Democratic Dynasties : State, Party and Family in Contemporary Indian Politics 9781107123441, 2015033498

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Democratic Dynasties

Dynastic politics, usually presumed to be the antithesis of democracy, is a routine aspect of politics in many modern democracies. This book introduces a new theoretical perspective on dynasticism in democracies, using original data on twenty-first century Indian parliaments. It argues that the roots of dynastic politics lie at least in part in modern democratic institutions – the state and political parties – which give political families a leg up in the electoral process. It also proposes a rethinking of the view that dynastic politics is a violation of democracy, showing that it can reinforce some aspects of democracy while violating others. Finally, this book suggests that both reinforcement and violation are the products, not of some property intrinsic to political dynasties, but of the institutional environment from which those dynasties emerge. kanchan chandra is Professor, Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University.

Democratic Dynasties State, Party, and Family in Contemporary Indian Politics Edited by

Kanchan Chandra New York University

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107123441 © Cambridge University Press 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Names: Chandra, Kanchan, 1971– editor of compilation. Title: Democratic dynasties : state, party, and family in contemporary Indian politics / edited by Kanchan Chandra. Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015033498 | ISBN 9781107123441 (Hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Political parties–India. | Politicians–Family relationships–India. | India–Politics and government. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Government / International. Classification: LCC JQ298.A1 D46 2016 | DDC 320.954–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033498 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-12344-1 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memory of Lloyd I. Rudolph (1927–2016) and Susanne H. Rudolph (1930–2015)

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of contributors List of acronyms Acknowledgments Prologue ka n ch a n ch a n dr a 1

page ix xi xiv xvii xx 1

Democratic dynasties: state, party, and family in contemporary Indian politics ka n ch a n ch a n dr a

12

2

The “old regime” confronts democracy ll o yd i . r u do l p h a nd su s a n n e h . r u do l p h

56

3

A sign of backwardness? Where dynastic leaders are elected in India 83 f r an c es ca r . je ns e ni u s

4

Dynasticism across Indian political parties ad a m zi e g f e l d

105

5

Women, dynasties, and democracy in India am r i t a b as u

136

6

Disadvantaged groups, reservation, and dynastic politics s i m o n c h au c h ar d

173

7

Why “Forward Castes” have a dynastic advantage: intra-party politics and co-ethnic favoritism ka n ch a n ch a n dr a

207

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8

Contents

Dynasty and “paths to power” a nj al i t h o m a s b oh l k e n

Appendix Index

238

266 270

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2

Party and dynasty in Indian parliaments (2004–14) page 16 Dynastic MPs in the 2004 parliament 19 Dynastic MPs in the 2009 parliament 20 Dynastic MPs in the 2014 parliament 21 Dynastic and royal parliamentarians in the 14th Lok Sabha 90 Dynastic and royal parliamentarians in the 15th Lok Sabha 91 Dynastic and royal parliamentarians in the 16th Lok Sabha 92 Location of princely states in India before independence 93 Local rootedness of dynastic parliamentarians in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabha 94 Proportion urban and dynasticism in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabha 96 Proportion marginal workers and dynasticism in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabha 99 Literacy rate and dynasticism in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabha 100 Dynasticism by party 106 Dynasticism by party age 112 Dynasticism by mode of decision-making 118 Dynasticism by leadership succession 121 Dynasticism by age, internal autocracy, and dynastic succession 123 Dynasticism and party size 127 Dynasticism and party success 128 Dynasticism and economic indicators across states 130 Dynasticism by region and party 132 Dynasticism by region in Congress and the BJP 133 Dynasty and women MPs in the 2004 parliament 138 Dynasty and women MPs in the 2009 parliament 139 Dynasty and women MPs in the 2014 parliament 140 Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for SCs (2004) 177 Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for SCs (2009) 178 ix

x

6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 8.1

List of figures

Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for SCs (2014) Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for STs (2004) Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for STs (2009) Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for STs (2014) Box plot of age of dynastic and non-dynastic MPs (15th Lok Sabha) 8.2 Box plot of age of dynastic and non-dynastic MPs (14th Lok Sabha)

179 180 181 182 247 248

Tables

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 6.1 6.2 6.3

Dynastic MPs in Indian parliaments (2004–14) page 16 Percent dynastic MPs by party (2004–14) 17 Percent dynastic MPs by region (2004–14) 18 Percent dynastic MPs by type of constituency (2004–14) 22 Percent dynastic MPs by gender (2004–14) 22 Percent dynastic MPs from across ethnic categories (2004–14) 22 Royal families as a percent of dynastic class (2004–14) 25 Characteristics of dynasties in the Indian parliament (2004) 25 Composition of dynastic class by party (2004–14) 26 Composition of dynastic class by region (2004–14) 26 Composition of dynastic class by gender (2004–14) 27 Composition of dynastic class by ethnicity (2004–14) 27 Attributes and performance of dynastic and non-dynastic MPs 31 Winning margin of dynastic MPs (2004–14) 45 Categories used in the chapter 87 Number of cases in the dataset for each category of parliamentary constituencies 89 Women candidates and MPs in Lok Sabha elections, 1951–2014 144 Representation of women in lower/single house of national parliaments in South Asia in most recent elections 145 Profile of male and female MPs (2004–14) 146 Profile of dynastic and non-dynastic female MPs (2004–14) 146 Women in Congress decision-making structures (2014) 152 Women in BJP decision-making structures (2014) 153 Distribution of women MPs by political party (2004–14) 158 Percentage of dynastic MPs elected in general vs. reserved constituencies (14th LS) 183 Percentage of dynastic MPs elected in general vs. reserved constituencies (15th LS) 183 Percentage of dynastic MPs elected in general vs. reserved constituencies (16th LS) 184 xi

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List of tables

6.4 Breakdown of dynastic MPs by party (10 biggest parties) – 14th Lok Sabha. 6.5 Breakdown of dynastic MPs by party (10 biggest parties) – 15th Lok Sabha. 6.6 Breakdown of dynastic MPs by party (10 biggest parties) – 16th Lok Sabha. 6.7 Number and percentage (in parentheses) of SC/ST members of the INC (CWC) and BJP executives from 1972 to 2002 6.8 Percentage of SC/ST members in the executive of the Madhya Pradesh INC 7.1 Ethnic dominance in political parties in the Indian parliament 7.2 Classification of parties based on only on identity of leadership (2004–14) 7.3 Classification of parties based only on identity of plurality of MPs (2004–14) 7.4(a) Profile of MPs from different party types (2004) (Leadership) 7.4(b) Profile of MPs from different party types (2004) (Plurality) 7.5(a) Profile of MPs from different party types (2009) (Leadership) 7.5(b) Profile of MPs from different party types (2009) (Plurality) 7.6(a) Profile of MPs from different party types (2014) (Leadership) 7.6(b) Profile of MPs from different party types (2014) (Plurality) 7.7(a) Proportion of dynastic MPs from Forward Caste parties (Leadership) 7.7(b) Proportion of dynastic MPs from Forward Caste parties (Plurality) 7.8(a) Proportion of dynastic MPs from Backward Caste parties (Leadership) 7.8(b) Proportion of dynastic MPs from Backward Caste parties (Plurality) 7.9(a) Proportion of dynastic MPs from Scheduled Caste parties (Leadership) 7.9(b) Proportion of dynastic MPs from Scheduled Caste parties (Plurality) 7.10(a) Proportion of dynastic MPs from Scheduled Tribe parties (Leadership) 7.10(b) Proportion of dynastic MPs from Scheduled Tribe parties (Plurality) 7.11(a) Proportion of dynastic MPs from Muslim parties (Leadership) 7.11(b) Proportion of dynastic MPs from Muslim parties (Plurality)

191 192 193 195 196 212 213 214 216 216 217 217 217 218 219 219 220 220 221 221 222 222 224 224

List of tables

8.1.1 Relationship between dynasty and experience at state or local level (15th Lok Sabha) 8.1.2 Relationship between dynasty and experience at state or local level (14th Lok Sabha) 8.2 Experience at lower levels conditional on presence of dynastic ties 8.3 State and local level experience conditional on dynasty 8.4 Education and dynasty 8.5 Percentage of dynasts and non-dynasts with political experience at lower levels of government, conditional on education 8.6 Proportion of MPs in each category with experience at the state or local level (15th Lok Sabha) 8.7 Proportion of MPs in each category with experience at the state or local level (14th Lok Sabha) 8.8 Level of government of dynastic origins and political experience (15th Lok Sabha) 8.9 Level of government of dynastic origins and political experience (14th Lok Sabha) 8.10 Type of family member, dynastic ties and political experience (15th Lok Sabha) 8.11 Type of family member, dynastic ties and political experience (14th Lok Sabha) 8.12 Dynasty and political experience by party organization (15th Lok Sabha) 8.13 Dynasty and political experience by party organization (14th Lok Sabha)

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243 243 244 246 250

251 252 252 255 256 258 258 260 261

Contributors

amrita basu (PhD Columbia University 1984) is the Domenic J. Paino 1955 Professor of Political Science and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College. She is the author of Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Women’s Activism in India, Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India, and six edited or co-edited books. She has received awards from the Fulbright Foundation, United States Institute for Peace, Social Science Research Council, American Institute of Indian Studies and the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. anjali thomas bohlken (PhD New York University, 2010) is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. She specializes in comparative politics and political economy with an emphasis on India. She is the author of Democratization from Above: The Logic of Local Democracy in the Developing World, which examines the political motivations behind the establishment of democratic panchayats in india. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Theoretical Politics and the Journal of Peace Research. kanchan chandra (PhD 2000, Harvard University) is Professor, Wilf Family Department of Politics at NYU. She is lead author of Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics, and author of Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Headcounts in India. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Princeton University Program in Democracy and Development, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, the SSRC-Macarthur Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. simon chauchard (PhD 2011, New York University) is an assistant professor of Political Science at Dartmouth College whose recent work has appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly and The American Political xiv

List of contributors

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Science Review. He specializes in comparative politics and political psychology with an emphasis on India. He is author of the forthcoming book Political Representation and Intergroup Relations in Rural India, which explores the psychological and behavioral impact of local-level reservations for members of the scheduled castes. francesca r. jensenius (PhD 2013, University of California Berkeley) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). She is the author of a number of articles on elections and political representation in India, published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Asian Survey, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Party Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics and Studies in Indian Politics. Her work has been supported by grants or fellowships from, among others, the Norwegian Research Council, the Center for Causal Inference at UC Berkeley, American Institute of Indian Studies, the Norway-America Association, and Fulbright. lloyd i. rudolph (PhD, Harvard University 1956) was Emeritus Professor of the University of Chicago’s Department of Political Science. He co-authored eight books with Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, including The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India [1967]; [1980]; Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma [1983]; In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State [1987]; and, most recently, Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home [2006]. He also edited or co-edited and contributed to Cultural Politics in India [1984]; The Idea of Rajasthan [1994] and Experiencing the State [2006]. His work was supported by grants or fellowships from the MacArthur, Ford, National Science and Guggenheim Foundations, the American Institute of Indian Studies [AIIS], the National Endowment for the Humanities [NEH] and the Fulbright program. He was awarded (with Susanne Rudolph) the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in 2014. susanne h. rudolph (PhD Harvard 1955) was the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science Emerita. Her books include Transnational Religion and Fading States; Education and Politics in India; In Pursuit of Lakshmi: the Political Economy of the Indian State; and Essays on Rajputana. Rudolph also edited Agrarian Power and Agricultural Productivity in South Asia. Her work was supported by grants or fellowships from the Ford, National Science and Guggenheim Foundations, the American Institute of Indian Studies [AIIS], and the Fulbright program. She was awarded (with Lloyd Rudolph) the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in 2014.

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List of contributors

adam ziegfeld (PhD 2009, MIT) is the International Council Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. He previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Chicago and Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He is author of Why Regional Parties? Clientelism, Elites, and the Indian Party System, as well as articles on electoral politics that have appeared in Comparative Politics, Electoral Studies, Asian Survey and Party Politics.

