The Hindu : Keeping it in the family

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Sunday, Feb 15, 2004

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Keeping it in the family

"Family" as the basis for claims to prominence and leadership has made its way into popular imagination and political acceptance, writes Harish Khare.

LAST WEEK, the Congress party's media managers carefully crafted an interaction between the "AICC beat correspondents" and the party president, Sonia Gandhi. Her managers had correctly anticipated that she would be asked whether the Congress was promoting a cult of the dynasty now that her two children, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Vadra, had been sought to be pitchforked into the "saviour" role. So when the convenient question was asked, Ms. Gandhi was ready with her reply. For the benefit of the television cameras, she rattled out all the "dynasties" that dotted the Indian political landscape: the Abdullahs in Kashmir, the Badals in Punjab, the Chautala clan in Haryana, the Patnaiks in Orissa, Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh, etc. And she added, for good effect, that all of them had been political associates in the National Democratic Alliance arrangement. She left it at that.

There is an element of truth in Ms. Gandhi's assertion. "Family" as the basis for claims to prominence and leadership has made its way into popular imagination and political acceptance. Partly because the Nehru-Gandhi family has used the trappings of democratic legitimacy to emerge as the most dominant, enduring and, till recently, the most successful role model of political leadership. Thanks to the success of the Nehru-Gandhi role model, all family members are deemed fit and competent to be legitimate claimants to a father's political mantle.

These claims are now made — and conceded — so regularly that they have acquired a sanctity of their own. So a Madhavrao Scindia must be succeeded by a Jyotiraditya Scindia; a G.M.C. Balayogi's widow must not only be made a candidate from his constituency, the Telugu Desam Party must also use its clout to find her a residence for life, a la Begum Abida. Or when a Jitendra Prasada dies, his wife becomes the first choice as a candidate from his seat on the assumption that voters would be "sympathetic" to her. This pattern is repeated and respected by almost all political parties, partly because the political class has come to see itself as having collective claims in terms of respect, legislative membership and all the privileges that go with that membership. The political class in India has learnt the art of taking care of itself and its families. Rivalries are not allowed to become animosities and certainly never allowed to stand in the way of social cordiality and concern. "We owe it to them (widows or children)" seems to be the dominant sentiment.

Sometimes, the family is used as a part of control mechanism. If a Laloo Prasad Yadav finds himself having to step down as Chief Minister of Bihar, he drafts in his wife on a kind of secondment; if a Kamal Nath finds himself denied the party ticket because of allegations of corruption, he insists on fielding his wife and, after a decent interval, making her resign so that he can contest in a byelection. There is now an untroubled consensus that the "seat" — be it that of Chief Minister or a Lok Sabha constituency — should not be allowed to go out of family control.

But a "dynasty" is different from a "family." The political families this country is familiar with have so far been two-generation affairs; also, the second generation lays a claim to the leadership slot in the name of the father's "legacy". Thus an Ajit Singh becomes an heir to Charan Singh's "kisan legacy", an Om Prakash Chautala is deemed to have assumed the mantle of Devi Lal. A Navin Patnaik's promoters project him as the rightful heir to Biju Patnaik's politics, even though he cannot speak Oriya. And so on.

A "dynasty", on the other hand, puts forward its claim in the name of "sacrifices" made by the family's earlier generations. In this respect, the Nehru-Gandhi family represents the only political dynasty in India; the only other family that can be elevated to the dynasty status is the Abdullah clan in Kashmir. But the Abdullahs' tragedy is that neither Farooq Abdullah nor Omar Abdullah is in a position to sell himself as an heir to the Sheikh's legacy. That legacy itself is in tatters; instead, the father-and-son duo has to rely on "normal" political devices to remain electorally relevant.

