The poll had run smoothly, yet there was something that niggled. It had first become apparent to me during the 2004 election campaign, and it niggled again now. The problem was the first-time MPs. With their spanking faces and sense of bland entitlement, these young men and women were treated with reverence by the Indian media, although their achievement was usually to have shared genes with an earlier leader (not far from the achievement of the pistol-toting Maharaja of Jodhpur, Hanwant Singh). I watched one of these new MPs on television as he drove through the dust of his inherited family constituency in an enormous Pajero, turning now and then to a waiting camera with a purposeful frown and saying things like, “I want to help these people, like my father did,” or “We are going to make India number one.” He looked like a giant baby who had been dressed up and put in a big buggy and sent off on an adventure.
The disjuncture between these fresh fruits and the hopes of the many millions of individuals they were supposedly representing was massive. In person they were perfectly affable and often idealistic, but as a phenomenon they were damaging. Was Indian national politics becoming hereditary, with power passing to a few hundred families, even as the elections themselves became more vibrant and open?
In the case of the new contenders, all you needed to know was the surname. It seemed India’s strong women politicians were not reproducing themselves, for most of the new MPs were only sons, probably on account of the social convention in the 1970s that educated people should have small families. “Hum do, hamare do”—“We two and our two”—was the slogan. Rahul was the son of Rajiv Gandhi, Jitin was the son of Jitendra Prasada, Jyotiraditya was the son of Madhavrao Scindia, Sachin was the son of Rajesh Pilot and brother-in-law of Omar Abdullah who was the grandson of Sheikh Abdullah and son of Farooq Abdullah; Akhilesh was the son of the Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav and Dushyant was the son of Vasundhara Raje, the BJP chief minister of Rajasthan and sister of Madhavrao Scindia. And so it continued.
I spoke to someone who was close to the new batch of Congress party MPs. What did they believe in? “It hasn’t crystallized at all. These boys have all seen the world. They don’t have an ideology.” This was intended I think as a compliment, the idea being that India had suffered from, and to an extent still suffers from, ideological politics. Did the new hereditary MPs—for simplicity’s sake we can call them HMPs—have plans? “They work really hard. Their constituents think they will just put in a call and get electricity for their village. They feel there is so much to do, they don’t know where to begin.” Why had they entered politics? “I can’t promise they are not wanting to make money. I wouldn’t say it’s from idealism, except perhaps with Rahul. He’s not sentimental, he has a clinical mind. The Congress party is a Mughal court, and no one can do anything unless the Gandhis say so. Sonia has tried to make it more democratic. The rest aren’t interested because they want to keep their own position. Everyone likes to have the ear of someone who is influential, and nominate a few chosen ones.” I tried to picture this in a British context and imagined, unhappily, how it would feel to have the nation’s destiny in the hands of the children of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair.
Most political parties shared in this tradition of reincarnation, although the problem seemed to be worse in the Congress party. The trajectory of these scions was remarkably similar—they went from an Indian boarding school to college in Europe or the United States, followed by a stint in banking or commerce and a return to a safe family seat in their late twenties. They were generating an atmosphere that gave a dull echo of the feeling which greeted “Rajiv’s Boys” in the 1980s, when bureaucrats and politicians were presumed to be dynamic simply because they were younger than those they were replacing. Press coverage of the HMPs would typically say how encouraging it was that “youngsters” were involving themselves in the future of the nation. The “young guns” or “young Turks” were projected as the future: “This is the era of Rahul Gandhi where to be young [he was almost forty, making him fifteen years older than India’s median age of twenty-five] is to be politically correct … The disillusionment with politics as usual is at an all-time low. If there is a time when the young can make a difference, it is now. Their time has come.”18
The problem though was not Rahul Gandhi: he was merely the latest incarnation of the lead dynasty, the most visible manifestation of a wider, much more serious fault. He had publicly expressed a measure of doubt about his inherited position, and rather than pursue the obvious course and become a minister, he was trying to restructure the calcified organization of the Congress party. His work before entering politics full-time—on his own terms, in his mid-thirties—had been in management, back-office operations and business consultancy. The further he proceeded with the process of reforming the party, the more he became aware how talent was strangled and individuals were prevented from rising on merit. He cultivated a mask of Buddhist detachment and purity in public, and most of his speeches were deliberately low-key. Even more than his mother, Rahul Gandhi avoided speaking on the record to the media.
