‘This marriage humiliates us. It scorns our principles. It brings indelible blame to the movement. We consider his arrangement for the party as the death knell for democracy and our self respect.’

C.N. Annadurai, c. June 1949, founder of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam on

his former leader Periyar’s decision to marry so as to

beget an heir who would lead the Dravidian movement.¹

THE BJP leader Arun Jaitley made a significant comment as the results for the Bihar state assembly came in last November. He labelled the results as a victory of merit over dynasty.² The latter was represented at the state level by the husband-wife duo of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, and the Paswan siblings of the Lok Janshakti Party. But there was little doubt it was lineage based politics of the country’s premier party that he was taking aim at.

This, he argued, would be a defining issue in the coming months and years. Parties that were open to men and women of talent would take on and root out those that were effectively dominated by kin and clan groups. Of the major political parties, it is only parties with a clear ideological focus and core agenda that have so far mostly kept families at bay, at least at the national level.

 

The oldest of these are the Left parties whose roots go back to the undivided Communist Party of India. The Bharatiya Janata Party too traces its roots to the founding by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, though others might look further back at the birth of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1925. Finally, there is the Bahujan Samaj Party founded as recently as 1984, with deeper roots in Dalit labour unions and social movements, with a tap root going back to Dr Ambedkar.

The question Jaitley raised is undoubtedly critical, but so is the timing, both in an immediate and in a wider contextual sense. While it is true that three members of one family have held the post of prime minister, there is another milestone we passed recently, not as a specific family or a particular party but as a nation. The 15th of August 2010 was the 63rd anniversary of independence. It also marked another less noticed but important anniversary. It was twenty one years to the day that a member of the Nehru family last addressed India as prime minister.

Come to think of it, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke at the Red Fort no less than 17 times and Indira Gandhi on 16 occasions. Add Rajiv and it makes 38 out of 62! Only three incumbents from outside the family have completed a full term in office. The first was P.V. Narasimha Rao as late as 1996, the others being Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.

Few have any doubt that the MP from Amethi, Rahul Gandhi, is in the game for the long haul. But given that Manmohan Singh has indicated he will not be available for another term in office (some reports hint that he is even willing to step down sooner), it means there will soon be a vacancy.

‘Rahul for PM’ would mark the return of a member of the family to the centre stage of Indian politics. It might also be an event his partymen and women pray happens sooner than later. In the initial period of the UPA in its first term, there was apprehension about the relations between the Congress president and the PM. It was, in a sense, a historic reversal of a pattern established by Nehru in his showdowns with Acharya J.B. Kripalani in 1948 and Purushottamdas Tandon in 1951 to put the party leader above the PM in the pecking order. A similar attempt by S. Nijalingappa versus Indira Gandhi led to the historic split of 1969. But the current arrangement, unusual and unprecedented as it is for a parliamentary democracy, has worked and even won the seal of electoral approval in 2009. But it is unlikely to be repeated.

 

Clearly the enthusiasm for such division of labour has worn thin and even the appeal looks jaded. The widely feted economist has looked ill at ease in cracking down on recalcitrant ministers, especially those from assertive allied parties. In his attempt to make peace with Pakistan, he clearly ran well ahead of opinion both in his party and the country at large. Even on an issue as crucial to the family’s sense of history, viz. about the environment, he, unlike her, has veered in favour of growth over ecological concerns.

Of all these, the former, an inability to assert himself has become a larger liability than anyone imagined. The ‘sharing of power’ arrangement with Sonia Gandhi handling the ‘politics’ of the party and coalition, leaving Manmohan Singh free to focus on growth was supposed to smoothen his hold on government. The reconstituted National Advisory Council was expected to ensure that the human dimension of development too got due emphasis. Instead, its pronouncements have seemingly resulted in a serious erosion of authority, at times appearing to reduce prime ministerial government or cabinet government to a caricature of itself.

 

Evidently, the Congress is in a bigger quandary than it is willing to admit. Rahul Gandhi is clearly a long distance runner. He is engaged in a marathon, not a simple sprint to the top. His reluctance to engage with the mainstream media has been more than matched, especially since he became general secretary, in his reaching out to village, hill and small town India. Even detractors from the opposition parties privately admit he may be better at reaching out to the half billion plus Indians aged less than 32 years.

