When you have no clear criteria for candidate selection and no clear ability to maintain organisational loyalty, dynasty becomes a substitute for loyalty, Kanchan Chandra, academic and professor of politics at New York University, tells Aditi Phadnis
Your book has a provocative, almost contradictory title: Democratic Dynasties. What gave you the idea of writing a book on the issue and what does it say?
The idea came in 2009: I had started collecting data on the 2009 parliament after looking at the large number of dynastic MPs in that parliament. There was at the time no comparative contextualisation of dynastic politics in India, people spoke of it as if it were culturally unique. And within political science, even though democracy is probably the best studied subject in my discipline, no one really had even started looking at dynastic politics because it seemed as if it was an antithesis of democracy.
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Since then a number of people have started looking at dynastic politics in modern democracies. In India Patrick French's book also came out. And although we are in an age which is almost the age of democracy - there are more democracies today than there were 30 or 40 or 50 years ago - it is clear that you also have this entrenched space for dynastic politics in these democracies.
In some countries you have an institutionalised space for monarchy or the aristocracy, like the House of Lords in the UK or the House of Chiefs in Zambia. But then you also have countries where while there is no space set aside for political families institutionally, they are fighting their way up through elections.
One point that the book makes is that dynasticism in India is not just about the Nehru-Gandhis. In Parliament now, on average in this century, about a quarter of the MPs have been dynastic. It was 20 per cent in 2004, 30 per cent in 2009 and 22 per cent in 2014. But India sits squarely in the middle of all the countries for which we have data. So we are not unique. At the high end is the Philippines - 50 per cent dynastic. At the low end is Canada at 3 per cent. So, we're just trying to turn the word "dynasty" in modern democracies from an epithet to an object of study.
And your point about it being almost contradictory: one of the findings about the data in India we've coded is about the age when the first member of a dynasty entered Indian Parliament, to see how old these dynasties are. And what is very clear in the Indian context is, India's dynasties have been created by democracy. There are very, very few dynasties that are legacies of the colonial period. There are very few royal families. The old aristocracy has almost disappeared from representative politics. Only 3 per cent of the Indian Parliament in the 21st century, on average, represents pre-existing royal families. And these royal families are only 10 per cent of India's dynastic class. Ninety per cent of India's dynasties have been created through the electoral process, typically after 1960.
We don't have enough comparative data on the extent to which old elites have survived democracies elsewhere. But in Pakistan, for example, there is a greater space for the old landed elite that has reinvented itself in democratic politics although there are new elites among Pakistan's dynasties also. But India's dynasties are a creation of its democracy and its democratic institutions, particularly its political parties.
So if the BJP says that it is fighting against the perpetuation of dynasties and attacks the Gandhi family on those grounds, does it have a leg to stand on?
At one level, yes it does, because if you look at the apex level of politics, no BJP prime minister has been dynastic - there are only two to choose from, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi, and they do not come from political families. No BJP president has been dynastic unlike the Congress party.
The BJP's MPs are also less dynastic than the Congress's. Right now, 48 per cent of Congress MPs have a dynastic background and only 15 per cent of BJP MPs.
But there are several areas where there is clear evidence of dynasticism in the BJP, too. First, although a smaller percentage of MPs among the BJP are dynastic than the Congress, since the denominator is so high - the Congress has only 46 MPs while the BJP has 283 - the majority of the dynastic MPs in the current Parliament now come from the BJP, not the Congress.
Also, many BJP chief ministers might not have been dynastic but they have been followed by their families in politics. And Vajpayee's niece and nephew have entered politics as well.
Interestingly, in 2006, when Yashodhara Raje Scindia entered politics in Madhya Pradesh, it was a BJP government that passed an order requiring that she be called Shrimant (your Highness). In the end, there was so much opposition that she herself backtracked and said she would happy to be called Mrs. Scindia. So if you look below the apex levels of politics in the BJP, it's clear that there is a dynastic element there. It's just less in degree than the Congress.
If we think about the prospects for dynasticism in the BJP in the future, there are two countervailing trends. In the book, we link the maintenance and sustenance of dynastic politics in India to weakly organised parties. When you have no clear criteria for candidate selection and no clear ability to maintain organisational loyalty, dynasty becomes a substitute for loyalty. But the BJP is a better organised party than the Congress. So that might suggest that with time, the level of dynasticism in the BJP will remain lower than the Congress.
On the other hand, the experience of power also produces a greater tendency towards dynasticism. So one might say, one reason the BJP is less dynastic is that it just hasn't been in power long enough. And if you look at BJP chief ministers, the fact that many of them now have dynastic heirs suggests that maybe with the experience of power there will be greater dynasticism in the BJP, too.
How do political people in this day and age justify regency… the fact that they are taking advantage of birth, entitlement and other such claims?
It is indeed a regency, a new aristocracy. And it is linked to birth, it is not only or primarily a matter of qualification. If we look at the actual qualifications: asking questions in Parliament or participation in the debates or the utilisation of MPLADS funds, we don't find any difference between dynastic or non-dynastic MPs. The data doesn't show any particular advantage that dynastic MPs have when it comes to qualifications.
But if you look at how candidates of political parties campaign, it is interesting. There's a chapter in the book by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph that argues that when dynastic candidates campaign on the basis of hierarchical loyalties or some sense of entitlement, they do badly. So when scions of political families campaign, it is always using the egalitarian rhetoric of democracy, it is always with reference to service and dynasty comes in only to say: the experience of my family means that I have the qualification to rule (Jayant Sinha particularly has made that point). It is also the matter of a political brand. There's a quote in the book from the Badal family where Sukhbir Badal says: "the family system runs because of credibility… why do people want to buy a Mercedes car? Or a BMW car? Because they know the credibility of that car. You come out with a new car that nobody knows, nobody will buy it."
In terms of caste, what is the dynasty pattern?
Over time, there has been the subalternisation of Indian parliament with decreasing representation of the upper castes. But between the 2009 and 2014 parliaments, the representation of the forward castes has stayed the same, which is about 43 per cent, despite the massive change in party seats. Second, although the numbers of the upper castes have come down in Parliament compared to the 1980s, they are still significantly over-represented. We don't know what the proportion of the upper castes to the population is, it is quite small. Still, if you have a parliament that has 43 per cent upper castes, it is a significant over-representation.
When you come to dynastic MPs, it turns out that upper castes are even more over-represented in the dynastic class. They are 43 per cent of all MPs in the 2014 parliament but 53 per cent of all dynastic MPs. So if we think of the dynastic class as representing an inner circle of power, we have a situation where there are double circles of exclusion. Upper castes are already over-represented in Parliament and then over-represented even more in dynastic membership of Parliament.
Subaltern groups like Dalits, Adivasis, lower castes and Muslims also have significant numbers of dynasties among them. But they do not only a small share of the dynastic advantage and they have to work harder to get it. They are not as likely to obtain lateral entry at a higher level as Hindu upper castes.
But for those groups which do not have reservations, specifically women and Muslims and also young people, dynastic ties end up providing a channel for entry that might otherwise have been even more blocked. In the absence of dynasty, you might have had even fewer Muslims, women and young people in politics.