India

by Patrick French

  Some of the new HMPs and ministers would be good at their jobs, and others would be bad. The fact someone was born into a prominent family certainly did not mean they would be a poor lawmaker. If you were to exclude people on this basis, you would be knocking out Jawaharlal Nehru and William Pitt the Younger, as well as monarchs who had turned out to be great administrators and reformers, such as the Maharaja of Bikaner or the fourth King of Bhutan. And you would be excluding George W. Bush. The issue here was not heredity itself, but the tendency to draft in a child, widow or in-law of a well-known leader as a means of entrenching family power. The children of prominent politicians expected to be pressed to join politics even if they were unsuitable or content in another line of work. Not to be pressed and praised might suggest some sort of disloyalty on the part of the advisers by whom their family was surrounded. So when a young scion advanced, whether at state or national level, it was understood that talent would follow, rather in the way that love was expected to follow a well-planned arranged marriage.

  How could you measure political nepotism? At the panchayat, district or state level, it would be difficult to see unless you were there. At the national level, members of the upper house, the Rajya Sabha, might be picked for ulterior reasons since they were chosen in part by nomination (state assemblies voted on who their Rajya Sabha MPs would be, which meant in practice it was a horse trade between parties). So I decided to direct attention only to the directly elected lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha, which has 545 members. My intention was to find out how each of these 545 MPs came into politics. With some, the answer was obvious and could be found out within moments; with others, published sources offered an answer; and with a high proportion of MPs, it was impossible to learn anything of substance. The Internet, which I had presumed would have the answers hidden away in one of its corners, was of marginal use. Surprisingly, around one third of India’s MPs were almost invisible online, except for their page on the Parliament website, which detailed matters such as their name, party, constituency, state and postal address.

  I was stumped. I had a certain amount of data, but it gave an incomplete picture. It was not enough to take prominent names and make larger deductions from them. Equally, much of the information did not seem to exist. Only someone who worked at a local level, perhaps as a political journalist, would be likely to know how each MP in their area entered politics. So I took the plunge and began to ask friends and contacts in different states across India if they would help to fill in the gaps. Some remarkable biographies reached me this way. For example, the member for Nagarkurnool, Manda Jagannath, had started out as a labourer on the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam, become a doctor and slapped a bank manager for refusing to give loans to tribal people; Shatrughan “Shotgun” Sinha of the BJP was described as “an actor, politician, publicity hound and crusader”; Ram Sundar Das, a Dalit MP from Bihar, had started in politics more than seventy years ago; Inder Singh Namdhari, a Sikh from Jharkhand, had switched between four different parties: “A deft player in statecraft,” the journalist Rasheed Kidwai wrote to me, “his favourite Hindi song is, ‘Mere pairon me ghungroo bandha de to phir meri chaal dekh le …’—‘Strap on the anklets and watch me move.’ ”

  It was too good to stop now. Once I had about 200 names, I asked Megha Chauhan, an efficient reporter on a Delhi paper who had worked with me in the past, to double-check the information and find out the trajectory of some of the nation’s more obscure MPs. The only rule was that the MP or their office should not be taken as a reliable source. We made a separate spreadsheet for each state, and a picture began to develop.

  It was at this point, when we were approaching 400 names, that I realized I was moving into deeper waters. We had a growing file of information about the Lok Sabha MPs: name, sex, date of birth, age, party name, constituency, state, whether or not the seat was reserved for a member of a Scheduled Caste or Tribe, political background, biographical notes and the source of the data we had obtained. But how would I catalogue it? What methodology would I use to analyse it? How did you classify the son of a political leader who was also a well-known cricketer and had been inducted into politics, or a successful lawyer who had been a student politician, or a prosperous industrialist who was a member of a dynastic family? What would be the best way to make larger deductions from the material? It was at this point that I thought I should take advantage of India’s reputation as a hothouse for nerds, geeks, techies and assorted data fiends.

  Arun Kaul’s CV looked promising. He was twenty-two, lived in Noida, had a BA and an MA, spoke German (I never asked him why) and had been “Jt. Secretary Cleanliness” at his school. He was hot with statistical software packages. The moment I knew I had found the right person was when I asked him to describe what sort of people lived in Noida, and he replied: “I think if one were to plot the ages of the inhabitants of Noida on a graph, it would be a bimodal curve, which would peak at about eighteen to twenty years, then fall, become a plateau and rise up again around the sixty to sixty-five years age bracket.” I asked him to take the information we had assembled on the family politics project, process it and see what conclusions emerged. Arun asked whether I needed code lists, cross tabs, cutoffs and logit regression, and I said I thought so. When he started to use the phrase “beta coefficients,” I surrendered.

  With Megha’s help, I completed the charts for each state (our last piece of information was the estimated birth date of a rural MP whose parents had not recorded it) and passed them over to Arun, who turned the political background of each MP into numerical code and converted the data to SPSS, a statistical package used by social scientists. We decided that when an MP had several routes to a political career, the most important would be entered, with the alternatives left as an observation but not included in the analysis. This usually meant that if a “family” element existed, it dominated. So, for example, if someone had an active background in student politics and a mother who was a chief minister, we felt it safe to assume that the mother was more important to their success than the student union membership.

