India (20 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One other aspect concerned me: the possible effect of the 108th Constitution Amendment, passed by the upper house of the Indian Parliament in 2010 to reserve 33 percent of seats in national and state-elected bodies for women. This had been a much disputed bill, with supporters saying it would give women essential national representation, and opponents saying it would disadvantage other groups—Muslims in particular—who did not have reserved seats. The driving force behind the change in the law was Sonia Gandhi, who announced: “It was my husband Rajiv Gandhi’s vision and promise.”
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But in the light of “family politics,” would this change in the law—which might have been genuinely influential had it taken place a few decades earlier—do anything other than entrench the power of existing political families, when wives and daughters were nominated for the reserved seats? The exact implementation and details of this change were not yet clear, but it seemed inevitable that at India’s next general election the number of hereditary women MPs in the Lok Sabha would rise. Going by present trends, more than 100 extra hereditary women MPs might be elected. This was a conservative estimate: if prominent MPs like Sonia Gandhi were to run in unreserved seats, and male MPs who were obliged to step down were to hand over their seats to their wives or daughters, the number of hereditary women MPs in the next Lok Sabha could cross 150.

Congress presently had 208 MPs, of whom 23 were women. This was the same as average, 11 percent. So far so low; now comes the difference: 19 out of the 23 Congress women MPs were hereditary (and of these, 4 were hyperhereditary). This left only 4 Congress women MPs who appeared to have reached Parliament on their own merit: Meenakshi Natrajan, Annu Tandon, and two other stalwarts. Who were they? Dr. Girija Vyas, the president of the National Commission for Women, and Chandresh Kumari Katoch, who turned out to be hereditary by another measure, being the daughter of none other than our old friend Hanwant Singh, the Maharaja of Jodhpur.
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The Indian republic was founded on the truth that power should not be handed over by the colonial rulers to the princes. India’s next general election was likely to return not a Lok Sabha, a house of the people, but a Vansh Sabha, a house of dynasty. Nehru, Patel, V. P. Menon and others went to enormous lengths to make sure heredity was knocked aside as a criterion for rule, and to ensure the 554 princely states were absorbed into a modern and democratic nation. The Indian Constitution was based on the principle that sovereignty was derived from the people.
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J
OHN
M
AYNARD
K
EYNES
was full of surprises. Not long before the First World War, he found himself working at the India Office, without enough to do. He had recently graduated in mathematics from Cambridge, and the new job involved a six-hour working day with an hour’s break for luncheon, though it was sometimes necessary to work from eleven to one on a Saturday, which was offset by two months of holiday, bank holidays and time off for Derby Day. It was a giant department of state in London—the network of offices filled 100,000 cubic metres—overseeing the government of India by remote control. In one of the oddest methods of colonial administration ever conceived (the system would be reformed in 1919) India was at this time run by an executive council based in England. When he attended a committee of the council for the first time in 1907, Keynes noted: “The thing is simply government by dotardry; at least half of those present showed manifest signs of senile decay, and the rest didn’t speak.”
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