WHILE princes played a significant role after independence – when they lost their state – only a handful of them have survived politically until today in Indian democracy.¹ The central government’s attitude accounts for this radical skimming off, as it showed less and less complacency for princely circles. A real shift came about in the 1960-1970s, a phase in which Indira Gandhi chose to open hostilities with the former princes – going so far as to abolish their pensions and privileges – to better establish her prestige as a ‘socialist’ leader.²

The decrease in the number of princes involved in politics, however, also stems from the fact that only those who managed to adapt to the new rules of the game survived. In general, the former princely families, such as those of Rewari, Panna, Mysore and Baroda, to name only a few examples, failed to have a political career beyond the second generation. The Scindias, the only princely family with members of the last three generations elected as MPs, are an interesting exception.

In 1947, this dynasty was at the head of one of the largest princely states in northern India. Its prestige was rooted not only in the size of its territory but also in its glorious past. The dynasty dates from the 18th century when a general in Shivaji’s army, a warlord who went off to fight the Moghul Empire, carved out a fiefdom for himself. This man, Madhoji Scindia was, like Shivaji, a Maratha by caste who earned the status of a kshatriya – at least in the eyes of his followers. From 1948 to 1951, the state of Gwalior was the backbone of a Part C state baptized Madhya Bharat (central India) of which the former Maharaja, Jivaji Rao Scindia, was appointed the Rajpramukh, or governor, to effect the transition.

During the first elections, in 1952, the Scindias controlled some fifty constituencies in the Madhya Bharat Assembly. Their influence can be traced to several complementary factors. First, they preserved a clientele inherited from the colonial era, the former jagirdars or other state ‘vassals’, who served as local representatives whom they could get elected to the state assembly. This clientelistic relationship, in the Scindias’ case, was also directly related to land and industrial holdings that not only employed thousands of people but also yielded a considerable revenue due to well thought out investments. Also to reckon with was the clientele the Scindias had formed through their many donations to social and educational institutions (Jivaji Rao founded the Vikram University in Ujjain in 1956 with an endowment of five million rupees).³ Over and above clientelism, the people’s worship of their sovereign was very strongly perpetuated in the Gwalior region, as Jean-Luc Chambard has shown.⁴

 

However, in 1952, in Madhya Bharat, the Hindu Mahasabha – a Hindu nationalist party – did remarkably well, largely because of the support of Sardar Angre, the right hand man of the Maharaja. Nehru thus asked Jivaji Rao, shortly before the 1957 elections, to field his wife, Vijaya Raje Scindia, as a candidate under the Congress label – since he did not want to contest himself.⁵ The weight of the Hindu Mahasabha then declined to the benefit of the party in power,⁶ with Vijaya Raje Scindia winning 76% of the votes in the Guna constituency (neighbouring Gwalior) where the summer capital of the former dynasty, Shivpuri, was located, and 67% of the votes in 1962 in the constituency of Gwalior. (The political trajectory of the family was to oscillate between the Guna and Gwalior districts for decades.) But in the late 1960s, D.P. Mishra, leader of the state Congress, tried to reduce the party’s dependence on the princes and especially on Vijaya Raje Scindia who, having been widowed in 1961, was then called Rajmata (queen mother).

Reacting strongly to Mishra’s manoeuvres, the Rajmata demonstrated her power after the 1967 elections by forming a separate party with ‘her’ MLAs in the Madhya Bharat Assembly, which enabled her to topple the Congress government. She officially joined the Liberal Party (Swatantra Party) – under which label she was elected in 1967 in Guna with 79% of the votes – shortly thereafter when the Congress toughened its policy toward former princes to prove its socialism. The former princes’ privileges and pensions were abolished in 1971 at the end of a legal-political battle that led the Scindias – like many other princely families – to join the Jana Sangh, the Hindu nationalist party that took over from the Hindu Mahasabha in the area. She ran for office under this label or that of the Bharatiya Janata Party – the successor to the Jana Sangh – in every election from 1972 to 1998 except in 1977 and 1984. She was continually re-elected to Parliament four times from 1989 to 1998 in the constituency of Guna.