Acronyms

AAP AD AGP AIADMK AICC AIFB AIMIM AINRC AITC AUDF BAMCEF BC BJD BJP BJS BNP BPF BSP BVA CEC CPI CPM DMK DS-4 FC IFDP INC IND INLD JD(S)

Aam Aadmi Party Apna Dal Asom Gana Parishad All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam All India Congress Committee All India Forward Bloc All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen All India N.R. Congress All India Trinamool Congress Assam United Democratic Front Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation Backward Caste Biju Janata Dal Bharatiya Janata Party Bharatiya Jan Sangh Bharatiya Navshakti Party Bodoland People’s Front Bahujan Samaj Party Bahujan Vikas Aaghadi Central Election Committee Communist Party of India Communist Party of India (Marxist) Dravida Munnetra Kazagham Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangarsh Samiti Forward Caste Indian Federal Democratic Party Indian National Congress Independents Indian National Lok Dal Janata Dal (Secular)

xvii

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List of acronyms

JD(U) JKN JKPDP JMM JVM KEC KLP KMPP LJNSP LJP MDMK MLA MLALADS MP MPLADS MNF MUL NCP NLP NPF NPP NREGA OBC PCC PMK RJD RLD RPI(A) RRP RSP RSS SAD SC SDF SHS SJP(R) SP ST SWP TDP

Janata Dal (United) Jammu and Kashmir National Conference Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party Jharkhand Mukti Morcha Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik) Kerala Congress Krishikar Lok Party Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party Lok Janashakti Party Lok Janashakti Party Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazagham Member of Legislative Assembly Member of Legislative Assembly Local Area Development Scheme Member of Parliament Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme Mizoram National Front Muslim League Kerala State Committee Nationalist Congress Party National Loktantrik Party Nagaland Peoples Front National People’s Party National Rural Employment Guarantee Act Other Backward Classes Pradesh Congress Committee Pattali Makkal Katchi Rashtriya Janata Dal Rashtriya Lok Dal Republican Party of India (Ambedkar) Ram Rajya Parishad Revolutionary Socialist Party Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Shiromani Akali Dal Scheduled Caste Sikkim Democratic Front Shiv Sena Samajwadi Janata Party (Rashtriya) Samajwadi Party Scheduled Tribe Swabhimani Paksha Telugu Desam Party

List of acronyms

TRS VCK YSRCP

Telangana Rashtra Samithi Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi Yuvajana Shramika Rythu Congress Party

xix

Acknowledgments

This book began in 2009, as a detour from a study of the relationship between ethnic politics and democracy in South Asia. While in India to study that subject, I was distracted by several aspects of democratic politics in postliberalization India which could not be reduced to ethnicity but had important connections with it. Dynastic politics is one of them. It was impossible to ignore the large number of MPs with a dynastic background elected to the 2009 parliament. Dynasticism in parliament was accompanied by dynasticism in parties, cabinets, past prime ministerships, chief ministerships, state legislatures, and panchayats (village councils). Why were there so many dynastic politicians in India? How did dynastic politics relate to ethnic politics, if at all? And what did it mean for both democratic practice and democratic theory? The first step in answering those questions was collecting the data. I began collecting data on the family backgrounds of Indian MPs with the assistance of a dedicated group of NYU students among whom Wamiq Umaira, Arthur Won Hai Chan, Sapana Gandhi, and Aeshna Badruzzaman deserve special mention. I was joined later by Anjali Bohlken from the University of British Columbia (UBC), and Simon Chauchard of Dartmouth College, assisted by Jeet Chatterjee, Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki, Ariel Rouhi, Chinmay Thakkar at UBC and Soumya Gupta, Aparna Krishnan, and Teva Levens at Dartmouth. Working together, we created the substantially expanded dataset that now informs the book. This dataset covers three parliaments, elected in 2004, 2009, and 2014. It is the most extensive dataset that we are aware of on the attributes of individual MPs in India, and of the constituencies, dynasties, and parties to which they belong. I discussed early patterns in the data in articles published in Seminar (April 2011) (with Wamiq Umaira) and Economic and Political Weekly (Vol XLIX, No. 28, July 12, 2014). As the data took shape, I invited several colleagues to use them to identify, interpret, and theorize about some of the patterns that they saw in dynastic politics in India and its relationship to democracy. Collaboration held the promise of producing work of greater depth, range, and quality than one person could do alone. I asked them to focus, not on testing hypotheses, but xx

Acknowledgments

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on suggesting concepts, establishing and contextualizing basic facts about dynastic politics, building hypotheses to explain these facts, and exploring the implications of these facts and hypotheses for democratic theory. We know so little about the working of dynastic politics in modern democracies that this seemed the obvious first order task, after which we and others could move on to testing some of the hypotheses suggested here. This book is the result. All chapters use the same data to address different aspects of dynastic politics in India and its relationship with democracy. Our reading of the data is contextual, informed by party statements and documents, political memoirs, interviews, and newspaper reports. And although we worked independently, to the extent that the work of social scientists who share a discipline and an area specialization can be said to be independent, our conclusions point in the same direction, with differences in nuance and emphasis: Dynastic politics in India is fundamentally shaped by modern democratic institutions and, in particular, the state and political parties. This institutionally shaped form of dynastic politics, paradoxically, reinforces some aspects of democracy while subverting others. When we began work on this project, dynastic politics in modern democracies was remarkably understudied. But in the five years since, it has begun receiving sustained attention. In 2009, a standard-setting article on political dynasties in the United States was published by Ernesto Dal Bo, Pedro Dal Bo, and Jason Snyder (Dal Bo, Dal Bo and Snyder 2009). In India, Patrick French’s book, India: A Portrait, stimulated a lively discussion of dynastic politics (French 2011). Several empirically driven research projects on dynastic politics are now underway, including by my colleague Pablo Querubin at NYU, who studies dynastic politics in twentieth-century Philippines, and by Daniel Smith at Harvard University, whose work creates the broadest comparative framework of which I am aware within which to situate dynastic politics in individual countries. This literature establishes that dynastic politics is in fact an entrenched feature of modern democracies – India is not unique – and while the questions it asks are varied, the answers also suggest that democratic institutions and dynastic politics can reinforce, as well as undermine, each other. We hope that this book creates a foundation for theorizing about, and testing for, these interactions between institutions, democracy, and dynasty. For conversations, and sometimes written comments, that have contributed to the arguments made here, I am grateful to Adam Auerbach, Nathaniel Beck, Rikhil Bhavnani, Bruno Biais, Isabelle Clark-Deces, Patrick Egan, Sanford Gordon, Nancy Hite, Yoshiko Herrera, Rob Jenkins, Anirudh Krishna, Melanie Manion, Jonathan Nagler, Pablo Querubin, Adam Ramey, Cyrus Samii, Jake Shapiro, Daniel Smith, Gopal Vasudev, Adam Ziegfeld, the two anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press, and the contributors to this volume.

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Acknowledgments

I learnt a great deal from sustained discussions with Anjali Bohlken, with whom I have also collaborated on separate work which conducts a statistical test of some of the arguments made here. I thank colleagues for invitations to present a separate paper on dynastic politics at seminars or panels that they organized, which invariably improved the quality of the arguments made in this book too: Rikhil Bhavnani (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Atul Kohli and Deborah Yashar (Princeton Seminar on Democracy and Development), Daniel Smith (Mid-West Political Science Association Meetings), and Zeynep Bulutgil (Tufts University). Tejbir Singh and Harsh Sethi’s invitation to guest-edit an issue of Seminar on “Dynasties in South Asia” in 2011 provided an important opportunity to explore early versions of the arguments and data. The themes and data of an essay in that issue, co-authored with Wamiq Umaira, have been considerably expanded, revised and in some cases corrected, in this volume. The unstinting support of Aruna Magier, NYU’s South Asia librarian, and Himanshu Mistry, the Faculty Technology Specialist at NYU’s GIS-Data Service Studio), made a large difference to this book. Milan Vaishnav generously allowed us to use the data he had compiled from election affidavits on the criminal background of Indian MPs. Francesca R. Jensenius shared her data on changes in the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies before and after a new delimitation exercise completed in 2008 and also created all the maps used in this book using data from www.mlinfomap.com acquired by the NYU library. At Cambridge University Press, I am especially grateful to our editor, Lucy Rhymer, and to Chloe Harris and Anand Shanmugam for shepherding the book through the production process. The research that informs this book would not have been possible without the time and resources made possible by several institutions. Fellowships from the Guggenheim and Carnegie Foundations funded the original project on ethnicity and democracy, which generated several others, including this book. The creative freedom those grants provided has been invaluable in all of my recent research. The Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where I was a fellow when this project began, and the Program for Democracy and Development at Princeton University, where I put the finishing touches on it, created research environments that were both peaceful and stimulating. I am especially grateful to NYU’s Department of Politics for time, resources and a remarkably stimulating intellectual community. The élan with which our administrative director, Diana Barnes, does impossible things makes my work possible, and the camaraderie of my colleagues makes it a pleasure. kanchan chandra

Prologue Kanchan Chandra

The term “democratic dynasties” in India usually brings to mind the NehruGandhi family, whose members have occupied the Prime Ministership and led the Congress party for most of India’s independent history. But this book is about a different sort of political dynasty, less famous than the Nehru-Gandhis, but more important for understanding contemporary democratic politics in India. One such dynasty is the Chavan family. Ashok Shankarrao Chavan was elected to India’s 2014 parliament from Nanded in the state of Maharashtra. He is the son of Shankarrao Bhavrao Chavan, who, in a political career that spanned almost five decades, was an MP (Member of Parliament), an MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) from Maharashtra, Chief Minister of Maharashtra, and a cabinet minister in the national government. The elder Chavan, initially trained as an advocate, won his first election, as an MLA, in 1957, a decade after India became democratic. When the younger Chavan came of age, his father, by then an MP, resigned his seat, to which his son succeeded in a by-election. The father did not exit politics when his son entered. He relocated to the indirectly elected upper house of the Indian parliament, and continued to hold ministerial positions in the national cabinet. His son followed in his footsteps in the meantime, eventually also becoming Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Shankarrao Bhavrao Chavan died in 2004. But other Chavan family members now active in electoral politics. Ashok Chavan’s wife, Ameeta Chavan, was elected to the legislative assembly in 2014. His now estranged brother-in-law Bhaskar Rao Patil has been a multiple-term MP from the family seat of Nanded. The Chavans of Nanded and other families like them, such as the Reddys of Kadapa, the Naiks of Thane, the Yadavs of Saifai, the Abdullahs of Ganderbal, the Gogois of Kaliabor, the Dhumals of Hamirpur, or the Sinhas of Hazaribagh, are the type of dynasty that this book is about. These dynasties are found in virtually all parties, regions, and social groups. Their founders belong not to an old pre-democratic ruling class, but a new elite created through the democratic process. Their members occupy not just the top offices in legislatures and parties but also secondary and tertiary positions burrowed deep 1

2

Kanchan Chandra

within. These families often have several members simultaneously active in politics, sprawling across representative institutions at multiple levels. And while they do not have the national and international visibility of the NehruGandhis, many have strong local roots in their home constituencies. Some have acquired considerable influence in regional politics as well. This book theorizes about the causes and consequences of these lesser but more important “democratic dynasties,” using original data on the composition of the lower, directly elected, house of the Indian parliament – the Lok Sabha or House of the People – between 2004 and 2014 (Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014). The twenty-first century Lok Sabha has a substantial proportion of MPs with dynastic backgrounds (20% in 2004, 30% in 2009, and 22% in 2014), leading one observer to rechristen it the “Chamber of Princes” (Singh, 2013). What, we ask, are the characteristics of dynastic MPs in India and the families to which they belong? Why have these new dynasties taken such systemic root in India’s democracy? How does dynasticism vary across party, region, and social group and what explains this variation? And what does it mean for the norms and practice of democracy? Our approach departs from history and biography, which have been for a long time the principal approaches to the study of political dynasties (see, e.g. Malhotra 2004), and statistics, which a handful of recent scholarly papers have used to test hypotheses about the causes or effects of dynastic politics (Dal Bo, Dal Bo, and Snyder 2009, Rossi 2009, Feinstein 2010, Querubin 2010, Querubin 2011, Chhibber 2011, Mendoza et al. 2012, Smith 2012, Van Coppenolle 2013, Asako et al. 2015). We try instead to establish basic facts about dynastic politics in India using simple descriptive tools (maps, charts, cross-tabulations) and then to interpret and theorize about these facts. Nothing we say here represents a conclusive test of a causal argument. Rather, ours is the prior task of identifying plausible relationships between dynastic and democratic politics, based on a contextual reading of the data. These relationships can then be tested in subsequent work, which, in the normal process of the cumulative research, may confirm some while disproving others.1 Some of these relationships, as we will see, are complex and unexpected, or at least unnoticed, and will, we hope, stimulate new thinking about the relationship between dynasty and democracy. The causes of dynastic politics in the Indian parliament lie, we argue, in the structure of two of India’s contemporary democratic institutions – the state and political parties. Two features of these institutions encourage the emergence of 1

In separate work, we ourselves conduct tests of the arguments made here. Bohlken and Chandra (2014) design a statistical test of arguments linking parties to dynasticism in parliament, and Simon Chauchard has begun to use vignette-experiments to test arguments for why voters support dynastic candidates.

