India (19 page)

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.”
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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.
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The youngest minister, 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.”
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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.”
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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?

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?

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.
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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?)

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.