But the Congress is less confident of itself than in the past. Part of this lack of confidence arises from the situation. Rajiv Gandhi did not have to contend with leaders like Mayawati or Nitish Kumar, who though emerging from the Dalit or Mandal end of the spectrum have created stable social coalitions in the all important Ganga basin. In his time, the economic power-houses of Gujarat and Maharashtra did not have any stable interregnum of non-Congress regimes. Today, however, the demographic centre of gravity of the subcontinent has shifted to a region where the Congress has all but vanished in the last couple of decades.

The signs of revival were clear enough in May 2009 in Uttar Pradesh, and indicated cross-caste and cross-class appeal about the development and stability slogan of the past. But there are few signs of a consolidation of such gains. Further, the scale of the recent defeat of the Congress in Bihar, where it won a mere four out of 243 Assembly seats, alongside its fourth place finish in the panchayat polls in UP, does not indicate that it has a core social base at all.

 

This is where Priyanka Gandhi’s earlier comment is significant. She said that if the Congress has the sprightly energy of a younger person despite being an old organization, it is in some measure due to its ability to give new ideas space at the top. This is a pattern not confined to members of the Nehru family. The Rao period or for that matter the brief spell at the top of Lal Bahadur Shastri both saw a very different style of leadership and significant departures in policy.

The past matters in this respect. It was Mahatma Gandhi who set the trend when he famously chose Jawaharlal as his successor. The reason: when he was gone the younger man would speak his language. It was Jawaharlal who was more in step with the world and the times, but he was also the leader who would safeguard the Gandhian legacy of a plural order.

For all the ignominy heaped on his head, there is no evidence that Jawaharlal Nehru ever planned or worked to place his daughter, Indira Nehru Gandhi, in his line of succession. The fact she was Congress President in 1957 and played a key role in ensuring the dismissal under Article 356 of the Communist ministry in Kerala are all too well known. Her name also figured in speculation about who would succeed the first prime minister.

There is little doubt about her presence in the top echelons of the Congress even during her father’s lifetime. She was a major campaigner right from the first general elections of 1952. Ten years later, she was one of the three senior leaders who vetted the choice of candidates for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls. Yet, we often forget that besides Nehru, there was a third member: Lal Bahadur Shastri.

The latter was so crucial to the larger game plan of the party that a special provision was made for him in the wake of the famous Kamaraj Plan. When the southern strongman became head of the party, he recognized the depth of the crisis in the organization and moved fast. Senior ministers were eased out of government and asked to work for the party. But Shastri returned four months later as minister without portfolio. If anything, it was he and not her who was placed in the line of succession.

Katherine Frank cites letters showing how Indira herself had little clear idea about where her life was heading. The latter even spoke about shifting to London to spend more time with her two sons.³ 

In any case, to read backwards in time is to project a scenario we are all too familiar with, of a party instinctively looking to one family to provide it leadership. Few recall that the first formal announcement of the Congress Working Committee after the tragic assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 was the press briefing by Pranab Mukherjee in which Sonia Gandhi was asked to lead the party and by implication the nation. She said no.

 

The India of the 1960s and 1970s was a very different country. In the former decade and right till 1969-71, when she broke their power, Indira Gandhi, and prior to that Shastri, had to contend with powerful Congress chief ministers. Leadership was not a family preserve even in the mid-seventies. This became evident in the hesitation shown by senior Congress leaders after the Allahabad High Court judgement in June 1975 that set aside the election of Indira Gandhi from Rae Bareli. Yashwantrao Chavan was a powerful figure in his own right. The minister who moved the resolution on the Emergency in the Lok Sabha was Babu Jagjivan Ram. They had been defence ministers in two successive wars with Pakistan and later in life, both moved out of her shadow.

 

It was only under the Emergency that the bid to launch Sanjay Gandhi gathered pace. But even here, it is notable that the attempt to rewrite the Constitution did not win explicit support from the prime minister. There was, however, never any doubt that Sanjay Gandhi was clearly in the line to succeed her, certainly by the time he became General Secretary of the party a few days prior to his death in the summer of 1980. Rajiv Gandhi in contrast had his reservations and, moreover, in his own oft-quoted words, his wife, Sonia Gandhi ‘fought like a tigress’ to make him rethink his course. By then, the Congress was a much depleted force at the top echelons.

