Implosion (28 page)

38
. ‘Last gram sabha opposes Niyamgiri bauxite mining’,
Hindustan Times
, 19 August 2013,
http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Odisha/Last-gram-sabha-opposes-Niyamgiri-bauxite-mining/Article1-1109960.aspx?htsw0023

IV
DYNASTY

12
Families Galore

South Asia is swamped with dynasties that have rarely contributed much to their countries’ well-being or development. They have played a dominant role in politics since before the countries gained independence from Britain, and they survive partly because of strong feudal, tribal and hierarchical traditions and hereditary social structures
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. The poor and unsophisticated sections of the electorate look up to them as icons and achievers beyond their reach. Middle-class supporters respect their legacy and seem to subscribe to the principle of the ‘devil you know is better than one you don’t’, while the elite cling to them in order to share their prestige and powers of patronage, which is especially important in status-conscious and influence-peddling societies.

In India, members of the Nehru-Gandhi family have resolutely clung to power at the top of the Congress party and India’s government for most of the years since Jawaharlal Nehru became India’s first prime minister, but the country would probably have been better off without them. In Pakistan, the Bhutto family has led the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) since the 1970s, but has done little for the good of the country. Bangladesh has been riven by battles between two dynasties, while a dictatorial family is now running Sri Lanka.

These dynasties have provided what should have been transitional leadership as their countries have developed political systems to replace colonial rule. Yet, while they have helped to build or restore democracy at some stage of their history, they have thwarted the emergence of other leaders and new ideas. The Nehru-Gandhis have blocked the top jobs and internal democratic development of the Congress party, and have also imposed their views on policy. Rahul Gandhi has tried to introduce democratic grassroots elections that ultimately could transform the party and sideline his dynasty but, without his family in control, that would almost certainly have happened earlier. As Mark Tully, the veteran BBC correspondent, wrote in 1991 at the end of his best-known book
No Full Stops in India
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, ‘For all its great achievements, the Nehru dynasty has stood like a banyan tree overshadowing the people and the institutions of India, and all Indians know that nothing grows under the banyan tree.’

Greed and corruption lie behind many dynastic ambitions. A large number of sons, daughters and other relations of Indian politicians are now encouraged to enter politics by their families and by political parties. They frequently run family business interests, which is part of the reason for a surge of political dynasties in recent years. Their involvement broadens and protects the base of politicians’ riches and powers of patronage, and it also helps with the management of illicit wealth passing from one generation to another.

That partly explains why politicians’ relatives are often rumoured to be handling their parents’ corrupt deals. They can help to protect the money involved and provide continuity in what might be called investment management. Massive amounts of money gained from bribes are often invested in real estate and other ventures through
benami
(Hindi for anonymous) names that are either false or belong to less visible people such as associates and servants. Sometimes the money is laundered through ‘round tripping’ via Mauritius and other tax havens and back into India as investments, with the politicians’ identities hidden in the benami names and shell companies. The downside for the families is that the people whose names are being used sometimes refuse to hand back the wealth, for example after a politician dies, so the existence of a dynasty can help to manage such problems. On the other hand, relatives become ambitious and use their proximity to someone in power to further their own separate business interests, with or without a politician’s knowledge.

Political parties gain from dynasties because, as with film stars and sports stars, family candidates are instantly recognisable, so they usually have less difficulty selling themselves in huge political arenas like India where there can be as many as 30 candidates and three million potential voters in one constituency. Most important of all, it is the family name that matters – Brand Gandhi generates instant recognition. It is not surprising therefore that, in the past decade, there have been increasing numbers of dynastic parliamentary candidates, in addition to the older political families who are led in terms of prominence by the Gandhi clan – Rahul and his Italian-born mother Sonia, plus Sonia’s estranged sister-in-law Maneka and her son Varun who are BJP MPs. The brands may not always pull in the votes however, as Rahul Gandhi discovered humiliatingly when he campaigned in state elections in 2012 and 2013. The offspring’s activities bring enhanced importance to a family brand and to its longevity in the public spotlight. This strengthens politicians’ own positions because they will have people around them who can (usually but not always) be trusted.

This is not to argue that all dynasties are necessarily corrupt, nor that all the family members who go into politics do so merely for reasons of sustaining power and patronage down through the generations. And, of course, India is a democracy, so all dynastic aspirants have to win elections and confirm themselves as leaders, as the Nehru-Gandhis have done since the 1920s. Dynasties are also common in many other areas – from company promoters to film stars and lawyers. In all of them, as with politicians, individuals have to establish their own success to a greater or lesser degree.

In Western democracies, elected dynasties play a limited role. In America, the Bush family has not come to dominate the Republican Party and the charismatic Kennedys, though inlf uential, only produced one president and have not controlled the Democratic Party. The Clintons so far have only had a husband and wife with top jobs, though their daughter Chelsea admitted in a
Vogue
magazine interview that she doesn’t rule out entering politics, seeing it (in a way that is unusual in India) as ‘part of being a good person ... part of helping to build a better world [and] ensuring that we have political leaders who are committed to that premise’.
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In Britain, Winston Churchill’s heirs were high profile but failed to carve out a political niche, while Margaret Thatcher’s offspring did not try, though both the Churchills and Thatchers cashed in on their parent’s name in their careers.

Dynasty has enabled women to become leaders in Asian societies
⁴
where it would otherwise have been difficult for them to attain high office (though this has not made a significant difference to the role of other women in these countries, apart from token appointments). More often than not, the women have, like Sonia Gandhi, been the widows or daughters of assassinated former leaders. In Pakistan, there was Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was executed in 1979. She herself was assassinated in 2007 (after which her husband Asif Ali Zardari became Pakistan’s president and their son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is now entering politics).