 

Rajmata Scindia’s electoral success flowed not only from her princely status, but also from her ability to play the political game. She never settled for merely allowing the tremendous political capital she had in her name, her influence and her fortune to bear fruit. For a start she was ideologically driven, and subscribed – under the influence of her right hand man, Bal Angre, Sardar Angre’s son – to the most xenophobic aspects of Hindu nationalist beliefs. As a result, she presided over the regional fortunes of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the most aggressive arm of the Hindu nationalist movement and promoted some of its leaders, including Uma Bharti. As vice-president of the BJP in the early 1980s, she took part in the debates that tormented the party at the time and defended her doctrinal purity against the senior party leaders who were quick to dilute it to rally new support. She was especially vocal against Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s new formulas: ‘Gandhian socialism’ and ‘positive secularism’.

Second, she fought with undeniable physical energy against the Emergency, the 18-month period during which Indira Gandhi suspended democracy and put opponents behind bars. She first set out for Nepal, where her family supposedly originated from, then turned around and gave herself up for arrest.⁷ The atrocious prison conditions she was subjected to steeled her character and reinforced her determination to fight Indira Gandhi against whom she ran in her own constituency in 1980.

Third, she was a fighter who went out to cull votes in backwater villages on gruelling campaigns, going from one village rally to the next, as I personally observed in the district of Shivpuri in 1989.

 

Like many other princely families, the Scindias very early on considered politics a family affair. The Rajmata got her brother elected to the state assembly in a constituency near Gwalior and her son, Madhav Rao Scindia, joined the Jana Sangh in 1970 at her request and ran for election with even greater success. Madhav Rao was re-elected over a period of nearly thirty years running, from 1971 to 1999, without ever being defeated in the constituency of Guna, then in Gwalior, which his mother left to him in 1977, the year that she passed him the torch and announced her retirement from politics. After all, was he not the family’s male heir?

Madhav Rao nevertheless proved to be an expert in the art of peddling his influence among the political parties. Far from remaining a vassal to the Jana Sangh, he switched to the Congress Party, which was eager to keep a foot ‘in the palace’, to quote the expression used by the local inhabitants. In 1977, Madhav Rao was one of the rare Congress candidates⁸ to escape defeat in northern India, a clear sign of his political clout. After that he was re-elected without interruption under the Congress label and held increasingly important ministerial portfolios, as Railway Minister in 1984-1989, under Rajiv Gandhi, then Civil Aviation Minister in 1991-95, under Narasimha Rao, and finally as Human Resources Development Minister in 1995-96.

 

When the Congress Party refused to field him as a candidate in 1996, following corruption charges involving several of its national leaders (the famous Hawala case), he founded his own party and won the election in his constituency against the official Congress candidate – impelling the party to reinstate him in 1998. With Madhav Rao, the Scindia line asserted another indispensable asset to any politician in a democracy: an image of competence that continues to dominate the memory India has of him despite accusations of corruption that may have tainted it. Trained at Oxford, he became the President of the Family Affairs Consortium on his return to India. He cultivated this reputation of a modern young man within the government of Rajiv Gandhi, a man in his fourties like himself, who at that time promised to bring India – before its time – into the 21st century. At the Railway Ministry, he introduced high-speed trains – pushing to open a Shatabdi line between Delhi and Gwalior, since his ‘devotion’ to his home region had much to do with his popularity.

Madhav Rao’s reputation as an administrator that surrounded him until his death in an airplane accident in 2001 is also enjoyed by his younger sister, Vasundhara Raje, who pursued a political career in the BJP in her mother’s wake. Vijaya Raje Scindia initiated her daughter into politics following her painful break with her son, revealing another specific feature of princely politics – the logic of factions: when a family is divided, each of its members is called on to choose sides.