  Now we could ask the question: how hereditary is Indian politics? How did the 545 MPs in the fifteenth Lok Sabha enter politics?

  No significant family background 255

  Family 156

  Student politics 47

  Business 35

  RSS 18

  Inducted 16

  Trade union 10

  Royal Family 7

  Maoist commander 1

  Initially, it appeared that heredity was not the most important aspect in Indian politics, in that “Family” was not at the top of the list of routes to Parliament. In total, 28.6 percent of MPs had a hereditary connection. “No significant family background” covered nearly half of all MPs, which meant they had found their way to Parliament by a similar mixture of idealistic and weaselly routes as lawmakers in any representative democracy. “Business” covered everybody from chief executives who were joining public service to members of a land or mining mafia who needed political clout. “Inducted” usually meant the MP was a famous actor, but it could mean someone who had done well abroad and was returning home, or even in one case a commando in Rajiv Gandhi’s security cordon who had been parachuted into politics. “Royal Family” meant an old princely family which had retained its influence—another form of family politics, but not what we were looking at in this study. The Maoist commander came in a category all of his own (I had considered listing him under “Business”). Rasheed Kidwai gave me his potted biography: “Baitha Kameshwar cleared his matriculation examination in 1975, and then decided against college and headed for the jungles to join the People’s War Group instead. He has rewards on his head from three state governments and has been labelled as a ‘dreaded Maoist commander.’ He won the election while in custody at Rohtas district jail without campaigning in person. He faces forty-six criminal cases ranging from murder and extortion to carrying out explosive acts.” Lately, the Communist Party of India (Maoist)
had disclaimed Kameshwar as a rogue operative.33

  Second question: which political party was the most hereditary? (Or, what percentage of a party’s MPs had reached the Lok Sabha through a family link—excluding parties with fewer than five MPs?)

  RLD 100.0 5 out of 5

  NCP 77.8 7 out of 9

  BJD 42.9 6 out of 14

  INC 37.5 78 out of 208

  BSP 33.3 7 out of 21

  DMK 33.3 6 out of 18

  SP 27.3 6 out of 22

  CPI(M) 25.0 4 out of 16

  JD(U) 20.0 4 out of 20

  BJP 19.0 22 out of 116

  AITC 15.8 3 out of 19

  Shiv Sena 9.1 1 out of 11

  AIADMK 0 0 out of 9

  TDP 0 0 out of 6

  The RLD ranked first, with all its MPs being hereditary. The runner-up was the NCP, a splinter from the Congress party, with seven hereditary MPs (including Agatha Sangma). The BJD at 42.9 percent came third. The results for these parties were statistically insignificant, since they had so few Lok Sabha seats. At the opposite end of the scale, two parties did not have a single MP from a hereditary background, but the TDP had only six MPs, while the AIADMK had nine; its leader, Jayalalithaa, expected strict loyalty and promoted cronies, but had not taken the family route. The Shiv Sena on 9.1 percent had eleven MPs, but was itself run by one (increasingly fractious) family, the Thackerays. In the middle of the table came Mayawati’s BSP: a full third of her MPs were hereditary, although in every case they were not Dalits, but had been brought in from one of the communities she was seeking to woo for the party, such as Muslims or Brahmins.

  The most important result concerned the two largest parties in India, the BJP and INC, or Indian National Congress. Since they had 324 MPs between them, the sample survey was large enough to be genuinely revealing. Only 19 percent of the BJP’s people were HMPs, which helped to explain the party’s appeal to the Hindu middle classes across swathes of middle India: they knew that more than four fifths of the party’s MPs had ascended by other means, rather than descending from on high, which made them seem more representative and regular. An additional 11.2 percent of BJP MPs came to politics through a background in the RSS, which for true believers in Hindutva was a family in itself. When the corpulent Nitin Gadkari became president of the BJP in 2009, he described himself as a “simple worker” who had reached the top by his own effort. “This can happen only in the BJP,” he said. “The BJP is not like other political parties where dynasty rules. My father was not the prime minister of the country.”34

  What, then, of Congress? Thirty-seven and one-half percent of its MPs had reached the Lok Sabha through a family connection. This was almost twice as many as its principal rival, but it was not a fatal statistic. The Congress leadership could still argue that more than 60 percent of its MPs had arrived on some alternative merit—through student politics, business or simply personal ability and ambition.

  The third question: was this a regional issue? Were some states more hereditary than others? Here, the results were diverse. Family politics was at its strongest in Punjab, Delhi and Haryana.35 After that, there was a significant drop. Apart from Andhra Pradesh, all the southern states had 75 percent or more of their MPs from a non-hereditary background. Generally the newer states, such as Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, which were only formed in 2000, were less nepotistic, presumably because family politics did not have enough time to become entrenched. In the same vein, MPs who came from seats reserved for Scheduled Castes or Tribes were statistically less likely to be from a family with a political background, although not by much.