It was only in the eighties that another major political family publicly set up a line of succession in its own fold. In making his son President of the National Conference, Sheikh Abdullah claimed that Motilal Nehru had anointed Jawaharlal Nehru Congress president at the Lahore session.

This was, at best, disingenuous. There is little doubt that he was a successor. This, however, was not due to his father Motilal, but to a man who was the single-most powerful influence on his life and thoughts, Mahatma Gandhi. ‘When I am gone,’ the latter famously said to the All India Congress Committee in 1942, ‘he will speak my language.’⁴ 

Nearly two decades after Rajiv and Farooq first took their place on the political stage, there are few Indian parties that do not have kin and clan at their core. The veteran journalist and scholar Inder Malhotra has argued that the precedent was set not in Srinagar or New Delhi but in Bhopal. Ravi Shankar Shukla inducted his two sons, Shyama Charan and Vidya Charan into politics in the sixties. The former became a legislator in 1962, a minister in 1967, and chief minister of Madhya Pradesh for the first (but not the last) time in 1969.⁵ 

It was in the eighties and after that the mould was decisively broken. The de-institutionalization began in the Congress where by the middle of the 1970s it was clear that first preference would be given to a member of one family. The Narasimha Rao years do constitute an exception, but few in the Congress wish to recall that period as it does not fit a storyline they are so much at ease with.

But look beyond and the absence of kinship stands out only in three key political traditions: the Hindutva, Leftist and the Dalit streams. While there are no doubt personal relations at the centre of many careers, there is no provision for succession in a family.

 

The backward class and cultivator-based parties have only conformed to the rule. Perhaps the pull of kinship is stronger among them and the norms of party and front less clear. One such party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam was formed over sixty years ago in protest at Periyar’s idea that his young wife would beget an heir. Yet, from around the time that Indira Gandhi was projecting Sanjay, M. Karunanidhi too had his eyes on his son, M.K. Stalin.

In this, politics is only conforming to a pattern familiar in Indian business families. The Marwaris and Parsis, the Banias and Chettiars, the Jains and Bohras who led the way for business through the 20th century kept leadership and succession mostly within the family. Even the new creators of wealth in the software revolution have done so (ask Azim Premji or Shiv Nadar). There are exceptions, the likes of Murugappa Chettiars and Infosys, but they remain odd ones out.

 

Kinship and family have come to occupy centre-stage in the polity. Fortunately, given that any aspirant still has to prove himself or herself in the rough and tumble of the electoral arena, there are checks and balances. India is still an active and vibrant democracy where a flying start is no guarantee against a flop show at the ballot box.

But how will the merit based ideas at the heart of democracy restrain the inequity at the heart of the notion that lineage plays a key role in power? After all, accumulation by the first generation is also safe-guarded best by inducting a family member into the leadership. What many see as Rahul Gandhi’s dilemma or the Congress’s challenge is actually an issue that has wider resonance and roots.

Family based lineages have long perpetuated the hold of a few over property or skills. If their reproduction in the public space is still under check, it is in some measure due to two major British innovations that had no counterpart in early India: the public exam and election by ballot box. There is a third, equally significant, idea and it is enshrined in the Constitution: the ideal of equality.

If doors should be open to all women and men of talent, then on what grounds can any party confine its search for leadership to one clan group? Historians of the Timurid lineage, better known as the Mughals, often warn that contests for succession arose from the fact there was no established tradition of who had prior right to rule. This has a modern counterpart in the divisions and rifts within powerful political families.

 

For the Congress, the challenge is to bridge the gap between its own thirty-five year old tradition of lineage based succession and a society increasingly at odds with such practices. After all, the world of business is not alone in rags to riches or at least lower middle class to tycoon stories across a range of sectors – from polyester to construction, software to grain trading. The electoral arena has also provided a ladder for upward social mobility, and on a scale perhaps matched only by those who enlisted in early modern armies.

