautala, the son of the first Jat supremo, Devi Lal, is still battling for the upkeep of the family tradition. In Orissa, the one who matters most is the son of Biju Patnaik. Then don't forget the legacy of Chowdhary Charan Singh in Uttar Pradesh, even if it doesn't extend beyond Baghpat, the constituency of his son Ajit Singh. The story of Charan Singh, the apostle of peasant raj, is a case study of how the struggle of anti-Congressism, the Janata experiment being its most successful achievement, would become a family struggle. The struggle is no less intense in the south, best illustrated by a vulpine old Congressman called K. Karunakaran, the doddering rebel with a family cause. His factional war against Chief Minister A.K. Antony, which at one point nearly brought down the Congress ministry, in retrospect, was a father's struggle for the sake of son and daughter, one as minister, the other as a Lok Sabha candidate. The house motto of Kerala's first political dynasty: kill the party if necessary for the survival of the family in power. Some conned cheerleaders of Karunakaran are now weeping as abandoned losers. The state that elected the first communist government in the world is today witnessing a new cultural revolution, spearheaded by a father figure. A variation of that revolution is raging in Tamil Nadu, too, where the Dravidian movement has become a family movement, led by the House of Karunanidhi. Father, son and grandnephew-the reigning trinity of the DMK, whose history of social revolt has little relevance today as the supreme leader surveys the future through his dark glasses. What he sees is a bright tomorrow for the family. Anti-Brahminism or rage against Hindi won't sell, but Karunanidhi has already marketed his son Stalin well; and now Dayanidhi Maran, the late Murasoli Maran's son, is contesting his maiden Lok Sabha election.
It is not that the other DMK is independent of family values. J. Jayalalithaa is what she is today-the avenging goddess of Poes Garden-because she has inherited, not acquired, the mantle of MGR, the pioneer of image politics, the first southern cult in dark glasses and fur cap. The family adventure in the south migrated from the movie hall to the mass arena. So MGR would be followed by NTR in Andhra Pradesh, where the hero of celluloid mythicals would create his own family mythology in politics. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, the son-in-law, is the keeper of the legacy. Though, it is not mythology but technology that fascinates the chief minister. Myth-making, after all, is an essential activity of family politics and it cannot be missed even in cosmopolitan Mumbai, where the House of Thackeray presides over the political as well as the social destiny of the city. In Maharashtra, it is not Bal Thackeray alone who believes that the lust for political power is an honourable family trait. Ask Murli Deora, who replaced Rajni Patel in the Congress pantheon. He has chosen the inheritor, son Milind, the candidate from South Mumbai. And for all political purposes, Baramati is Sharad Pawar's family property. Is it that the shining path belongs to the political families only? The princely power can't be wished away, for the Maharaja chic has not yet gone out of political fashion. Isn't the people's princess from the House of Scindias the poster rani of the BJP? Vasundhara Raje, the chief minister of Rajasthan, is not the only one who keeps the political spirit of the late Rajmata of Gwalior alive. The family has perfected the act of political balancing, or power sharing with opposing ideologies. For the newest face of the Scindia legacy in the Congress is the son of the late Madhavrao Scindia. In this post-Congress era, family politics is pan Indian. During the high noon of Congressism, regional or caste aspirations didn't require the philosophy of cohabitation. India's grand old party itself was an all-inclusive organisation. Today, in the age of a new coalition dharma, regional parties are not peripheral, and they are getting increasingly privatised. A coalition of families is on the rise, and it is demanding. And it denies space to the outsider, especially to the smartest, and it is, like any family business, opaque. The family has taken over the opposition space as well. So dissent too is finding the virtues of dynasty in India, as in Kashmir where the Abdullahs and the Mirwaizs and the Lones are the counterpoints. True, family politics is an expression of the politics of trust, and it is not entirely Indian-what about the Bhuttos and the Bandaranaikes, or, as in the other big democracy, the Kennedys and the Bushes? Still, as the propagandists of Asian values say, trust is an abiding Asian obsession. Fear of the outsider ensures that the family is the only institution worth trusting. In dynastic diversity, India is still unbeatable, even if a few are beaten in E 2004. Maybe the only values that are left in Indian politics are family values. — with Priya Sahgal and bureau reports | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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