  The answer to my fourth question was inevitable, given the way in which Indian politics works. Were women MPs more likely to have reached their position through a family link? Yes: 69.5 percent of women MPs fell into the family politics column. The exceptions were powerful self-made women leaders like Mayawati, Jayalalithaa and Mamata Banerjee, whose extraordinary success was not often replicated in the middle ranks of political parties.

  When the information about all the MPs was coming in, I had been struck by how many of the older ones had risen from a grassroots background—people such as 78-year-old Danapal Venugopal, a respected and modest man who had started out in a block-level panchayat in Tamil Nadu and served five consecutive terms in Parliament. The tradition of seats being passed within families seemed more recent. To an extent, this was inevitable: it was not until the 1960s that there would have been significant numbers of MPs dying or coming up for retirement. So any MP aged seventy or over (our benchmark date for age-related calculations was 1 January 2010) who had started out in national politics at a relatively young age was unlikely to have had a parent in Parliament. So my fifth question was: is politics in India becoming more hereditary?

  Arun sent me an unusually excited email while he was looking at this question: “Your hunch was spot on: as age decreases (i.e. as one moves from older to younger MPs), it may be noted that incidence of ‘family politics’ increases! Just ran the analysis—such a nice, perfect little linear trend. Researcher’s delight!”

  I asked him to produce a simple graph of the perfect linear trend. This was a shocking result. Every MP in the Lok Sabha under the age of thirty had in effect inherited a seat, and more than two thirds of the sixty-six MPs aged forty or under were HMPs. In addition, this new wave of Indian lawmakers would have a decade’s advantage in politics over their peers, since the average MP who had benefited from family politics was almost ten years younger than those who had arrived with “no significant family background.” In the Congress party, the situation was yet more extreme: every Congress MP under the age of thirty-five was an HMP. If the trend continued, it was possible that most members of the Indian Parliament would be there by heredity alone, and the nation would be back to where it had started before the freedom struggle, with rule by a hereditary monarch and assorted Indian princelings.

  Percentage of hereditary MPs by age

  Already, the tendency to turn politics into a family business was being emulated across northern India at state level, with legislators nominating children and spouses. There was no reason to believe it was not also spreading to the districts. Nepotism was written into the working of democracy, as it was in other areas of Indian life, ranging from medicine and the legal profession to the media and the film industry. An advert for an investment website encapsulated this attitude, which was that even if you were self-made you would do your best to dispense patronage if you made it to the top: beside a photograph of an ambitious young man was the line: “I don’t have an influential uncle. But I will be one someday.” The Bollywood movie Luck by Chance—about young actors who try to make it on merit rather than on family connections—itself starred Farhan Akhtar and Konkona Sen Sharma, the children of famous parents.

  Looking at Arun’s analysis more closely, the difference between older and younger MPs was marked. For those over fifty, the proportion with a father or relative in politics was not unreasonable, at 17.9 percent. But when you looked at those aged fifty or under, this increased by more than two and a half times to nearly half, or 47.2 percent. I checked some of the people involved, and the news was not reassuring. Of the thirty-eight youngest MPs, thirty-three had arrived with the help of mummy-daddy. Of the remaining five, one was Meenakshi Natrajan, the biochem graduate who had been hand-picked by Rahul Gandhi, three appeared to be self-made politicians who had made it up the ranks of the BJP, BSP and CPI(M) respectively, and the fifth was a Lucknow University mafioso who had been taken on board by Mayawati: he was a “history-sheeter”—meaning numerous criminal charge-sheets had been laid against him—who had been involved in shootouts and charged four times under the Gangsters Act.36

  I asked Arun for another chart. Looking only at the Congress MPs, how hereditary were they, by age? Here, the curve was more dramatic and it concealed an even more worrying phenomenon, which was that the tentacles of extended families were now winding themselves ever more tightly around India’
s body politic. While compiling the main list of MPs, I had noticed that a few seemed to be more than simply the sons or daughters of a politician—rather, their links spread in several directions at once, making them not just hereditary but “hyperhereditary.” So Preneet Kaur, for example, was the daughter of a senior bureaucrat and daughter-in-law of a former maharaja, and her husband, mother-in-law and two brothers-in-law were either former ministers or senior politicians. In other cases, the links were more nebulous and might connect to close family members at a lower level, for instance in a state assembly.

  Percentage of hereditary Congress MPs by age

  I asked Arun to look at the MPs who had multiple family links. He responded, “The problem is the sample size, it is twenty-seven. As a rule, one does not consider stats run on sample sizes less than thirty to have any statistical meaning.” I promised to bear this in mind and not to look at the data in percentage terms. The twenty-seven hyperhereditary MPs were concentrated in certain states: Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab in particular. Again, their age distinguished them. The average age of an MP with no significant family background was fifty-eight; for a hereditary MP it was forty-eight and for a hyperhereditary MP it was forty-six. They were identifiable, unsurprisingly, by their party. The BJP had only three hyperhereditaries—and two were Maneka and Varun Gandhi. The Congress party had seventy-eight hereditary MPs, of whom nineteen were hyperhereditary. In some cases they had combined their political takeover with a successful business, like Dr. Gaddam Vivekanand, a prominent and wealthy asbestos manufacturer from Andhra Pradesh whose father and brother were politicians.37