The last Royalists

LINE AND LENGTH

An economist friend of mine, whose blind belief in time series data is matched only by his lack of faith in history, often berates me for looking for historical parallels to explain the present. He refuses to admit, however, that context is as important for time series data as it is for history.

This article is dedicated to him since he is also a strong Congress supporter. He is convinced that the entry of Priyanka Vadra and Rahul Gandhi has put the wind up the BJP and that the battle for Raisina Hill is now all over bar the shouting.

Election results may well prove him right. But it is nevertheless instructive, given the context, to point out some interesting parallels in world history. These relate to attempts to restore the old order (ancien regime) and how they came to a sorry end.

The flaw, however, lay not so much in the attempts at restoration as in the idea these attempts represented. This idea was rooted in the belief, a la the Congress, that a particular family had a natural or even divine right to rule.

Thus, there was, to give him his proper name, Prince Charles Edward Louis Philip Casimir Stuart, known to posterity as Bonnie Prince Charlie. His father had been James II of England, who was deposed by a predominantly Protestant parliament when it turned out that he was a secret Catholic.

Ever the pragmatic traders, the Brits simply imported a Protestant king from Holland. This fellow was known as William of Orange and he replaced James II, who ran off to Rome where the putative Charles III was born in 1720.

James II had never accepted that England had changed forever and that it was all over for him and his family. He brainwashed Charles well who, with French help, even invaded Scotland in 1745 and had some initial successes there, not unlike Sonia Gandhi winning in the Assembly elections between 1998 and 2003. But, like her, he was given poor advice and was soon chased off back to France, and thence to Rome from where he had come.

France also provides an excellent example of promoting an idea whose time had gone. This happened in 1815 after the British had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.

They "" and the rest of the Europeans "" were scared out of their wits that the French virus of Republicanism (guillotining the royalty and the aristocracy, that is) would spread. So they supported Louis XVIII, the son of Louis XV who had had his head chopped off after the revolution of 1789.

Although he wasn't a bad chap personally, Louis XVIII had two problems. One, he was seen as a proxy for foreigners and two, his support base consisted of ultra-royalists in a country that had lost all patience with the idea of hereditary rulers. The parallel with the Congress is striking, even to the extent that it was a coterie representing discredited ideas that ran France in his name.

This restoration of the Bourbons, in spite of their having "learnt nothing and forgotten nothing" lasted for nearly half a century. (So even though things happen more quickly now, the BJP had probably better watch out. My economist could well have the last laugh). But it was a very troubled half-century and the kings survived only because they abdicated real power to what would today be called a coalition of "interests".

Space does not allow me to give the details of all the European monarchies. But rest assured, exactly the same sort of thing happened there as well. The pattern was that first there was the death of legitimacy, then the ouster of the royals, followed by the attempt by them to regain power, and the eventual acceptance by them and their followers that the show was finally over.

The Russian monarchy was the last to go when the Communists seized power in 1917. Amazingly, however, though the royalty went the idea and practice of monarchy lingered on for another 70 years. The Communists simply became the new royalists with a succession of kings from Stalin to Gorbachev.

True, in an ideological concession to orthodoxy they chose non-hereditary kings, but the monarchical nature of the new Russian dispensation "" "I am the state" "" is essentially beyond dispute, right down to courtly (or politbureau) intrigues.

I think this is why our own Communists are so fond of the Gandhi family. To the extent that they have no problem with the idea of the hereditary right to rule, they don't even make a token genuflection to orthodoxy.

In that sense they are more like the Communists of North Korea "" one Kim after another. Charles X of France, who was the royalists' royalist, would not just have approved of our commies, he would have been proud of them.

Another interesting aspect of this history is the basically similar way in which the British and the Soviet communists approached the issue. Both simply changed the claimants without discarding the idea itself. This ensured its longevity, in Britain till now and in Russia till 1991. Several western European countries have done the same thing.

The odd thing is that Indian history doesn't conform to this pattern of a hereditary right to rule. That is what makes the Congress thing even stranger. Political power in India has flowed not out of the absolute legitimacy of the hereditary right to rule but more usually out of a successful fight to wrest it.

What Aurangzeb did to Dara Shikoh was an extreme example of such fights. But in the Congress there aren't even rival claimants to power. It is no longer Indian even in that negative sense.

If you examine this history further, you will find there are three elements in it. The first is the very idea of the hereditary right to rule. The second is those who claim this right. And the third element consists of those who accept this claim and promote it.

The history also shows that once the idea has been discredited, the second and third elements almost always come to grief. It takes time but grief is always the end result.

So one may well wonder how long it is going to take for the Congress to go the way of all royalist parties.