“There are three-four ways of entering politics,” he said frankly to a gathering of students in Madhya Pradesh. “First, if one has money and power. Second, through family connections. I am an example of that. Third, if one knows somebody in politics. And fourth, by working hard for the people.”19 Unlike many of the other young HMPs, he did not pretend otherwise. “Main apne pita, nani aur pardada ke bina us jagah par nahin pahunch sakta tha jahan main aaj hoon”—“Without my father, grandmother and great-grandfather, I could never have been in the place that I am now.”20
For the middle and senior ranks of Congress party workers, the situation was highly frustrating. Like qualified employees of family businesses in India, they knew their achievements were much less important than the lack of a name. Younger people felt unable to progress, or to take a share of power, knowing their way would be blocked indefinitely. Often, the temptation was to switch to another party where paths might be more open. A senior state-level Congress activist described having to beg his boss to let him speak to Sonia Gandhi: “ ‘Saab I want to meet Soniaji. Should I do so? Will you take me to meet her?’ And when [he] does take me along, do you think I can say anything against him to Soniaji? Do you think I can even dare to open my mouth on how the party works at the grassroots level?”21
Even those who were well connected in politics found the party structure exasperating, and thought rival parties were lighter on their feet. Yusuf Ansari had run as a state legislator in Uttar Pradesh in 2007, and the tale of his unsuccessful campaign showed what a sorry condition the party had reached in its old heartland in the “cow belt.” (In India’s first general election, Congress took eighty-one out of the eighty-six seats in the state.)22 The changes wrought on electoral politics by caste movements had left the organization disoriented. “It was summer,” he said, “April, very hot. I was given Mahmudabad, a backward, rural constituency, and had to find workers, set up an office, organize the campaign. It was not long after the execution of Saddam Hussein, and the Shias were being blamed for this. I am Sunni, and about one quarter of the Muslims in the constituency are Shia. The imams and maulanas, my core vote, came to me and said they had decided to tell their people to go with the Samajwadi Party, because otherwise a Shia—the BSP candidate—might win. So my campaign was sunk by tensions produced in Iraq. The procedure in Congress is to delay, whereas the BSP had declared their candidates a year earlier. We had a week’s notice. All my nominees had to be cleared at a district level by the Congress party, and you couldn’t even get people on the phone. Our party is great on paper: there’s a ‘recruitment in-charge,’ a ‘natural disaster in-charge,’ but none of it works. In the BSP and the Samajwadi Party, there is a grassroots structure operating twenty-four hours a day. The BSP have a president in each district who is always a Dalit, with a direct line to Mayawati. In Congress, even the most senior figures, the khadi-clad veterans, have secret or tacit arrangements with ot
her parties, while keeping their positions. Mrs. Gandhi knows this—but people tell her, ‘We can’t do without X,’ so they don’t get rid of him.”23
The rigid, archaic composition of Congress, where everything oriented around the often unspoken edicts of the first family, was not unconnected to its electoral success. At an election, the party was able to present the members of the Gandhi family—Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka, who had a talent for working a crowd—and let them speak nebulously of loyalty, secularism and their concern for the dispossessed. Despite his irritation with sycophants (even a minister had been spotted trying to carry his shoes), Rahul Gandhi was not above playing the game, coming out with this ill-judged line at a meeting in 2007: “I belong to the family which has never moved backwards, which has never gone back on its words. You know that when any member of my family had decided to do anything, he does it. Be it the freedom struggle, the division of Pakistan or taking India to the 21st century.”24 The words caused annoyance in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, and demonstrated a natural or instinctive attachment to family tradition.