Prologue

3

dynastic politics in India – the large returns associated with state office and the organizational weakness of political parties. The returns associated with state office ensure that the families of politicians will want to enter politics. The organizational weakness of political parties ensures that they are likely to get tickets (party nominations) when they do. Once dynastic candidates obtain a party’s endorsement, voters must determine whether or not to support them. But the choices that voters make, and therefore the role they play in producing electoral dynasticism, are circumscribed by the structures of state and party. Building on this argument, we propose a rethinking of the simplistic view that dynastic politics is a violation of democracy. The primary objection to dynastic politics in a modern democracy is that it introduces a form of birthbased exclusion among elected representatives that is antithetical to democracy. There is no doubt that dynastic politics in India is indeed associated with this illegitimate form of exclusion: dynastic MPs in India, when assessed according to some standard indicators, are not better qualified for politics than their non-dynastic counterparts, but parties give them a leg up anyway simply on the strength of their family ties. Further, those who benefit most from this preference among parties for birth-based attributes are Hindu “Forward Caste” males. In this sense, dynastic politics in India is associated with a double form of exclusion; first by creating a birth-based ruling class, and second by amplifying the representation of dominant groups within this ruling class. But paradoxically, dynastic politics has also had an inclusive effect. It has provided a channel for representation for members of social categories – women, Backward Castes, Muslims, and youth – which do not find, or have not found, a space in politics through normal channels. In this sense, dynastic ties in India have performed the same function as quotas for members of underrepresented social groups. It is significant that the two subaltern groups among which dynasticism among Indian MPs is highest – women and Muslims – do not have the benefit of quotas. Those subaltern groups – Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes – who have mandated representation through quotas are less dynastic. This does not mean that dynastic politics is a normatively desirable channel to bring about political inclusion. But in an unequal polity in which there are already high barriers to the entry of new groups into politics, dynastic politics has become an informal, second-best, means of overcoming some of them. Indeed, in such a society, not having dynastic ties can itself serve as a form of inequality (see Chapter 6, by Chauchard, in this volume). India is by no means unique or even extreme among modern democracies in the fact or degree of dynastic politics in its national legislature. Some democracies have an institutionalized space for dynasties, in the form of a constitutional monarchy (e.g. in the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, Bhutan, Thailand, Lesotho, or Morocco) or sub-national kingdoms (such as the Buganda in Uganda or Ashanti in Ghana) or a reserved space for aristocrats

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in the legislature (such as the House of Lords in the UK or the House of Chiefs in Zambia). In others, dynastic politicians have made their way into positions of power through the electoral process, even when no space is formally set aside for them. India lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of democracies for which comparable data on dynasticism in the legislature are available. (We are not concerned in this book with dynasticism in the executive, which has not so far been studied in a comparative framework and may be associated with different patterns). This spectrum is bounded at one extreme by the Philippines, in which fully half of all Congresspersons in 2007 followed a relative into elected office (Querubin 2010, Mendoza 2012), and at the other by Canada, in which 3% of the House of Commons in 2011 was dynastic (Smith 2012). Japan, Iceland, and Ireland, in which between a third and a fourth of elected legislators in 2009 were dynastic, occupy the upper half of the spectrum along with India. Belgium, Israel, the United States, and Norway, in which the proportion of dynastic legislators ranged between 6% and 11% in a comparable time period, occupy the lower half (Dal Bo, Dal Bo, and Snyder 2009, Smith 2012). Yet there is no basis in democratic theory for understanding the role of dynastic politics, or heredity more generally. The classic notion of democracy is that it is a political system in which both voters and representatives are conceptualized as individuals. A revisionist literature in political philosophy and political science has struggled to replace or at least augment this individualist notion with some role for collectivities, conceptualized as “groups” or “associations” or “factions” or “parties.” (Cohen and Wright 1995). This literature, initially concerned with “voluntary” collectivities based on shared views or interests, has expanded over time to address also the question of whether and how democracy can accommodate descent-based groups constituted on the basis of ethnicity (Lijphart 1977, Horowitz 1985, Kymlicka 1989, Taylor 1992, Kymlicka 1995). The family, however, is a quintessential descent-based group for which there has so far been no room in democratic theory. Remarkably, this is true even in anthropology, which is the principal discipline to theorize about kinship structures. Although there has been a burgeoning literature in recent years on the “anthropology of democracy,” hardly any work in this tradition links the family (as distinct from larger collectivities such as clan and tribe) to modern democracy. But, while the family shares an affinity with other descent-based identities such as ethnic identities, it is distinct in several key respects. While ethnic identities can be constituted by a wide array of descent-based attributes (Chandra 2012), families are constituted by a single one: the existence of a proximate common ancestor. While ethnic identities are large-scale, impersonal, “imagined communities,” families are usually small-scale identities in

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5

which members are personally connected to each other. While membership in ethnic categories requires only the perception that an individual possesses the requisite descent-based attributes, membership in a family requires objective, biological ties. And while dynasties in India tend to be mono-ethnic, they can in principle also be cross-ethnic, especially in countries in which marriages across political families from different ethnic groups are common.2 This means that the relationship of dynastic politics to democracy – and in particular the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion associated with it – may be distinct from that of ethnic or other descent-based identities and deserves to be theorized about independently. Indeed, we show here that dynastic and ethnic representation do not go together naturally: the extent to which they reinforce or undermine each other depends on the internal factional structure of political parties representing distinct ethnic groups. The ethnic groups that dominate the internal organizations of their parties are likely to be over-represented in the dynastic class relative to their representation in the legislature, while those ethnic groups that are weakly represented in internal party organizations are likely to be under-represented. This book is a first cut at theorizing the relationship between dynastic and democratic politics. We propose an institutionalist theory of this relationship, showing that, and how, dynastic politics is a systematic product of modern democratic institutions: state and party. The variation in degree and effect of dynasticism in other countries may similarly be related to variation in the structures of their states and political parties. Dynastic politics may well not arise to the same degree in democracies in which, other things equal, state office offers smaller returns, or in which parties have stronger organizations. If it does, it may have a different effect on democratic politics. The arguments we make in this book run counter to the suggestion, heard frequently in the media and occasionally in the social sciences, that dynasticism in India reflects some cultural value unique to Indian society, such as the acceptance of an association between birth and occupation, or of hierarchy, as natural. This essentialist argument is reflected, for example, in former BBC journalist Mark Tully’s approving view that India’s family values distinguish it from “the West.” In his words, “It is India’s strong family traditions, so different to the nuclear families in the West, that justify dynasts in the eyes

2

There are some examples of inter-ethnic marriages across political dynasties in India. For example, the families of the late Backward Caste leader Gopinath Munde and the late upper caste leader Pramod Mahajan are related by marriage. Sachin Pilot, a Congress leader from a Hindu Gurjar political family (his father is the late Congress leader Rajesh Pilot), is married to Sara Abdullah, descended from a Kashmiri Muslim political dynasty (her father is the National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah). But these inter-ethnic political dynasties are exceptions for the most part in the Indian case.

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of voters. In India, it’s widely thought to be natural and acceptable for a father or a mother who has any form of power to want to hand it over to a son or a daughter (Tully 2012).” Recent work in cultural anthropology, which has suggested that in India, “hierarchy may form the basis for democratic governance,” also supports a cultural essentialist interpretation of dynastic politics in India (Piliavsky 2014). These views are not supported by the data. As we have seen, dynastic politics is alive and well in many modern democracies, including several in the so-called “West,” each presumably distinct in their cultural features. And not all citizens in India, regardless of their attitudes towards family or hierarchy, support dynastic politics. If we take at face value the recent survey finding that 46% of voters prefer to vote for a candidate from a political family, we are still left with 54% who do not believe dynastic representation is necessarily natural or preferable (Vaishnav, Kapur, and Sircar 2014). These differences in attitudes are evident also when voters are interviewed individually. Commenting on the politically dominant Badal family at an election rally in Punjab during the 2014 elections, for example, one young man seemed to treat a connection between family and occupation in India as natural: “I come from a family of shopkeepers,” he said, “Their career is politics. It’s a onefamily rule, yes, but that’s how politics works in India (Mandhana 2014).” But several hundred kilometres away, in Rahul Gandhi’s constituency of Amethi, another voter in the same election had a different view. He told a reporter from the New York Times: “I won’t vote for someone simply because he has that surname.” (Barry 2014) When dynastic candidates now campaign in elections, furthermore, they are careful not to use hierarchy as a legitimizing principle (see Chapters 1 and 2 in this volume). Those who have resorted to hierarchical appeals in the past – what the Rudolphs term “vertical mobilization” – have found themselves on the losing side in elections (see Rudolph and Rudolph [Chapter 2], in this volume, and Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). Essentialist arguments also do not explain why dynastic representation in India has increased over time (Velasco 2014), or why the same parliamentary constituencies in India switch, as they so often do, between dynastic and non-dynastic MPs. This is not to say that cultural norms and practices do not matter in some way to understanding the nature of dynastic politics in India. But the relationship between culture and dynastic politics may be a more complex one than the essentialist view suggests. Variation in cultural norms and practices may well help explain variation in the shape of dynastic politics when it arises, illuminating questions such as variation in the preponderance of male rather than female family members in politics, or in the role played by extended rather than nuclear family structures. Dynastic politics, in turn, may well also produce changes in these cultural norms and practices. For example, the role of

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7

dynastic ties in giving political representation to women may well in turn produce changes in the norms and structures of gender inequality within the family. Similarly, the benefits of having multiple family members concurrently in power may revive or reinforce a preference for extended over nuclear family structures, if it gives core family members reason to claim distant relatives as kin, or gives those distant relatives reason to stake a claim to kinship. Finally, dynastic politics can itself generate cultures of acceptance around it, normalizing by its very pervasiveness the idea that it is an acceptable form of politics in India. At the broadest level, then, this book suggests a conceptualization of the relationship between democratic and dynastic politics, and the cultural norms and practices that support this relationship, as an interactive one. The degree and nature of these interactions may vary across democracies as the structure of their institutions vary. But getting away from simple dichotomies such as “democratic” and “dynastic” politics and thinking about the complex interactions between them is the first step in understanding the pervasive role that dynastic politics has come to play in modern day democracies. In Chapter 1, the introduction to this volume, Kanchan Chandra proposes a conceptualization of dynastic politics as a modern and institutional phenomenon, describes the pervasiveness of dynastic MPs in the 2004–14 parliaments in India across party, region, gender, and ethnic groups, and lays out the arguments locating dynasticism in the structures of state and party, and linking it with both the reinforcement and violation of democratic norms and practices. In Chapter 2, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph describe the encounter between the “old regime” dynasties – the princely rulers and jagirdars of pre-democratic India – and voters in India’s first democratic elections in 1952, showing how their adaptation to modern party structures, or lack of it, was important in explaining their subsequent electoral fortunes. Old regime dynasties, they argue, were “less prepared for the politics of the future” as a consequence of their indifference to party structures, and relatedly, the difficulty of adapting to the norms of participatory politics. But among the old order’s candidates, former courtiers who had learned to broker the demands of competing interests were more likely to succeed in the politics of the future than those who had not. In Chapter 3, Francesca R. Jensenius relates dynastic representation to constituency-level characteristics. The chapter highlights two clear patterns. First, there is no overall systematic difference between constituencies that elect dynastic and non-dynastic politicians. This supports the argument advanced in this volume that dynastic politics in India is, in fact, a modern phenomenon, not particular to socio-economically backward constituencies. Second, there is indeed a systematic difference between constituencies that elect dynastic

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politicians with a royal background and dynastic politicians from non-royal families. MPs from royal families are much more likely to be elected from constituencies that are more rural, poorer, and with fewer literate voters. But, read in light of the previous chapter, even these “traditional” dynasties likely succeed where they do by appealing to voters in “modern” terms. And the small numbers of such MPs suggests that as India modernizes, the space for “traditional” dynasties has be shrinking, making way for their “modern” counterparts. In Chapter 4, Adam Ziegfeld asks why some parties are more dynastic than others. Building on the suggestion that dynasticism in parliament is related in part to the organizational weakness of political parties, he explains the variation in dynasticism across parties by linking it to the absence of an impersonal procedure for ticket allocation in conjunction with the age of a party and its type of leadership. He argues that older parties, parties in which a single-leader wields autocratic control over a weak organization, and parties whose leaders are either dynasts or actively paving the way for family members to succeed them should exhibit higher levels of dynasticism than younger parties, parties in which more power is vested in the party organization, and parties whose leaders are neither dynasts nor laying the groundwork for their own dynastic succession. In Chapter 5, Amrita Basu explains the paradox of low representation and high dynasticism among women MPs as a consequence in part of the underrepresentation of women in political parties. The under-representation of women in the internal organizational structures of political parties, she argues, biases parties against women in the candidate selection process. Dynastic ties can serve to counteract this bias. Within the context of structural barriers to the representation of women in the Indian parliament, then, Basu argues that dynastic ties have served to increase the power of a historically underrepresented group. In Chapter 6, Simon Chauchard similarly explains the low level of dynasticism among the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) as a consequence of their less dominant role in the executive of the main parties that return MPs from these categories to Delhi. The delayed accession of SC/ST politicians to top jobs, in turn, may have something to do with reservation policies. This argument suggests the uneasy conclusion that reservations may have curbed the emergence of strong leaders among members of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes that in turn prevents them from founding political dynasties. And in a political system whose features make the creation of political dynasties predictable, he argues, the relative dearth of SC/ST dynasties signals a form of persistent political inequity.