This brings up the question of battlefield. With the mother and son already having divided up the constituencies around Gwalior – the son inheriting the former capital, the mother the neighbouring town of Guna – where would the daughter go? Vasundhara Raje first tried a constituency located to the North of Gwalior, but failed in 1984. Married in 1972 into the Dholpur dynasty, whose territory had been made part of the state of Rajasthan after 1947, Vasundhara Raje ran for a seat in the state assembly in 1985, and this time won. She then won a parliamentary seat in another constituency of Rajasthan, Jhalawar, and held it without interruption in 1991, 1996, 1998 and 1999. She entered A.B. Vajpayee’s government in 1998 as Union Minister of State for External Affairs.

 

Her career took a new turn, however, when she resigned from Parliament to lead the BJP in the 2003 election battle in Rajasthan. At the time she went on a 12,380 km tour, baptized the Parivartan yatra (pilgrimage for change), in a van without air conditioning in the heat of May, dressed in the traditional costume of a Rajasthan princess. For a Maharani to solicit their support ended up intriguing and then seducing the voters who gave (not merely for this reason!) the BJP an unprecedented majority in the state – and its first woman head of government.

 

On being interviewed about the reasons for her popularity, she replied without hesitation, ‘People trust me because of the family I come from.’⁹ And in fact she has claimed that she remained faithful both to the ‘modernity’ – embodied by her brother – (hence her emphasis on economic issues throughout her campaign¹⁰ ) and to her mother’s technique of sparing no effort at reaching out to the people in an unmediated fashion. As member of the BJP national executive since 1987, she has become a lynchpin of the Hindu nationalist apparatus as a regional ‘boss’, just as her mother had been. After the defeat of the BJP during the 2008 state elections, she was forced by the party high command to resign from the party’s leadership in the Vidhan Sabha in 2010, but staged a comeback six months latter to become leader of the opposition again in March this year.

Her sister, Yashodhara Raje Scindia, also decided to undertake a political career with the BJP after coming back, in 1994, from the United States where she had migrated in 1977. She first entered the Madhya Pradesh assembly in 1998 on the Shivpuri seat and was re-elected in 2003. As Minister for Tourism, Sports and Youth Welfare, she was officially designated not as ‘Shrimati’ (Mrs.), but ‘Shrimant’ (Her Highness). She won the Gwalior Lok Sabha seat during a by-election in 2007 and, true to family tradition, won again in 2009.

 

Madhav Rao’s untimely death did not signal the extinction of the Congress branch of the family line. Jyotiraditya, his son, whom Madhav Rao had been grooming for a political career when he died,¹¹ immediately picked up where his father left off. Jyotiraditya, who had studied in the U.S. – he did an MBA at Stanford – married to the heiress of another princely family that too had gone into politics, that of Baroda. He was elected to the Lok Sabha under the Congress label in 2002 in a by-election to replace his father in Guna, one of the most ‘hereditary’ constituency of India. He retained this seat in 2004 and in 2009 when he was appointed Minister of State for Commerce and Industry. The third generation of a princely family thus made its debut in politics in Parliament during the XXIst century, not only in Madhya Pradesh on the Congress side, but also in Rajasthan on the BJP side. Indeed, the son of Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Dushyant Singh, was elected MP in the constituency of Jhalawar-Baran in 2009.

Even if their prestige has waned, the former maharajas still maintain an aura that in particular has to do with their religious role. The Scindias, for instance, keep watch over the temples of their former jurisdiction – they are the jajman, or sanctifiers, of the Hindu rite and the ‘patrons’ of places of worship and processions alike. In 1991, I saw Vijaya Raje Scindia presiding over the ceremonies of the annual procession of the Gopal temple in Ujjain (one of the seven Hindu holy cities), an ancient town located in the South of the former state of Gwalior. Nothing in this ritual seemed contrived: neither her presence visible to all at the height of the temple, nor the line-up of akharas at her feet, nor the worship of the crowd gathered. In a place like this one, as well as in the villages of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where the Dalit movements and low caste-oriented parties are weak, old hierarchies die hard.