This may explain why the challenge for Rahul Gandhi is so real. It is not the mere absence of credible mass leaders from outside the savarna fold in the Congress in North India alone that is his handicap. It is the fact that ambitious and gifted young citizens from the larger bloc of classes, earlier mostly engaged in manual or menial labour, have already found a place in the sun and in other parties. This has not only a class or caste but also a gender dimension.

The challenge lies at the core of the further evolution of the polity and of society at large. Is it a coincidence that so many of the regionally rooted chief ministers are from social strata that only got voting rights in 1952. This is as true of the BJP (Narendra Modi and Shivraj Singh Chauhan are OBCs), as the BSP (Mayawati, who is both a woman and a Dalit). The pattern is far from universal but it should push the Congress to ponder.

Strangely enough, it was the eighties that saw the party undercut positive discrimination, first through inaction (on the Mandal Report when it was tabled in 1980) and then via indirect sponsorship of opposition to it a decade later. Interestingly, by the end of the decade, the only time when two members of the family had ruled with no break in between, both the Mandal and Dalit platforms had begun to coalesce in Hindi speaking India.

Strange as it may sound, the ability of the most powerful family in the country’s history to stay at the helm lies in its ability to sense and pave the way for such upward mobility for a new generation. In retrospect, universal voting rights, education, the creation for a public space and state-led investment in the economy enabled Nehru to do just that in the 1950s. Indira Gandhi’s bank nationalization and war against the Syndicate too, in turn opened up new spaces in her party, especially so in South and West India. Whether or not that process can be furthered is the challenge facing the party, and at one remove, the family.

 

To return to Arun Jaitley’s remark, the only all-India leader who was able to take on the Congress and graft a larger coalition for a stable period was Vajpayee and he came up through the ranks of a political party. But the bid to attack Sonia Gandhi on grounds of foreign origins never quite enthused the BJP’s first prime minister. He perhaps realized this might rebound as it eventually did. As Kancha Illaiah presciently remarked, those denied citizenship rights prior to the Republican constitution were used to being labelled as inferior on account of birth.⁶ 

But the issue – what forces provide room for talent – will continue to be at centre-stage. Rahul Gandhi will find his competence or ability to answer difficult questions of policy come under more strident attack. The only members of the family to lead it to three electoral victories, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were able to identify with larger social forces that underpinned their power. Any advantage due to familial or political association only worked due to their fallible but often keen insight into the socio-political fabric of the country.

 

Whether parties with a marginal role for lineage will actually gain ground is a moot question. This is true of all of them, be it the Hindutva groups (the largest), the Dalit led formations (the fastest growing but youngest of the large national parties) or the Left (the oldest but at the moment the most crisis-ridden and that includes the Maoists).

The truth after all is that the choice is rarely so stark as between lineage and merit; most often it is a mix of the two. Anyone with lineage can get a head start, but no more. They can survive in a pocket borough or carve out a tiny niche without making a wider mark. Conversely, a family lineage can spring up even in supposedly hostile soil, such as the regionalist DMK of the eighties or the socialist blocs of UP and Bihar in the succeeding decades.

Lineage remains a key factor in the polity, though it is today more severely on trial than ever before. It may have shown surprising resilience over the last few decades, but this only masks its real (and increasingly questionable) ability to reinvent itself. Merit and lineage are, at one level, mutally contradictory principles of organization, and for the Congress more than any other formation, the name will matter only if it is linked to the promise of social and political change. If it does not, its opponents will argue, and with some strength, that lineage has been trumped by merit.

 

Footnotes:

1, R. Kannan, Anna, The Life and Times of C.N. Annadurai. Viking Penguin, Delhi, 2010, p. 141.

2. He was echoing a slogan of ‘dynastic dictatorship’ used by the Janata Party in the January 1980 general elections. After the fall of the Morarji Desai government, the party was led into the polls by Jagjivan Ram.

3. Katherine Frank, Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi. Harper Collins, Delhi, 2001, pp. 279-280.

4. Rajmohan Gandhi, The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi. Penguin, Delhi, 1995, p. 367.

5. Inder Malhotra, Dynasties in India and Beyond. Harper Collins, Delhi, 2003, p. 205.

6. Kancha Illaiah, Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism. Bhatkal and Sen, Kolkata, 2004.