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In Chapter 7, Kanchan Chandra documents and explains a “Forward Caste” advantage in dynastic representation as a consequence of the intra-party politics that drive the ticket allocation process. “Forward Caste” led parties, such as the INC or BJP, naturally enough, favor co-ethnic (“Forward Caste”) dynasties in the allocation of tickets. But, paradoxically, subaltern-led parties such as the BSP or the SP or the DMK also favor “Forward Caste,” or ethnic outsider, dynasties because their leadership is more threatened by co-ethnic subaltern-caste dynasties. This means that the rate at which the inclusion of subaltern ethnic groups in parliament translates into inclusion in the dynastic class is mediated by the internal factional structure of India’s political parties. But, even though dynastic politics has benefited subaltern groups less than it has the “Forward Castes,” it may well have increased the degree of representation of subaltern groups beyond the level at which they would have been represented otherwise. Put in more general terms, this chapter suggests that the extent to which dynastic politics is accompanied by or reinforces patterns of ethnic inclusion depends on intra-party politics. This is a new contribution both to the literature on ethnic inclusion, which has focused largely on interparty competition rather than intra-party politics, and to the literature on dynastic politics, which has not so far addressed the role either of ethnicity or intra-party politics in explaining dynasticism in modern democracies. In Chapter 8, Anjali Bohlken shows that, if we take qualifications to mean political experience, dynastic MPs are not better qualified for politics than their non-dynastic counterparts – quite the opposite. Dynastic MPs are less likely to have acquired political experience at lower levels of government than non-dynastic MPs. But all dynasties are not equal. This “dynastic advantage” (i.e. the ability of dynastic ties to serve as a substitute for political experience at lower levels of government) belongs mainly to Hindu “Forward Caste” male MPs. It does not exist amongst Muslim and SC or ST MPs and exists only sometimes for women. Bohlken’s findings suggest that normative concerns about the degree to which dynasticism has produced a birth-based exclusion should be confined mainly to dynastic MPs from dominant groups and less to dynastic MPs from subaltern groups, more of whom have had, on average, to supplement the accident of birth with acquired political experience. REFERENCES Asako, Yasushi, Takeshi Iida, and Tetsuya Matsubayashi (2015). “Dynastic Politicians: Theory and Evidence from Japan.” Japanese Journal of Political Science. 16: 5–32. Barry, Ellen. “In Stronghold, a Gandhi Finds the Reception Is More Skeptical than Worshipful.” May 9, 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/05/10/world/asia/in-indiasupport-cools-for-a-gandhi-in-a-traditional-stronghold.html.

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Bohlken, Anjali and Kanchan Chandra (2014). “Why Dynastic Legislators Do Better in Elections: An Institutionalist Explanation.” Working Paper. Chandra, Kanchan ed. (2012). Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Chandra, Kanchan, Anjali Bohlken, and Simon Chauchard (2014). “Dataset on Dynasticism in the Indian Parliament.” Chhibber, Pradeep (2011). “Dynastic Parties: Organization, Finance and Impact.” Party Politics, May 5, 2011. Cohen, Joshua and Joel Wright (1995). Associations and Democracy. London: Verso. Dal Bo, Ernesto, Pedro Dal Bo, and Jason Snyder (2009). “Political Dynasties.” Review of Economic Studies 76(1): 115–42. Feinstein, Brian D. (2010). “The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 35(4): 571–98. Horowitz (1985). Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kymlicka, Will (1989). Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford [England], New York: Oxford University Press. (1995). Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Lijphart, Arend (1977). Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration. Yale University Press. Malhotra, Inder (2004). Dynasties of India and Beyond: Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh. New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers India. Mandhana, Niharika. “In India, a Political Dynasty Prospers in Power.” Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2014. Mendoza, Ronald U., Edsel L. Beja, Victor S. Venida, and David Barua Yap II (2012). “An Empirical Analysis of Political Dynasties in the 15th Philippine Congress.” ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1969605. Piliavsky, Anastasia (2014). Patronage as Politics in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Querubin, Pablo (2010). “Family and Politics: Dynastic Persistence in the Philippines: Manuscript, September 2010. (2011). “Political Reform and Elite Persistence: Term Limits and Political Dynasties in the Philippines.” Manuscript, April 2011. Rossi, Martin A. (2009). “Political Dynasties: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Argentina.” Universidad de San Andres, Working paper. Rudolph, Lloyd I, and Susanne H (1967). The Modernity of Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Singh, Tavleen. “A Chamber of Princes?” Indian Express, September 8, 2013. http:// archive.indianexpress.com/news/a-chamber-of-princes-/1166167/. Smith, Daniel Markham (2012). Succeeding in Politics: Dynasties in Democracies. PhD Dissertation, UCSD. Taylor, Charles (1992). Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tully, Mark. “Political Dynasties: It runs in the Family.” India Today, August 10, 2012.

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Van Coppenolle, Brenda (2013). “Political Dynasties in the UK House of Commons: the Null Effect of Narrow Electoral Selection.” Manuscript, London School of Economics, November. Vaishnav, Milan, Devesh Kapur, and Nilanjan Sircar (2014). “46 percent of Voters Have No Problems Supporting Dynastic Candidates.” Times of India, March 23. Velasco, Carlos (2014). Parties, Dynasts and the Selection of Candidates: Evidence from India. Paper presented at Princeton University Comparative Politics Seminar, September 22.

1

Democratic dynasties State, party, and family in contemporary Indian politics Kanchan Chandra

The formal basis of dynastic rule in India was abolished three times over after India obtained independence in 1947, first with the integration of “princely states” into the Indian union, then when India severed even a symbolic association with the British crown by declaring itself a republic, and finally with legislation abolishing the system of zamindari, or hereditary landownership. But new dynasties emerged through the democratic process, replacing those that were eliminated. Now, in the twenty-first century, about a quarter of MPs in the directly elected lower house of Indian parliament (Lok Sabha) on average, have had a dynastic background: 20% in the 2004 parliament, 30% in the 2009 parliament, and 22% in the 2014 parliament. These “democratic dynasties” are a modern phenomenon, distinguished from traditional aristocracies in one key respect: their dependence on electoral endorsement. In a traditional aristocracy, birth is sufficient to guarantee entry. But in a democratic aristocracy, members must also win elections. When it comes to democratic dynasties, then, we must ask questions that are not necessary in the case of traditional ones: How and why do members of a birth-based class obtain (or retain) positions through the electoral process? And what consequences, in turn, does the rise of political families have for this electoral process? This book, as the prologue noted, advances an institutionalist argument about the causes and consequences of dynasticism in the Indian parliament. We suggest that these democratic dynasties are the product, not of some cultural predilection for family-based politics, but of the high returns to state office and the organizational weakness of political parties. We then argue that the effect of dynastic politics on democracy is mixed. It amplifies some forms of exclusion while simultaneously creating opportunities for inclusion. But both exclusion and inclusion are products, not of some property intrinsic to political dynasties, but of the institutional environment within which dynastic politics has arisen in India. Dynasties may not arise at all in democracies with differently structured institutions, and if they do, they may well have a different effect on democratic politics. This chapter elaborates on these arguments. Dynastic representation in parliament, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg of dynastic politics in India. The position of Prime Minister has been held by a 12

Democratic dynasties: state, party, and family

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single political dynasty – the Nehru-Gandhi family – for most of India’s history as a democracy (thirty-nine out of the sixty-seven years that India had been democratic at the time this book went to press). The Cabinet, in which 24% of the ministers had dynastic background in 2014, is even more dynastic than the Lok Sabha.1 The leaders of over a third of the parties (36%) in the parliament elected in 2014 had a dynastic background. So did the chief ministers of almost a third (28%) of the governments of Indian states in the same year. In several of these states, the leaders of opposition parties were dynastic too. And, although we do not have data on dynasticism in lower-level legislatures – the state legislative assemblies, the village, block and district councils (panchayats), and the municipal corporations – news reports and initial research (Ziegfeld forthcoming) both suggest that family ties represent a systemic phenomenon there as well. The causes and consequences of dynasticism in other institutions and in other levels of politics may not be the same as in the national parliament (Manikandan and Wyatt 2014), but we hope that the arguments and data in this book will prompt a broader assessment of the relationship between dynasty and democracy that also takes them into account. Section 1 defines the concept of dynasty and dynastic politics as used in this book (for details on the coding criteria beyond what is given here, please consult the data appendix). Section 2 describes the variation in dynasticism across region, party, constituencies, gender, and ethnic group in the 2004, 2009, and 2014 Indian parliaments. The term ethnic “group” is used interchangeably with ethnic “category” to mean nominal membership in descent-based categories including those based on caste, race, tribe, ancestral religion, mother tongue, and region of origin (see Chandra 2012 for elaboration). Section 3 describes the main features of India’s dynastic class, where the term “class” is used loosely to mean a social category whose members have a political office (i.e. MP) in common, but not necessarily a shared identity. Section 4 describes the terms in which dynastic politicians appeal to the electorate. Section 5 describes the role of the modern state in the production of dynasties in parliament. Section 6 describes the role of political parties in this production. Section 7 addresses the role of voters in relation to that of state and party. Section 8 elaborates on the institutionally shaped effects of dynastic politics on democracy in India. 1

Dynasty and dynastic politics

Throughout, we define a “dynastic MP” as one who is preceded by family members who were active in electoral politics. We define a family as a set of individuals bound by proximate ties based on blood or marriage. In principle, 1

In the previous government, elected in 2009, 36% of the cabinet was dynastic, compared to 30% of the Lok Sabha.

