Inheritance of power

Sonia Gandhi has followed the well-established tradition of the Hindu patriarchal system by publicly nominating...

Sonia Gandhi has followed the well-established tradition of the Hindu patriarchal system by publicly nominating, on November 17, at a formal AICC session, her male child, Rahul Gandhi, as the inheritor of her assets — like the leadership of the Congress party. It is a befitting reply to Hindu communal political outfits who have attacked her for being a foreigner. In this regard, she has chosen to conduct herself like a true Hindu.

But Sonia Gandhi is not alone. Almost every party has religiously followed this time-tested tradition, including a rationalist atheist like M. Karunanidhi and a Sikh politician like Parkash Singh Badal. Whether NCP’s Sharad Pawar would have declared his daughter his inheritor if he had had a son, is a moot question.

It needs to be stated here that except for the cadre-based, ideologically-oriented communist parties — and to some extent the Sangh Parivar — every political formation is flush with funds. How can leaders keep complete control over the financial resources of a party without nominating a ‘successor’? Politics is expected to define the socio-economic goals for society, and parties concretise their societal programmes with a view to winning elections and implementing their programmes. Yet self-appointed practitioners of ‘secular democracy’ have not hesitated to extend support to practitioners of Hindutva politics, or actively compromised with obscurantist religious elements. Serious ideological politics has, thus, been displaced by the politics of opportunism; and MPs, MLAs, ministers, et al, have come to regard politics as an opportunity to maximise private benefits for themselves and their children. If senior politicians have tasted the fruits of power and if they have found that it is also financially productive, the logical step is to hand over the ‘business’ to their children. It is not without reason that the Congress and other parties are pressured by political veterans to nominate their children as candidates so that the ‘succession’ can be expedited.

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When Lalu Yadav had to serve time in jail for the fodder scam, he could not have handed over power to anyone but his wife. Such illustrations can be multiplied to substantiate the argument that prosperous political shops with are patented by the ‘shop owners’. Modern democracy based on the principle of rule by the people is a product of great struggles against the practitioners of the divine right to kings, but in Indian democracy, the children of political families inherit the ‘empire’ of their parents.

C. Wright Mills once wrote a scathing condemnation of American democracy, describing it as power exercised by the ruling elite. In India, the ruling elite happens to be the Nehru-Gandhis, the Scindias, the Mulayam Singh parivar, and others — whether in Kashmir or Tamil Nadu. Sonia Gandhi is not alone.