For political opponents, the yuvraj—the prince—was a soft target, but within Congress he was a source of possible future elevation. In issue after issue, the party mouthpiece, Congress Sandesh, fell over itself to praise the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty. A full-page image of “Indira Gandhi on her 91st birth anniversary” might be followed by a garlanded photo of the queen mother, Sonia Gandhi.
Our pride is Mother India,
Our guide is Mother Sonia.
In a land where so much was still based around reverence and the influence of family life, it did not seem implausible to appeal to family values for possible electoral gain, even if it contradicted the meritocratic values of the makers of India’s Constitution. Praising dynastic leaders was, however, a declining strategy, one which held less appeal for younger people as they learned more about the world and gained experience of new corporate practice which depended on merit. With his background in consultancy, Rahul Gandhi was seeking to drive his party out of a rut. He travelled the countryside and spent the nights with Dalit families, interacting with the public and speaking better Hindi than his late father. Crucially, he boosted membership of the Youth Congress, democratized it and brought in outsiders to run internal elections. “People without financial muscle are now able to get good positions,” a member of his team told me. “They must learn processes and protocols. The Youth Congress will become robust over time. Rahulji is very particular about that.”25
It was a fine plan, and extremely ambitious. In 2009, a handful of parliamentary candidates arose through this internal democracy, and a few more were talent-spotted. So “Team Rahul,” as the media liked to call his helpers, now consisted not only of the sons of his father’s colleagues but a handful of interloping MPs like Meenakshi Natrajan, a Tamil biochem graduate from Madhya Pradesh whose family had no link to politics, and who had even been observed carrying her own tiffin box to work.
The reforms were a well-intentioned step, but it was hard to see them succeeding. Rahul Gandhi was up against a cascade of privilege and entitlement that reached to the heart of Indian politics at the centre and at state level. When other politicians sought to emulate his “Dalit sleepovers”—at the instigation of the Congress party machine—they missed the point. Shriprakash Jaiswal, the coal minister and MP for Kanpur, set off into the boondocks accompanied by music and movie equipment, his own food, a stock of mineral water and a brand new mattress with a set of sheets and pillows. He might be staying in a poor Dalit’s house, but he did not wish to bed down on a straw mattress or a charpoy, a rope bed. After showing Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, a screen deification of the Mahatma, Shriprakash Jaiswal and his entourage left at 2 a.m., having completed the sleepover. “The purpose of the visit was to break caste barriers and understand life in Dalit villages,” he said. “We were honest in our venture.”26
The years Rahul Gandhi had spent living abroad anonymously had given him a closer understanding of the workings of different societies than most other privileged Indians. Many of his peers, not only in the Congress party, had only the most fleeting experience of life outside the bubble, away from admirers and servants. They perceived themselves as hereditary rulers, descended if not from the Sun then from a forebear who had worked to create modern India. Their usual justification, really a technical defence, was that they had been elected—ignoring the fact that almost no one else stood a chance of gaining the nomination. If Rahul Gandhi’s plan were to succeed it would take fifty years, since many of these people were in their late twenties or thirties and the Indian political system was mistrustful of cabinet ministers aged under sixty—and many were older still. When the youthful British foreign minister David Miliband visited India and ingratiatingly addressed his elderly counterpart Pranab Mukherjee by his first name, New Delhi’s bureaucrats made their displeasure clear.
The radical alternative was to compel sitting HMPs to step down, or at least face open reselection in a reformed party. This was Rahul’s best and most likely bet, a re-run of the Kamaraj Plan of 1963 when senior Congress politicians had been obliged to put “party before post” and stand down. Having been shamed into retiring from office, these entrenched elements were expected to return to the grassroots and help revitalize the Congress party machine. This move had cleared the way for the rise of Rahul’s grandmother, Indira Gandhi.