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this definition includes fathers, mothers, spouses, siblings, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and in-laws. But the majority of preceding family members in our database (67% in 2004 and 77% in 2009) are fathers or male spouses. By “active in electoral politics,” we mean the holding of office in an elected body (directly or indirectly elected), or being a candidate for an election (direct or indirect) or holding an office in a political party. Electoral politics, limited in both area and suffrage, was introduced in India by the British at the end of the nineteenth century, and expanded to cover the entire population and area of India after it obtained independence in 1947. Our criteria allow for the coding of an MP as dynastic, therefore, if he or she had a preceding family member active in electoral politics in either pre- or post-independence India. In fact, however, only a handful of present-day political dynasties have founding members who held elected office in pre-independence India. The vast majority were founded by men who came of age after independence. The requirement that a dynastic MP must be preceded by a family member in office in order to be coded as dynastic excludes MPs who are followed but not preceded by family members. Consider the example of Mulayam Singh Yadav. Yadav is a first generation politician from a peasant background who worked his way up the political ladder from the grassroots. He won his first elected office, as an MLA, in 1967. Now, more than forty years later, he is both an MP and head of his own political party, has been both Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and a Union Cabinet minister, and is the patriarch of a dynasty that includes at least eleven other family members. We treat each of Yadav’s family members, but not Yadav himself, as a dynastic politician, because they, not he, were preceded by a family member in politics. However, we identify separately the family ties of MPs like Yadav who were founders of their dynasties, and also code for MPs who have family members “concurrently” in politics regardless of the order of precedence. The requirement that a dynastic MP should be preceded by a family member in electoral politics renders the term “dynastic politics” as we use it here more precise than the term “family-based politics.” The term “dynastic politics” captures the idea of temporal order. The term “family-based” politics, by contrast, simply refers to the notion that individuals from the same family are or were active in politics regardless of whether or not one was preceded by another. This focus on the order of precedence allows for an examination of the extent to which these ties give politicians an initial advantage in politics. Those who are followed rather than preceded by family members can create advantages for their descendants but cannot be said to have been initially advantaged themselves by such ties. It also produces more conservative estimates than coding MPs based simply on whether they have family ties in politics. For example, our estimate of 2004 MPs who had family members in politics active in politics at some point, completed in 2013, is almost double that of MPs who had family members

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precede them.2 Had we waited longer to complete that coding, it would likely have been even higher, as more relatives entered politics in the interim. The requirement that a dynastic MP should be preceded by a family member active in electoral politics excludes members of India’s old aristocracy – maharajas, jagirdars or zamindars – unless they are preceded by a family member who held a position in electoral politics. Consider for example the contrast between Jyotiraditya Scindia (MP in 2004, 2009, and 2014) and K. C. Singh Baba (MP in 2004 and 2009). Jyotiraditya Scindia is a descendant of the ruler of Gwalior, but also had several family members precede him in electoral politics, including his father Madhav Rao Scindia, his grandmother Vijaye Raje Scindia, and his aunt Vasundhara Raje Scindia. K. C. Singh Baba is a descendant of the ruler of the princely state of Kumaon, but he is to the best of our knowledge the first member of this royal family to obtain a political office in electoral politics. While both Scindia and Baba are from erstwhile royal families, the first is dynastic by our definition while the second is not. However, we code separately for whether MPs have an aristocratic background, thus allowing us to explore (in Chapters 2 and 3) the intersection of India’s old aristocracy with its modern day political dynasties. 2

Overview of dynastic MPs in Indian parliaments (2004–14)

A quarter of Indian parliamentarians have been dynastic, on average, between 2004 and 2014: 20% in 2004, 30% in 2009, and 22% in 2014 (See Table 1.1). There is no discernible trend in the degree of dynasticism in the twenty-first century parliaments: between 2004 and 2009, it increased by almost 50%, before dropping by 25% between 2009 and 2014. But other data on candidates in parliamentary elections between 1977 and 2004 indicate that dynasticism in Indian parliaments has been steadily increasing over these decades (Velasco 2014). Dynastic MPs are pervasive across political parties in parliament, irrespective of size, ideology, age, leadership, and support base. As Figure 1.1 shows, most parties in all three parliaments, including the two largest (Indian National Congress [INC] and the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]) had significant numbers of dynastic MPs, albeit with variation in the degree of dynasticism across parties. Table 1.2 summarizes the data on which the figure is based. 2

The same is true of representative institutions other than parliament. Of the fifteen individuals who have been Prime Minister of India between 1947 and 2014 (some for multiple terms), only three (all members of the Nehru-Gandhi family) have preceding ties, more but than double that number (eight and counting) have family ties of some type (either preceding or following) in politics. In 2014, 28% of Chief Ministers had family members precede them, but more than 50% have family members precede or follow them in politics. Similarly, while the leaders of 36% of parties in parliament have preceded them in politics, the leaders of another ten parties have family members who followed them into politics (and often the leadership of the party), bringing the total of family-based political parties to a whopping 66% of all political parties in parliament.

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Table 1.1 Dynastic MPs in Indian parliaments (2004–14)

Parliament

Total no. of MPs

Percent (number) dynastic

2004 2009 2014

543 543 543

20.07 (109) 30.02 (163) 21.92 (119)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

100.00 90.00 80.00 70.00 60.00 50.00 40.00 30.00 20.00 10.00

2004

2009

Other

TRS

TDP

AITC

JD(U)

BJD

SHS

DMK

BSP

RJD

SP

CPM

AIADMK

BJP

INC

0.00

2014

Figure 1.1 Party and dynasty in Indian parliaments (2004–14)* Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014) * The figure describes parties which won more than ten seats in any parliament. Please refer to Table 1.2 for the data on all parties individually, including those in the “other” category.

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Table 1.2 Percent dynastic MPs by party (2004–14)

Party

Total (2004)

Percent dynastic (2004)

AAP AD AGP AIADMK AIFB AIMIM AINRC AITC AUDF BJD BJP BNP BPF BSP BVA CPI CPM DMK IFDP INC INLD JD(S) JD(U) JKN JKPDP JMM JVM KEC LJNSP LJP MDMK MNF MUL NCP NLP NPF NPP PMK RJD RLD RPI(A) RSP SAD SDF

0 0 2 0 3 1 0 2 0 11 138 1 0 19 0 10 43 16 1 145 0 3 8 2 1 5 0 1 4 0 4 1 1 9 1 1 0 6 24 3 1 3 8 1

0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 33.33 100.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 27.27 14.49 100.00 0.00 10.53 0.00 10.00 13.95 18.75 100.00 28.28 0.00 33.33 12.50 50.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 100.00 75.00 0.00 25.00 0.00 0.00 11.11 0.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 8.33 66.67 0.00 33.33 25.00 0.00

Percent dynastic Total (2009) (2009)

Total (2014)

Percent dynastic (2014)

0 0 1 9 2 1 0 19 1 14 115 0 1 21 1 4 16 18 1 207 0 3 20 3 0 2 2 1 0 0 1 0 2 9 0 1 0 0 4 5 0 2 4 1

4 2 0 37 0 1 1 34 3 20 282 0 0 0 0 1 9 0 0 44 2 2 2 0 3 2 0 1 0 6 0 0 2 6 0 1 1 1 4 3 0 1 4 1

0.00 50.00 0.00 16.22 0.00 100.00 100.00 17.65 33.33 40.00 14.89 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00 11.11 0.00 0.00 47.73 50.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 33.33 0.00 0.00 100.00 0.00 66.67 0.00 0.00 0.00 33.33 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00 0.00 33.33 0.00 0.00 25.00 0.00

0.00 0.00 0.00 11.11 0.00 100.00 0.00 15.79 0.00 42.86 19.13 0.00 0.00 38.10 0.00 0.00 18.75 33.33 0.00 39.61 0.00 33.33 15.00 66.67 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 88.89 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 25.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 50.00 0.00

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Table 1.2 (cont.)

Party

Total (2004)

SHS SJP(R) SP SWP TDP TRS VCK YSRCP IND Total

12 1 36 0 5 5 0 0 5 543

Percent dynastic (2004) 8.33 0.00 27.78 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 20.07

Percent dynastic Total (2009) (2009)

Total (2014)

11 0 21 1 6 2 1 0 10 543

18 0 5 1 16 11 0 9 3 543

18.18 0.00 28.57 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 30.07

Percent dynastic (2014) 16.67 0.00 80.00 0.00 31.25 18.18 0.00 44.44 0.00 21.92

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

Table 1.3 Percent dynastic MPs by region (2004–14)*

Region

Total number of MPs from region

Percent of MPs from region who are dynastic (2004)

Percent of MPs from region who are dynastic (2009)

Percent of MPs from region who are dynastic (2014)

North-West North-Central West South East North-East Total

66 125 78 132 117 25 543

33.33 20.00 11.54 18.18 20.51 20.00 20.07

50.00 33.60 26.92 28.79 21.37 16.00 30.02

22.73 22.40 15.38 23.93 23.93 20.00 21.92

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014 * The North-Western region includes Chandigarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, and Rajasthan; the North-Central region includes Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh; the Western region includes Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Goa, Gujarat, and Maharashtra; the Southern region includes Andaman and Nicobar, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Lakshadweep, Puducherry, and Tamil Nadu; the Eastern region includes Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal; and the North-Eastern region includes Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim.

It is worth underlining that although opposition to dynastic politics was a central campaign issue in the 2014 election campaign, and despite the large changes in the number of seats won by political parties in these elections, the degree of dynasticism in the 2014 parliament has persisted at significant levels. Dynastic politics in India is pervasive across regions. Table 1.3 describes the regional distribution of constituencies with dynastic MPs in the 2004, 2009,

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14th Lok Sabha (2004)

Non-dynastic MP Dynastic MP

Figure 1.2 Dynastic MPs in the 2004 parliament Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014.

and 2014 parliaments. Figures 1.2–1.4 summarize the distribution of dynastic MPs across constituencies. As the table and figures show, constituencies in all of India’s major regions have sent significant proportions of dynastic MPs to parliament, with some variation in the degree of dynasticism across regions and across elections. In the 2004 and 2009 elections, the North-Western region was significantly more

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15th Lok Sabha (2009) Non-dynastic MP Dynastic MP

Figure 1.3 Dynastic MPs in the 2009 parliament Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014.

dynastic than other regions. But in 2014, all regions with the exception of the West sent a roughly equal percentage of dynastic MPs to parliament. Further, several constituencies in many regions, as I note later, switch from a dynastic to a non-dynastic MP and back again across elections. Dynastic MPs are elected from both “general” and “reserved” constituencies, although there is significant variation in dynasticism across them: “general” constituencies have a greater proportion of dynastic MPs

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16th Lok Sabha (2014)

Non-dynastic MP Dynastic MP

Figure 1.4 Dynastic MPs in the 2014 parliament Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014.

than constituencies “reserved” for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (See Table 1.4). Dynastic MPs are also found in significant proportions across gender categories. But women MPs are considerably more likely than men to have dynastic ties: 58% of women MPs in 2004, 69% of women MPs in 2009, and 43% of women MPs in 2014 had dynastic ties, compared to 17%, 25%, and 19% of male MPs in these respective parliaments (See Table 1.5).

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Table 1.4 Percent dynastic MPs by type of constituency (2004–14)*

Type of constituency

Total no. (2004)

Total no. (2009 and 2014)

General Reserved SC ST

423 120 79 41

412 131 84 47

Percent MPs who are dynastic 2004

Percent MPs who are dynastic 2009

Percent MPs who are dynastic 2014

21.75 14.17 16.46 9.76

31.78 24.43 25.00 23.40

25.48 10.69 8.33 14.89

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014 Note that the number of reserved constituencies in 2004 differs from that in 2009 and 2014 because of a new delimitation completed in 2008.

*

Table 1.5 Percent dynastic MPs by gender (2004–14)

Parliament

Total no. of female MPs

Percent female MPs who are dynastic

Total no. of male MPs

Percent male MPs who are dynastic

2004 2009 2014

45 58 63

57.88 68.96 42.86

498 485 480

16.67 25.36 19.17

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

Table 1.6 Percent dynastic MPs from across ethnic categories (2004–14)

Category

Percent of MPs from this category who are dynastic (total MPs) 2004

Percent of MPs from this category who are dynastic (total MPs) 2009

Percent of MPs from this category who are dynastic (total MPs) 2014

Forward Castes Backward Castes Scheduled Castes Scheduled Tribes Muslims Other or Unknown Total

22.85 (210) 19.33 (150) 15.67 (83) 12.73 (55) 25.71 (35) 30.00 (10) 20.07 (543)

35.60 (236) 27.42 (124) 23.86 (88) 20.00 (55) 35.48 (31) 22.22 (9) 30.01 (543)

27.23 (235) 21.83 (141) 8.24 (85) 16.67 (54) 31.82 (22) 20.00 (5) 21.96 (543)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

Finally, dynastic MPs are pervasive across ethnic categories, with variations across them in the degree of dynasticism. Table 1.6 describes the percentage of MPs who are dynastic from some standard caste, tribe, and religious categories in India, based on government classifications, slightly

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modified so that they are mutually exclusive. These categories are ordered in a rough hierarchy, with the “Forward Castes” occupying a dominant position, and the Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Muslims normally categorized as “subaltern groups.” Since the definition of these categories is important for understanding the relationship between dynasty, democracy, and inclusion discussed later in this chapter and throughout this book, I elaborate on it here. The official definition of these categories cuts across religious divisions to some extent. The largest population in each category is Hindu, but a small proportion of the population of some caste or tribal categories can include some non-Hindus. In order to construct mutually exclusive categories, I classify members of all religious categories based on the caste or tribal category to which they belong, with the exception of Muslims, whom I classify on the basis of religion.3 The term “Forward Caste,” refers to non-Muslim categories not classified as Backward or Scheduled by either their state or the central government, in 2004. As such, it captures historically dominant castes in India, including the “twice born” castes (Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Banias) as well as intermediate caste groups that had early access to political and economic power in post-independence India (Jats in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, Marathas in Maratha, Kammas and Reddys in Andhra Pradesh). Some castes classified as “Forward” in the early part of the period under study were classified as “Backward” subsequently. For example, Jat Sikhs in Punjab were declared a Backward Caste in March 2014. But in order to construct classifications that are comparable across all three parliaments studied here, I classify all castes according to the government classifications in effect during 2004, the first year described by the data. A category is classified as Backward Caste if it was classified as socioeconomically backward by either the state or the central government in 2004, and if its members are not Muslim. A category is classified as Scheduled Caste if it appears on the Central Government list of the Scheduled Castes. The Scheduled Castes were once treated as “untouchable” by caste Hindu society, and are identified in a separate Schedule of the Indian Constitution as being eligible for affirmative action benefits. A category is classified as Scheduled Tribe if it appears on the Central Government list of Scheduled Tribes. The Scheduled Tribes are 3

This rule is driven by the availability of data: It has usually been possible to obtain data on the caste or tribal identity of all MPs except Muslims, for whom reliable information about caste identity is usually not available. We therefore code all Muslim MPs on the basis of religious and not caste identity. Note that the main arguments here do not change no matter how we classify Muslim MPs by caste. If we recalculate all tables based on the assumption that all Muslim MPs in parliament – and by extension Muslim dynastic MPs – are “Forward Caste,” or if we assume that all Muslim MPs in parliament – and therefore Muslim political dynasties – are Backward Caste, the broad facts highlighted by these tables remain the same.