However, status considerations are by themselves not enough to explain the political longevity of this princely line. If that were true, they all would have survived. But there is no other princely family with this level of involvement in politics and, furthermore, few have managed to turn the corner of the second generation. To understand the political longevity of the Scindias, one has to factor in the fact that they have not only relied on the prestige inherited from the past and the clientelistic networks they have cultivated but have also paid the price of their political involvement, as evidenced by Vijaya Raje Scindia during the Emergency, beating the pavement to reach out to voters, and have acquired competencies well beyond their ancestors’ conservatism. Moreover, they have educated their offspring in institutions of international repute and invested in industry and services. The Scindias’ success stems from this faculty of combining innovation and rootedness in a territory. They were predestined to govern according to the criteria of the past but they pursued this vocation by adjusting their know-how.

 

Along with these qualities is another: integrity – till recently. Up until the Hawala case, no Scindia had ever been suspected of corruption. Their own image was a major asset to their popularity. Interviews I conducted in the area of Gwalior convinced me of this, the respondents moreover finding it perfectly normal that such a family would not feel the need to add to its fortune by illegal means. It is worth noting that throughout her 2003 election campaign, Vasundhara Raje was fond of repeating: ‘I have come from a big family. I have no needs, no worries.’¹² Things have changed, though, in the context of the rise of corruption in Indian politics.

 

The case of the Scindias shows that far from being dynastic in the strict sense, the princely families which have been successful form political lineages that have adapted to the democratic rules of the game. The distinction I make between dynasties and lineages is not purely semantic. While the former designation has become common parlance in India, it is misleading in more than one way. It suggests that politicians – in this case, former princes – can behave like ‘rois fainéants’ and be re-elected one election after another. In fact, those who thought about politics along these lines have vanished from the political landscape: democracy turning out to be too demanding for them.

Certainly princes benefit not only from money and muscle power – two assets they have in larger quantity than the average politicians – and from their inherited prestige, but to survive in politics they have to canvass at the time of elections like the others and to deliver (which requires some minimum skills). This is why the Scindias epitomize a rare phenomenon, their resilience being evident from their capacity to fight back when they lose – and they have lost power or elections almost as often as the Nehru/Gandhis.

 

Footnotes:

1. For an inventory that already dates back fifteen years, see R. Sarin, ‘Bygone Glory’, Asiaweek, March 1996, pp. 36-42.

2. Regarding this episode, see chapter three by C. Hurtig, Les Maharajahs et la Politique de l’Inde Contemporaine. Presses de Sciences Po, Paris, 1988.

3. Hitavada, 16 October 1956, p. 1.

4. Jean-Luc Chambard, Atlas d’un Village Indien. EHESS, Paris, 1980, p. 37.

5. V. Scindia with Manohar Malgonkar, Princess: The Autobiography of the Dowager Maharani of Gwalior. Time Book International, New Delhi, 1988, pp. 172-173.

6. For greater detail, see C. Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics. Columbia University Press, New York, 1996.

7. This information was provided by Sunderlal Diwan, an industrialist in Shivpuri who was long the main notable in Rajmata Scindia’s constituency.

8. He ran as an ‘independent’ – before joining the Congress parliamentary group – but his affinity with Congress was public knowledge.

9. A. Nagaraj, ‘The Grapes of Rath [processional float – here the word refers to V. Raje’s vehicle]’, The Indian Express, 4 May 2003.

10. The press emphasized that she had a degree in economics and was ‘assisted by a core team of professionals, she chose candidates after a scientific analysis of each and every constituency’, The Indian Express, 8 December 2003.

11. R. Menon, ‘Scindia Was Planning to Launch Son Into Politics’, http://www.rediff. com/news/2001/oct/03madh2.htm (viewed on 22 August 2006).

12. A. Nagaraj, ‘The Grapes of Rath’, op cit.