In Bangladesh, there are two warring families headed by Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia, who have both been prime ministers. Both entered politics after the assassination of close relatives. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of Bangladesh’s independence movement and its first prime minister, was killed in a 1975 army coup along with other family members. Zia’s husband, General Ziaur Rahman, seized power after Mujib’s assassination and was himself assassinated in an abortive 1981 coup. By destabilizing each other’s governments when they are in opposition, the two women have allowed their feud to stymie the development of one of the world’s poorest countries, and both have sons or other relatives lining up to succeed them. In Sri Lanka, there was the Bandaranaike dynasty and the country is now controlled by a new dynasty led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa. In Myanmar, there is the iconic opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. The small Himalayan countries of Nepal and Bhutan used to keep it simple with hereditary monarchs, but Nepal’s was ousted in 2008,
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and Bhutan’s has been partially replaced by a democratically elected government.

The Families

The acceptance of dynasties fits with the idea of making do with things as they are – if a dynasty works, why change it! But does it work? It has certainly been supremely important in India because of the Nehru-Gandhi leadership of both the Congress party and the central government, but the country’s politics would have developed differently if the family had moved to the sidelines in the second half of the twentieth century. Despite persistent rumours – unproven and denied – that have continued to swirl around the Gandhis since the Bofors gun corruption scandal in the late 1980s, few people would suggest that the family is in politics primarily for financial or personal gain.

Positive committed motives can be ascribed to other dynastic rising stars of Rahul Gandhi’s generation such as Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot and Jitin Prasada, who are all in their thirties or early forties. Scindia is the aristocratic heir to a maharajah’s title in Madhya Pradesh and to the Gwalior parliamentary seat where his late father, Madhavrao Scindia, was an MP. From widely differing backgrounds, they are all sons of former senior Congress ministers and became ministers of state in the Congress government elected in 2009. Some were given further promotions. In the same age group, Omar Abdullah, National Conference chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir and the son and grandson of former chief ministers, is also in politics for constructive reasons, ignoring the advice passed down from his grandfather Sheikh Abdullah, Jammu and Kashmir’s first chief minister, that ‘politics is a dirty game and once you are in it, you’ll never be able to get out’.
⁶

Sachin Pilot, who is in his mid-thirties, is married to Omar Abdullah’s sister, merging two dynasties. To test his commitment, one has to go no further than his official bungalow on Delhi’s Safdarjang Road, close to the prime minister’s enclave and opposite the exclusive Gymkhana Club. There, every morning, this tall, slim and at first glance rather stern-looking politician, holds a durbar for 100 or so of his constituents from Rajasthan and for the poor from Uttar Pradesh (his family’s home state) and elsewhere. They are given chai, visit toilets (he’s installed six to accommodate them), and wait to meet this grandson of a rural Gujjar dairy farmer who went to Wharton in the US. ‘It gives them a sense of belonging,’ he told me when I interrupted a morning session.
⁷
‘About 20 per cent get the work they want done, while the others are able to talk about what they need – work transfers, police problems, family feuds, buffaloes that have run away. This is a job a politician can do.’ I wondered as I left how many other senior politicians had this dedication – probably not more than four or five.

Pilot says he had never thought of entering dynastic politics, but with hindsight it seems to have been inevitable. He told me that he made his first political speech when he was 12, at a village meeting held by his mother, who was standing for Rajasthan assembly seat. ‘They called me to speak, so I did, for about one and a half minutes. So I got recognition and later an opportunity to run in elections.’ His father, Rajesh Pilot, was a minister in the Congress governments of the 1980s and 1990s and had been considering challenging Sonia Gandhi for the party leadership not long before he was killed in a car crash in 2000. Sachin was in college in the US at the time, and his mother took over Rajesh’s parliamentary seat while Sachin finished his studies. In 2004, it seemed natural for him to stand in her place, and since then he has campaigned for the poor and especially for the Gujjars, who want to enhance their official tribal status – he was briefly jailed in 2007 when he joined mass Gujjar protests that blocked a highway to Delhi.

In 2009, he became minister of state for communications and information technology and in 2012 was promoted to be minister of corporate affairs. At the age of 36, he successfully enacted the new companies legislation by first gaining support from coalition parties and then steering it through parliament. The bill, which repealed 57-year-old laws, had been pending for about a decade and, after receiving cabinet approval at the end of 2012, it needed someone with Pilot’s energy and drive to make it become law.

In an older generation, there is Naveen Patnaik, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) chief minister of Odisha, who is in his mid-sixties. He is a rare example of dynastic success rather late in life, and he might be the last of the line. Naveen was a dilettante international socialite, mixing with people such as Jacqueline Onassis and Mick Jagger, until he fell unexpectedly into politics and became an MP in the late 1990s on the death of his father, Biju Patnaik, a former chief minister of Odisha. Naveen’s elder brother Prem, a Delhi-based businessman, was not interested in entering politics, nor was his sister Gita Mehta, a well-known author partly based in New York.

I remember Naveen talking emotionally at Delhi dinner parties about how ineffectual he felt (and was) in the face of the state’s appalling rural poverty, which he was personally encountering for the first time. He later became the state’s semi-reclusive chief minister and astounded both supporters and critics by being elected consecutively three times.
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He has managed to maintain a clean image with his electorate by reducing their exposure to petty corruption, despite allegations that his government (and specific ministers) accept bribes on large mining and other projects. He has never married, so has no heirs to succeed him. Perhaps conscious that a rival Patnaik family had lost elections because voters had tired of their dynasty, he has played down his own family links, and his brother and sister are rarely seen in Odisha. So, unless one of them changes their mind and decide to cash in on the family legacy, Naveen might close the dynasty, at least for a time.