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India’s indigenous inhabitants who are also listed in a separate Schedule of the Indian Constitution as being eligible for affirmative action benefits. Muslims are classified based on the name of the MP and, where necessary, additional background research to determine religious affiliation. In those rare instances in which the caste or tribal identity of a Muslim MP can be identified, they are still classified on the basis of religious identity. For example, the sole Muslim MP (from Lakshadweep) in each parliament who is also classified as a member of the Scheduled Tribes, is classified here as Muslim rather than ST. While not eligible for affirmative action benefits on the basis of religion, Muslims are now estimated by government reports to suffer from a degree of social, political, and economic disadvantage that is comparable to and in some cases worse than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (See Government of India 2006). As we see from Table 1.6, a considerable percentage of MPs from all social categories, regardless of their degree of dominance or subalternity, are dynastic. But there is some variation in the degree of dynasticism across categories. The percentage of dynastic MPs from the “Forward Castes” and Muslims is consistently higher than the percentage of dynastic MPs from the Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes. Any explanation for dynastic politics in India must explain both the pervasiveness of dynastic MPs across region, party, gender, and ethnic group in India as well as the variation described above. This is what we do in this book, showing how both pervasiveness and variation are linked to the features of political parties, operating within the context of a patronage-driven state. 3

Characteristics of India’s dynastic class

India’s dynastic class, as we noted previously, is mostly a democratic creation. Pre-democratic aristocratic families (former princely rulers, or jagirdars, or zamindars) comprise only a small percentage – 3% – of MPs in India across the three parliaments (See Table 1.7). Of these, a subset were preceded by family members in democratic politics prior to 2004. This subset constituted only 10% of dynastic MPs in 2004, 12% in 2009, and 10% in 2014. MPs from these “royal” democratic dynasties – an oxymoron if there ever was one – belong mostly to either the Indian National Congress or the BJP, with a smattering from smaller, regional political parties. The vast majority of democratic dynasties are of recent, more humble, vintage. As Table 1.8 shows, the average age of the dynasty of a dynastic MP in the 2004 parliament was forty-four. Note that this is different from the age of the MP. We code the age of the dynasty of an MP based on the year that the founding member became active in politics. An average dynastic age of

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Table 1.7 Royal families as a percent of dynastic class (2004–14)

Parliament

Total no. of MPs from royal families

Percent of all MPs from royal families (Total MPs)

2004 2009 2014

17 19 14

3.13 (543) 3.50 (543) 2.58 (543)

Total no. of MPs from royal families with preceding members in “democratic” politics 11 16 11

Percent dynastic MPs from royal families (Total Dynastic MPs) 10.09 (109) 9.82 (163) 9.24 (119)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

Table 1.8 Characteristics of dynasties in the Indian parliament (2004) Characteristic

Percent

Average Age of Dynasty of Dynastic MP Dynastic MPs with Family Member in Past Important Position Dynastic MPs with Family Members in Concurrent Important Position Dynastic MPs Related to Concurrent National Party Leader Dynastic MPs Related to Concurrent State Party Leader Dynastic MPs with Local Roots

44 26.83 20.33 7.32 8.94 52.03

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

forty-four in 2004 indicates that the founder of the average dynasty entered politics in 1960, well after India became fully democratic. MPs from these “democratic dynasties” are often not prominent themselves and not descended from prominence. As we see from the table, most dynastic MPs in 2004 were not descended from politicians who have held important positions in the past (where an important position is defined as the Prime Minister or Chief Minister), and not related to anyone concurrently in such positions: Only 27% were related to someone who was previously in an important position, and only 20% to someone who was concurrently in such a position. The majority of dynastic MPs in 2004 were also not related to someone who is concurrently a national or state party leader. Yet they had successfully put down local roots: The majority of these dynastic MPs in 2004 (52%) had followed a family member in the same parliamentary constituency. While we have not performed a similarly detailed coding exercise for dynastic MPs in the 2009 and 2014 parliaments, we have no reason to believe that the patterns in these latter parliaments would be different. These democratic dynasties are also not, on average, dominated by any one political party. As Table 1.9 shows, the single largest group of dynastic MPs in

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Table 1.9 Composition of dynastic class by party (2004–14)

Category Congress BJP Others Total

Percent MPs from this party 2004

Percent dynastic MPs from this party 2004

Percent MPs from this Party 2009

Percent dynastic MPs from this party 2009

Percent MPs From this party 2014

Percent dynastic MPs from this party 2014

26.7 25.41 47.89 100 (543)

37.61 18.35 44.04 100 (109)

38.12 21.18 40.7 100 (543)

50.91 13.33 35.76 100 (165)

8.10 51.93 39.97 100 (543)

17.65 35.29 47.06 100 (119)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

Table 1.10 Composition of dynastic class by region (2004–14)

Category North-West North-Central West South East North-East Total

Percent MPs from region

Percent dynastic MPs from region 2004

Percent dynastic MPs region 2009

Percent dynastic MPs from region 2014

12.15 23.02 14.36 24.31 21.55 4.60 100 (543)

20.18 22.94 8.26 22.02 22.02 4.59 100 (109)

20.25 25.77 12.88 23.31 15.34 2.45 100 (163)

12.71 22.88 10.17 26.27 23.73 4.24 100 (119)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

2004 and 2009 came from the Congress, which was also the largest party in these two parliaments. In 2014, it came from the BJP, which was the largest party in that parliament. Taken together, the Congress and the BJP account for 53–64% of dynastic MPs across parliaments, with the remainder widely dispersed across a large number of smaller parties. Dynastic MPs are also not dominated by any one region (see Table 1.10). In the 2004 parliament, the North-West, North-Central, Southern, and Eastern Regions were almost equally represented among dynastic MPs. The balance of dynastic MPs across regions subsequently changed, as the fortunes of parties changed across elections. But no region has accounted for more than a quarter of the dynastic class in any parliament. That said, two regions – the West and the North-East – are consistently underrepresented among dynastic MPs in relation to the proportion of MPs from these regions in parliament.

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Table 1.11 Composition of dynastic class by gender (2004–14)

Category Male Female Total

Percent MPs from this category 2004

Percent dynastic MPs from this category 2004

Percent MPs from this category 2009

Percent dynastic MPs from this category 2009

Percent MPs from this category 2014

Percent dynastic MPs from this category 2014

91.71 8.29 100 (543)

76.15 23.85 100 (109)

89.32 10.68 100 (543)

75.46 24.54 100 (163)

88.40 11.60 100 (543)

77.31 22.69 100 (119)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

Table 1.12 Composition of dynastic class by ethnicity (2004–14)

Category* FC BC SC ST Muslims Other/Unknown Total

Percent MPs from this category 2004

Percent dynastic MPs from this category 2004

Percent MPs from this category 2009

Percent dynastic MPs from this category 2009

Percent MPs from this category 2014

Percent dynastic MPs from this category 2014

38.67 27.62 15.29 10.13 6.45 1.84 100 (543)

44.04 26.61 11.93 6.42 8.26 2.75 100 (109)

43.46 22.84 16.21 10.13 5.71 1.66 100 (543)

51.53 20.86 12.88 6.75 6.75 1.23 100 (163)

43.28 26.15 15.65 9.94 4.05 0.92 100 (543)

53.78 26.05 5.88 7.56 5.88 0.84 100 (119)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014 * FC: Forward Caste, BC: Backward Caste, SC: Scheduled Caste, ST: Scheduled Tribe

When it comes to gender, both men and women are well represented (Table 1.11). Men constitute the majority of the dynastic class: Roughly three-quarters of the dynastic class in each parliament is male. But women, who form an average of 10% of all MPs, are significantly over-represented: About a quarter of the dynastic class in each parliament is female. Finally, this dynastic class is drawn from a diverse set of ethnic groups. But there is a pronounced imbalance in which groups are best represented within it (See Table 1.12). The majority of dynastic MPs are drawn from the mostly Hindu “Forward Castes.” This represents a double advantage. Although there is no precise

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census estimate of their population, there is wide agreement that “Forward Castes” constitute a minority of the population of India as a whole and in most states (see especially Frankel and Rao 1989). But they are consistently overrepresented in parliament in relation to their proportion in the population and then overrepresented again in the dynastic class in relation to their proportion in parliament. The percentage of “Forward Castes” in the parliament, while disproportionately high, has decreased over time (Jayal 2006, Jaffrelot and Kumar 2009). But the percentage of “Forward Castes” among the dynastic class in parliament has actually increased, at least between 2004 and 2014. Backward Castes, while also not counted in the census, are estimated to constitute a majority of the population (with the caveat that counting Muslims separately as I do here may reduce this estimate). But they are underrepresented in parliament and in the dynastic class: they constitute a quarter of MPs, on average, and also a quarter of dynastic MPs, on average, across the three parliaments. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are represented in parliament in proportion to their population (16% and 8%, respectively) because India’s affirmative action policies provide for quotas (known in India as “reservations”) that ensure that they are represented in all directly elected bodies in proportion to their proportion in the population. However, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe politicians are also underrepresented in the dynastic class. Muslims are the most severely underrepresented minority in both parliament and among parliamentary dynasties. Although Muslims constitute 13% of the population, they constitute only 5% of MPs, on average, between 2004 and 2014. The Indian constitution does not allow for quotas in national and statelevel representative institutions based on religious identity that might have corrected for this underrepresentation in parliament. The small number of Muslim MPs means that dynastic Muslim MPs also make up a very small percentage of the dynastic class: an average of 7% of dynastic MPs between 2004 and 2014 are Muslim. Yet, while this pattern of ethnic imbalance among dynastic MPs appears at first glance to reflect old patterns of inequality in society, a closer look also indicates change. In the 2004 parliament, the average age of “Forward Caste” dynasties, calculated from the year its founding member entered politics, is higher than all other subaltern groups except Muslims: It was forty-nine (suggesting that the average founding member entered politics in 1955), compared with forty-two for Backward Castes (suggesting that the average founding member entered politics in 1962), thirty-eight for Scheduled Castes (suggesting that the average founding member entered politics in 1966), and thirty-three for Scheduled Tribes (suggesting that the average founding member entered politics in 1971).