Nearly all aspiring politicians with a family connection did everything in their power to exploit it. When campaigning in 2009, Rahul’s cousin, Varun Gandhi, said the Congress-led government was spineless and that “Wherever I go, I am told that if Sanjay Gandhi had been alive, the country would not have got reduced to such a mess.”27 Later in the year when the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, died in an accident, the local Congress party said 462 people had died of shock or committed suicide with grief. The purpose of this implausible piece of news was to force the national party to appoint his fabulously rich son, Jaganmohan Reddy, in his place. The move failed, and an investigation showed that families of people who had died in different ways were paid Rs5,000 [$105] by local Congress leaders for “funeral expenses,” and persuaded to say they were victims of the mass grief.28 Whichever way you turned, family politics were playing their part. In total, twelve of the seats in Uttar Pradesh in 2009 were won by women; but three were political widows, three were wives, one was a daughter, two were daughters-in-law, one was a movie star, one was the wife of a senior police officer and one, Annu Tandon, was the wife of a top executive at Reliance, India’s largest and most powerful private company.
I had spent some time with Annu Tandon travelling around her potential constituency, Unnao, watching her speak to gatherings in village after village while buffaloes lay in ponds in the heat. It was clear that although she was sincere, she had needed to spend money through a family trust in Unnao to prepare her way for an election victory. Her idol was Indira Gandhi (“I used to copy her hairstyle and her clothes”) and her electors were some of the poorest people in India. One woman, Mira Devi, told me that although she would vote for Annu Tandon (“She is a woman and may understand the problems of women”), she doubted any politician could change things: “We have no electricity, no good roads, no doctor for seven kilometres. It’s very hard when children fall ill or a pregnant woman needs to go to the doctor.”29 This was the reality in the poorest parts of the nation, after more than sixty years of independence: although democracy functioned, its benefits were limited.
The media continued to report young faces admiringly in 2009, as a new generation coming in like a breath of fresh air. But how new were the faces? India’s youngest MP, Hamdullah Sayeed from the Lakshadweep islands, was the son of a man who had once been India’s youngest MP, and in 2008 the government had even gone to the trouble of amending the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) (Union Territories) Order, 1951 to allow Sayeed junior to contest the seat, since he was not born in Lakshadweep.30 The youngest minis
ter, 29-year-old Agatha Sangma from Meghalaya, was the daughter of a former speaker of the house. According to Savvy magazine, “She stunned everyone sitting in the central hall by preferring to take the oath in Hindi”—the patronizing presumption being that because she came from the north-east, where people spoke in strange tongues and ate dogs and bees, Sangma would only be able to swear in in English. For the new minister herself, the experience was inspiring: “Soniaji and Rahulji both congratulated me after the swearing-in ceremony,” she reported. “Rahul Gandhi is overwhelmed by my performance over the last one year.”31 So even within the family system, the hierarchy was closely defined: a young minister might inherit a seat, but the imprimatur would come from the first family.
As well as enjoying the comparative youthfulness of the new MPs, the Indian press admired their ability to work across political lines. They were “the bonhomie brigade” who played in each other’s cricket matches and went to each other’s parties. They formed parliamentary committees and refused to let party whips interfere. Supriya Sule, the daughter of Sharad Pawar, who had attempted to oust Sonia Gandhi because of her “foreign origins,” worked happily with the children of her father’s rivals. “It’s all so lovely,” she told a journalist who mentioned her willingness to bury the past. “Let’s keep it lovely and not let past shadows darken it.”32 Was it any wonder the new MPs felt socially at ease together? With their prime education, overseas experiences and spare money they were socially much closer to each other than to their constituents. The younger government ministers complained that they had too little to do, since important decisions rested with the older generation of cabinet ministers.
The practice of nepotism in politics was so taken for granted that its effect on democracy in India had never been fully quantified. I was left wondering how deep the dependence on pedigree ran. Had it been this way for decades, or was it getting worse? What was the effect of a closed structure on bright, qualified people who might otherwise have entered public service? They knew they were more likely to get a break in business, or in a stable profession, than in this hereditary system. A stream of potential talent was diverted at source, away from politics. Would a self-made man like Rajesh Pilot have got anywhere if he had been born in 1975 rather than in 1945?
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