The Nehru-Gandhis are unique insofar as they have used their dominant perch in national politics to manufacture a place for themselves in our collective historical memory. A whole generation of historians has chronicled the sacrifices made by the "aristocrat" Motilal Nehru, and how Jawaharlal Nehru, the young man who would be the prince, undertook an arduous discovery of India. Other historians and family-memory-manufacturers have told us how Indira "learnt" the complexities of statecraft from her illustrious father. It also helped that there was a genuine Nehruvian legacy to be defended and preserved, and who better for the custodian's role than Nehru's daughter? To be fair, Nehru did not use his long prime ministerial innings to tilt the succession toward Indira Gandhi's way; she became Prime Minister only because of an accident of history when Lal Bahadur Shastri suffered a massive heart attack after the Tashkent Summit in January 1966.

The dynasty liturgy changed once Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister in her own right by proving herself capable of working up a charismatic chemistry with the masses of this country. What precipitated the rise of the "dynasty" was that her rivals, in and out of the Congress, sought to take out their political differences in personal terms; the personality cult that got built around her after the 1970-71 massive electoral victory instigated a culture of sycophancy within the Congress and a weakness for demonisation among the Opposition. Somehow, the political parties ended up elevating Indira Gandhi to such an exalted status that she — rather than her policies, party, associates — became the object of political passions, resentments and admiration.

This was bound to have a profound effect on her family. As it was, both Rajiv Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi virtually grew up in a Prime Minister's house. The sprawling Teen Murthi Bhavan was the young boys' playground and it was perhaps only natural that they began to think of India as a family enterprise, which they would one day have to look after. The Janata Party Government's shortcomings only reinforced the Indira cult. And when she was gunned down by her own security guards, the national mood of grief and anger only facilitated Rajiv Gandhi's succession as Prime Minister. This was the first time since the formal end of the nominal Mughal rule in 1857 that the succession for "the Delhi throne" was sorted out as a king-prince affair. It is a different matter that Rajiv's succession got consecrated in an unprecedented electoral victory. Indira Gandhi's balidan (supreme sacrifice) became the raison d'etre for Rajiv's claim to the Delhi throne. It was at that moment that the dynasty felt itself entrenched as a legitimate proposition.

And when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, his "sacrifice" was worked into the Congress theology to claim the Congress crown for Sonia Gandhi who then, as per the script, declined to accept, for the time being, the role of a "saviour", paving the way for Narasimha Rao. But for the dynasty spear-carriers, the Narasimha Rao Government had no other status except that of a stop-gap arrangement, which enjoyed no other source of legitimacy except as a regime that enjoyed Ms. Gandhi's patronage. A section of the Congress saw to it that Mr. Rao was defeated in the 1996 Lok Sabha election, a move that was the opening salvo in the long-drawn stratagem to encash her "mystique."

In 1997, Rajiv Gandhi's "sacrifice" was again invoked to destabilise the United Front Government, setting the stage for a new Lok Sabha poll. And again, as per the script, Ms. Gandhi entered the fray in the last week of December 1997 laying claim to leadership as the heir to the Rajiv legacy. She symbolically began her campaign from Sriperumbudur. When she failed to work the magic in electoral terms, a new mythology had to be invented: had she not campaigned, the party would not have got even these many seats (144); a year later, in 1999, when the Congress contested with Ms. Gandhi as its prime ministerial candidate and ended up with a miserable tally (114 seats), the myth was re-worked to argue that without her the party would have ended up with only a double-digit tally. Lest someone should raise the question of Ms. Gandhi's non-performance as a vote-catcher, Priyanka and Rahul are now being groomed to take over the Congress because they are deemed to be the legatees of the "dynastic charisma."

Democratic sentiment and egalitarian impulses can take care of dynastic pretensions in and outside the Congress. But the Congress has once again shown the way to the other parties as to how the democratic functioning of the party system can be sabotaged to advance the dynasty's interests and claims. As long as political parties remain internally undemocratic and externally unaccountable, claims made in the name of a family or dynasty would continue to get the better of democratic ideas and institutions.

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