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We know that members of these subaltern groups were initially poorly represented in parliament and in most political parties, and that this degree of representation began increasing both within parties after the Congress split of 1972 (Chandra 2004) and in legislatures more generally in recent years (Jayal 2006, Jaffrelot and Kumar 2009). The average age of dynasties from different social groups suggests that as members of these subaltern categories have begun to become better represented in politics, they have also begun to penetrate the upper reaches of dynastic politics in the Indian parliament. The pace at which they enter the dynastic class, however, as several chapters in this volume show, is mediated by the internal politics of the parties to which they belong. 4

How dynastic MPs appeal to the electorate

Given the widespread criticism of dynastic politics, not only in the social sciences but also in the Indian media, one might have expected MPs with a dynastic background to gloss over, or divert attention from, their family ties. But that is not the case. Dynastic MPs speak often and proudly of their family background in their election campaigns. When Rahul and Sonia Gandhi speak at election rallies, for example, life size hoardings of Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi often stand in the background. The Gandhi family is not unique in its deliberate use of family background in election campaigns. When Jayant Sinha, the son of former BJP finance minister Yashwant Sinha, contested the 2014 elections from his father’s old constituency of Hazaribagh, he proudly linked his political career to his father’s. As he put it: “to have the benefit of a track record is reassuring. I tell people the political legacy is my sanskar or values” (Das 2014). Debrabrata Saikia, son of ex-Chief Minister Hiteshwar Saikia, who entered the electoral fray for the first time in 2011, describes his own “political background” on his website by listing his father’s achievements (www.debabrata saikia.org/political-background/). Party leaders with family members in politics also underline the legitimacy of family-based succession. Shibu Soren, for example defended the induction of his family into leadership positions in the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha by saying simply: “I had set up the party. What’s wrong if I, my wife and sons are its office-bearers?” (Prasad 2009). Our point here is not that all candidates in Indian elections legitimize the use of dynastic ties. Many of those who do not come from a political family oppose dynastic politics. Perhaps the most well known among these opponents of dynastic politics is current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Nitish Kumar, the former Chief Minister of Bihar is another prominent politician who has been a staunch opponent. But this opposition does not deter those who have a family background in politics from flaunting it. When faced with criticism of dynastic politics in the 2014 election campaign, for example, the Gandhi

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family only deepened its emphasis on lineage.4 The several BJP candidates who followed a family member into politics, such as Jayant Sinha cited above, also saw no reason to conceal their dynastic background. Significantly, however, dynastic candidates do not justify hierarchy or claim a birthright when they speak of their family backgrounds, or appeal to traditional family values such as obedience or obligation. Instead, they invoke modern and egalitarian values, associating family background with a credible guarantee of superior performance, skill, and service. It is notable, for example, that in the campaign alluded to above, Jayant Sinha used family ties, not to awaken a sense of obligation among voters, but to lay claim to greater skill as a politician. Similarly, much as Hillary Clinton once said that her role as first lady gave her foreign policy experience, Debabrata Saikia linked his biography to his father’s in order to claim political experience. Another dynastic candidate – Kiran Chaudhry, the daughter-in-law of former Chief Minister Bansi Lal – linked her family background to an expectation of better performance. According to an account of her campaign, “she told the crowds that all three Lal families had ruled Haryana for twelve years each, but the development during Bansi Lal’s rule was more than anyone else” (Mukherjee 2009). The family name, as Sukhbir Singh Badal, the President of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), and himself a descendant of a political dynasty, believes, makes the claim of better performance especially credible: “This 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” (Mandhana 2014). The claim that family background is a credible guarantee of performance or experience or superior political skills is not supported by the available data. Table 1.13 shows that while dynastic MPs are younger, wealthier, better educated, and less likely to have a serious criminal indictment than nondynastic MPs, they do not do better than others on any available indicator of performance.5 The young age of dynastic MPs, furthermore, goes hand in hand with inexperience. As Chapter 8 in this volume shows, dynastic MPs are less

4

5

In a typical speech in his home constituency of Amethi a few days before the election, Rahul Gandhi named each one of the family members who had been elected before him from Amethi, using lineage to claim a long and deep relationship with its electorate. See, for example, a video of the speech, delivered in Amethi on May 3, 2014 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmwNQ2O pr4o. These data describe only the 2004 and 2009 parliaments, because comparable data for the justelected 2014 parliament are not yet available. Self-reported wealth is likely to be underreported for any one individual. But if we assume that all individuals underreport equally, this should be a reliable measure of relative wealth.

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Table 1.13 Attributes and performance of dynastic and non-dynastic MPs 2004

Wealth (in crores) Graduates Serious Criminal Indictments Age Attendance Questions Debates MPLads Funds Utilized in Final Year of Term*

2009

Dynastic

Non-dynastic

Dynastic

Non-dynastic

2.82 84% 8% 46 68% 185 30 1.67

1.62 77% 17% 54 70% 179 31 1.48

9.8 85% 15% 49 77% 161 15

3.3 78% 20% 58 77% 133 20

Source: http://myneta.info/ (for wealth, age, and education, based on candidate affidavits; Vaishnav (2011) (for criminal indictments), www.prsindia.org/index.php?name=mptracklok (for parliamentary attendance, questions, and debates), MPLADS Annual Report 2009–10 (for MPLADs) * Ratio of funds released under the scheme to the funds actually utilized in the MP’s final year. Data not available for 2009.

likely to have acquired experience in local level politics before entering parliament. The average attendance of both types of MPs in both parliaments was about the same – indeed in 2004, non-dynastic MPs had a marginally higher attendance.6 Dynastic MPs asked more questions in both parliaments, but nondynastic MPs participated slightly more often in debates than dynastic MPs. There is also only a slight difference in the utilization of funds by dynastic and non-dynastic MPs under the MPLADs (MP Local Area Development) Scheme in the MP’s final year of parliament.7 This last point requires some explanation. Initiated in 1993, the MPLADs scheme provides discretionary

6

7

This information is from www.prsindia.org/index.php?name=mptracklok. The data on parliamentary performance include three principal measures: An MP’s attendance in parliament, computed as the days the MP signed the attendance register as a percentage of the days he was eligible to sign the register; the total number of questions posed by the MP in parliament, and total number of debates in which the MP participated in parliament, where the term “debate” describes any occasion on which the MP spoke in Parliament, including debates on Bills and zero hour. These data do not capture the participation of ministers who, as representatives of the government, are not required to sign the attendance register, do not ask questions, and do not participate in debates as ordinary members. This information is from the MPLADS Annual Report 2009–10 (New Delhi: Government of India, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, 2011), downloaded from www.mplads.nic.in. The data on the utilization of MPLADs funds in the final year of a parliamentary term are not yet available only for the 2009 and 2014 parliaments, in the first case because the MPLADs Annual Report for the year 2013–14 year has not yet been made public, and in the second case because the 2014 parliament has only just begun its term.

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funds to the MP to allocate to projects of his or her choosing up to a maximum amount (2 crores in 2004 and currently 5 crores). The district administration is required to implement these recommendations as long as they can verify that they comply with government guidelines. The expenditure on MPLADs is only a small component of the overall government expenditure in the constituency. But it is the only scheme directly tied to an individual MP. Funds unutilized in one year carry over to the next but if funds remain unutilized by the MP in the final year of his or her term, they are passed on to the successor MP from the same constituency. If an MP has not utilized the funds released under the scheme in this final year, therefore, we can assume that the MP is not active in recommending development projects, or not sufficiently knowledgeable about the rules governing the projects, or not successful in working with the district administration to have the recommendations approved. The ratio of funds released under the scheme to the funds actually utilized in the MP’s final year, therefore, can be read as a measure of the MP’s effectiveness in navigating the local level bureaucracy. Dynastic MPs, at least in 2004, do not appear to do this significantly better than non-dynastic MPs. Regardless of its veracity, the claim that family ties are linked to performance packages them in a vocabulary acceptable in a modern democracy. In India’s early elections, as the Rudolphs show in this book, candidates from erstwhile royal families who used hierarchy as a mobilizing tactic, by emphasizing their position as local notables, their right to rule, and invoking “the drama and awe that surrounded their being” (what they term “vertical mobilization”), did badly. The new, “democratic dynasts” sometimes have a stature in their home constituencies which is no less kingly. But they have presumably learned that the hierarchical language of the past does not pay off. “Vote for us,” they say, often with folded hands, “not because politics is our birthright, but because the long experience of our family in politics has given us the capital to serve you better.” Employing the service and skill-oriented rhetoric of the modern elected representative not only makes them more acceptable to voters but also creates a publicly defensible pretext for the favoritism shown to them by parties in the ticket allocation process. 5

The role of the state: giving family members an incentive to enter politics

The first step towards explaining why democratic politics in India has been accompanied by dynastic politics lies in explaining why the family members of existing politicians choose to enter politics in present-day India. Politics has not always been so attractive to the families of politicians. Early data tracking dynastic candidates prior to the 2004 parliament shows that the proportion of

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dynastic candidates in parliamentary elections has increased over time since 1977 (Velasco 2014). Newspaper accounts of parliamentary election campaigns from the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s also do not yield as many examples of family-centered campaigns as the newspapers of the last two decades do. We know, furthermore, that even those MPs and other holders of elected office who did not have family members preceding them often have multiple family members follow them. All available indicators suggest, then, that family members of existing politicians are entering politics now in greater numbers than before. The answer to this increasing attractiveness of a political career, I suggest, lies in the increasing returns associated with state power from the 1990s onwards. The Indian state is a dominant state in which public officials have tremendous discretion in the exercise of state power (Chandra 2004). By a “dominant” state, I mean a state which controls access to goods and services which affect the lives and livelihoods of the majority of its citizens. By a “discretionary” state, I mean that public officials have tremendous discretion in allocating these goods and services to specific individuals. These two features, which have characterized the post-colonial Indian state since its inception, have surprisingly remained intact even after the liberalization of the economy since 1991. If anything, the reach of the state has expanded in several ways since liberalization (Chandra 2015): In its role in providing inputs such as land, concessions, and credit to the private sector, in its expanded regulatory presence, and in the expansion of state-funded developmental programs such as NREGS (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme), and of the discretionary funds given to legislators under MPLADS and MLALADS (Member of Legislative Assembly Local Area Development Scheme). Taken together, these features promise those who occupy state office high returns.8 These returns certainly include the one that politicians themselves cite as the main attraction to political office: the power to serve the people. Given the scope and power of the state in India, those who control it certainly have an immense capacity to serve, and several of those in positions of power indeed use this power for the public good. That is a return in itself, and there is also high status associated with it. But there are also at least three other forms of more private returns. 8

This characterization of the Indian state was introduced in Kanchan Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed (New York: Cambridge University Press 2004). Most studies of democracy in India, although motivated by other questions and arguing from different premises, point to the large size of the state and the importance of understanding the structure of the state in order to understand the nature of Indian politics. See, for instance, Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi (University of Chicago Press: 1987), Pradeep Chhibber, Democracy Without Associations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

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The first, and most obvious, return is corruption. Given that elected officials have significant discretion in how state policy is implemented, those in elected office naturally have an opportunity to obtain bribes or kickbacks for using their influence in favor of some groups or individuals at the expense of others. The recent corruption scandals over the telecom ministry and the Commonwealth games are simply two of the many examples of large-scale returns to corruption made possible by India’s new economy.9 But the accumulation of smaller scale returns – for example, kickbacks associated with influencing the preferential allocation of licenses or mining concessions, or bribes associated with contracts allocated under the MP and MLALADS, or with asking questions on the floor of the legislature, or influencing the filing of a First Information Report (FIR) by the police – is also not insignificant. Corruption on any scale, however, is not the only, or perhaps even the major form of returns to office. A second form of return is the preferential treatment that an elected representative can receive in the allocation of state-controlled benefits that occurs squarely within the letter of the law. These include the opportunity to obtain preferential access to inputs such as land or credit, or the speeding up of regulatory clearances, or favorable treatment by the law and order machinery. They also include the simple fact of political protection in an environment in which the state is not neutral: One former MP whose family repeatedly fights elections does so, he argues, in part to block encroachments on his estate that would become likely if his rivals came to power.10 Such preferential treatment can further the interests of the representative and his dependents even in the absence of any illegality. A third form of return is simply the emoluments that come with elected office. Even if a holder of elected office never accepts a bribe or favor, she or he is entitled to a salary, perquisites, and a pension. These returns loom large, especially in the rural economy, given the limited alternatives for employment. Official figures, even when taken at face value, are telling. According to a 2009 survey conducted by the Ministry of Labour and Unemployment, only 15% of India’s 478 million labor force has a regular salaried job.11 Forty percent are “self-employed,” 36% work as casual labor, and 9% are outright unemployed. The figures are worse in rural areas, where the majority of the labor force resides. In rural areas, only 10% of the labor force has a regular job. 41% is self-employed, 39% works as casual labor, and 10% are outright unemployed. The count of “self-employment,” furthermore can often disguise

9 10 11

The Economist, “A Rotten State,” March 10, 2011. Interview with Kanchan Chandra. All figures calculated from Report on Employment and Unemployment Survey (2009–10). Government of India: Ministry of Labour and Employment, Labour Bureau, Chandigarh, October 2010.

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de facto unemployment or underemployment (Jeffrey 2010, 8). It seems to suggest a regular source of income from autonomous economic activity, but in fact would include those struggling to eke out a living, including those engaged in subsistence agriculture on meager plots of land, as well as family members who have no source of income other than dependence on such land. Jeffrey rightfully terms this as an employment “crisis” (Jeffrey, 8). Especially in rural India, then, any form of access to the state – through elected office at any level, through entry into the bureaucracy, police or army, or through the acquisition of even a low level job – is a highly valued commodity for individuals and often large numbers of their dependents. Obtaining access to elected office, therefore, is more attractive now than it has ever been before. And it is attractive to everyone, not just to members of political families. Political contestation in India has been increasing exponentially since 1991 and reached a new high in the 2014 parliamentary elections, in which 464 political parties and over eight thousand candidates competed. But for the young heirs of political families, the opportunity cost of forgoing politics is perhaps higher than for the rest. Except for the unusually wellqualified, most twenty- or thirty-year olds from political families are likely to obtain greater returns, in status, power, and earning capacity, from entry-level positions in elected politics than entry-level positions in business or banking or bureaucracy or other such professions. It is these returns, perhaps, that explain the remarkable “concurrent” aspect of dynastic politics in India. These family ties represent, not only a “passing down” of family held positions from the old generation to the new, but also a lateral expansion, in which the one generation continues to occupy leadership positions while simultaneously creating new positions for siblings, in-laws, and children. The majority of MPs with dynastic ties in the 2004 and 2009 parliaments (59% in 2004 and 53% in 2009) have family members who are concurrently active politically, either in elected office at the national, state, or local level, or as candidates for elections, or as party leaders. We have not yet coded the identical measure for the 2014 parliament but have no reason to believe that it would be different. To illustrate, consider the example of Meira Kumar and Akhilesh Yadav, who were both elected to parliament in 2009.12 Both followed their fathers into office: Meira Kumar’s father, Jagjivan Ram, who belonged to the Scheduled Castes, was an illustrious Congress leader, and a former MP and Cabinet minister. Akhilesh Yadav’s father, Mulayam Singh Yadav, had been MP, MLA, and a former Cabinet minister as well as Chief Minister of the 12

Akhilesh Yadav resigned his position in 2012 to take up the position of Chief Minister of the State of Uttar Pradesh. In the by-election that followed, his wife Dimple Yadav was elected to the MP seat he had vacated.

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state of Uttar Pradesh. Kumar’s dynastic tie is “sequential.” She entered politics a year before her father’s death, and succeeded him as the preeminent Dalit leader within the Congress party. But Akhilesh Yadav’s is concurrent: His father has not only continued to be active along with his son, but brought in many other family members. Akhilesh Yadav is part of a concurrent dynasty with at least eleven members, which includes his uncles, aunts, brothers, cousins, and most recently also his wife. In the 2014 elections, all of the five seats won by the Samajwadi Party in parliament were won by the Yadav family. When Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had won from two constituencies, vacated one of them, the SP nominated his nephew Tej Pratap Yadav to fight the by-election. It is these concurrent dynasties which now form the majority of political dynasties in India. In fact, in the 2014 parliamentary elections, Meira Kumar’s niece also entered politics, transforming what had hitherto been a sequential dynasty into the beginnings of a concurrent one (Singh 2014). This diversification occurs within all three levels of government. At the national level, we have several examples of parliamentary seats distributed across a single family. In 2009, for example, father and son Sisir and Suvendu Adhikari from the Trinamool Congress were concurrently members of parliament. In 2014, Sharad Pawar’s daughter-in-law, Supriya Sule, and his brother in law, Padamsinh Patil, were concurrently MPs in the same year. Pappu Yadav and Ranjeet Ranjan, a married couple simultaneously elected to the 2014 parliament from Madhepura and Supaul respectively, are another example. Even the President, Pranab Mukherjee, has a family member – his son, Abhijit Mukherjee – concurrently active, as a member of the 2014 parliament, at the national level. We see a similar distribution of family members within and across regional and local institutions, but do not address those here, since this book focuses on the national parliament. The simultaneous sprawl of family members across political office makes sense when we realize that the greater the number of political positions within a family, the more it can presumably capture from the state. Furthermore, distributing family members across state offices is also insurance against risk: Individual members may lose elections, but the family as a whole is unlikely to be out of power. The more competitive the elections and the greater the risk of losing, the greater the likelihood that families will put up candidates for multiple elected offices. In that sense, electoral competitiveness and dynasticism are likely to reinforce rather than undermine each other. Not surprisingly, concurrent dynasties have also now begun to spread also to non-elected branches of the state and to the private sector. One MLA, for example, explained his career choice as the result of a family decision to diversify across the state. He was one of four brothers, and his father decided that the family would be best served if one brother went into the police, one in

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the bureaucracy and one in electoral politics.13 Some business families have also begun to place at least one member in electoral politics. A former senior police officer notes of the growing sprawl of families across legislatures, bureaucracy, police, and business: Over the years a powerful net is developing where close links have developed between the politicians, business class, and bureaucrats that have also been cemented through marriage alliances. The case of a senior officer in the former Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s office is illustrative in this regard. This person was the secretary of the Prime Minister, his brother in law was a police commissioner of Delhi his father in law was the chief minister of Bihar and his family is the largest land owners in Bihar [sic]. He also has many other family members who are in the bureaucracy, working for large business houses and in politics. (Verma 2005)

6

The role of party organizations: giving family members tickets

It is all very well for the families of politicians to want to be in politics. But so does everyone else. At election time, party offices are mobbed with thousands of ticket seekers. But parties disproportionately favor dynastic politicians when it comes to the allocation of tickets. In the absence of data on the family background of the over eight thousand candidates who now typically run for parliamentary elections, as well as the several thousand more aspirants for party tickets in these elections, we identify such favoritism by looking at the rates at which parties renominate dynastic MPs in one parliament as candidates for election to the next one.14 We treat all incumbent MPs as the pool of aspirants, and those renominated as the candidates selected from this pool.15 Parties, we find, renominate dynastic MPs disproportionately: In the 2009 elections, they renominated 65% of dynastic MPs compared to 57% of nondynastic MPs. In 2014, parties renominated 75% of dynastic MPs, compared to 65% of non-dynastic MPs. Among dynastic MPs, those MPs who were preceded by a family member in the same seat – what we call “locally rooted” MPs – were more likely to be renominated than dynastic MPs who were preceded by a family member active in politics but not as an MP from the same seat: In 2009, 82% of the first type of dynastic MP was renominated

13 14

15

Interview with Kanchan Chandra. Collecting data on the family background of all aspirants for a party ticket is an impossibly large, and perhaps undoable, task given the difficulties in identifying the universe of aspirants: The names of individuals who win a party nomination are public, but the names of those who seek one are not, and may not even be documented in private party records. The only other significant study to look at processes of candidate selection within parties (Farooqui and Sridharan 2014) also studies renomination, but of candidates in addition to incumbents.

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compared to 61% of the second type. In 2014, 78% of the first type of dynastic MP was renominated, compared to 72% of the second type. Interestingly enough, even the BJP, which campaigned against dynastic politics in these elections, renominated all but one of its dynastic MPs who had such embedded roots in a constituency, but less than half of its other dynastic MPs. In 2009, too, it was significantly more likely to renominate locally rooted dynastic MPs (77%) than MPs from other sorts of dynasties (50%). Why might parties favor dynastic MPs – and in particular locally rooted dynastic MPs – in the renomination process? The answer, I suggest, improving upon arguments made in previous work (Chandra and Umaira 2011), lies in the functional benefits that family ties provide to organizationally weak parties (a term that we will define shortly), coupled with the weak constraints that such parties have against dynasticism. The leadership of organizationally weak parties is constantly worried about the loyalty of its members. It is concerned, in particular, about two kinds of disloyalty: Defections, which can threaten the party’s survival in one or more localities, and challenges from within the party to its main leadership. Using dynastic ties as a criterion for renomination – and in particular renominating locally rooted MPs – allows the leadership to dampen, although not eliminate, defection. The concern about the second kind of disloyalty – a challenge from within – drives parties to renominate family members of those groups which are strong enough in internal party structures to demand attention, but not so strong that they would mount a leadership challenge. The rest of this section elaborates. Consider first why dynastic ties might minimize local-level defection. The threat of defection usually comes from disgruntled aspirants who have been denied a party ticket and is therefore highest in the period preceding an election. The practice of renominating a dynastic MP lowers the likelihood of intra-party rebellion by putting in place a predictable principle of succession that is less likely to be contested by those outside and within the family. Of course, it does not prevent dissension altogether. But it can reduce the degree of dissension by restricting the pool of claimants to a smaller number. Consider first the case of non-family members. When a party establishes dynastic ties – and in particular locally rooted dynastic ties – as a consistent principle for the allocation of tickets well before the election, realistic nondynastic challengers know to direct their ambitions elsewhere. Those aspiring not to run themselves, but to support the likely nominee, know where to direct their efforts. In this sense, the dynastic principle functions, much as a formal rule does, as a predictable device which allows party members to coordinate their behavior. Dynastic MPs who do not have local roots may not dampen dissension to the same degree, given their vulnerability to the charge of being “outsiders.”

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Challenges within the family, while not impossible, are also less likely because of the intrinsic property of family ties. These properties include, but are not limited to, the high psychological cost of rupturing them, the coincidence of self-interest within the family, and the difficulty that family members related to one party’s candidate have in convincing leaders of another party of their credibility. In the infrequent cases when family members cross party lines, they often do so in pursuit of a coordinated family interest. In the 2010 assembly elections in Bihar, for instance, several JD(U) politicians who could not get their family members JD(U) tickets got them RJD tickets instead.16 In the same elections, fathers and sons were contesting from the LJP and BJP, and the RJD and BJP, campaigning separately during the day and returning to the same home at night. Those who are genuinely estranged still face the problem of credibility, and rarely obtain comparable positions in the party to which they defect. Indeed, in the handful of well-known feuds in which members of the same family crossed party lines, there is only one prominent case, that of the Scindia family, in which members of the same family have risen to powerful positions in more than one party. In most cases, defectors from a family which leads one party are only able to find secondary positions in another – for example, Maneka Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law, who left the Congress after her husband’s death and has been with the BJP since 2004, does not hold any position in that party’s organizational structure. That said, the likelihood that parties will resort to the dynastic principle to guard against local defection depends on the alternatives available to them, and the constraints, if any, against the use of dynastic principles. The benefits of using dynastic principles are likely to bemost attractive to parties in those constituencies in which they do not have disciplinary or ideological structures to prevent or minimize defection. It also depends on whether the rules, if any, governing the nomination process permit nepotism or act as a constraint against it. Organizational weakness in parties – a term which can now be defined precisely – takes two forms: The lack of a rule-bound system for the allocation of internal party positions, including party nominations, and the lack of rules for maintaining the cohesiveness of local units. The lack of a rule-bound system for the allocation of internal positions removes constraints against the nomination of dynastic candidates. The lack of rules for maintaining

16

The JD(U) MP from Aurangabad, for instance, “actively lobbied for the Aurangabad assembly seat but chief minister Nitish Kumar did not oblige. The infuriated MP opened the channels of communications with the RJD camp and his efforts paid off. His elder brother is now RJD nominee from Aurangabad, creating huge embarrassment for the JD(U) leadership.” Ashok K Mishra, “Its Family First, Party Later in Bihar,” Economic Times October 7, 2010.

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local-level party cohesiveness drives the party leadership to rely on dynastic ties as informal substitutes. The first type of organizational weakness is a party-level attribute: It characterizes parties as a whole and distinguishes them from each other. It is the type of organizational weakness emphasized in my own previous work (Chandra and Umaira 2011) as well as that of others (Chhibber 2011, Chhibber, Jensenius, and Suryanarayan 2011, Ziegfeld in this volume). The second type of weakness is a local level attribute: There may well be variation in the structures for maintaining cohesiveness across local units within the same party. There is limited variation in India in the first type of weakness. The difference between parties is one of degree, with the BJP and the Left parties (CPI and CPM) being somewhat more rule-bound than others (See Farooqui and Sridharan 2014, and Chandra in this volume). The limited variation across parties in the degree to which they nominate dynastic candidates, Chapter 4 in this volume suggests, is a consequence in part of the limited variation in this form of organizational weakness. This may explain why parties such as the BJP, CPI, and CPM are somewhat less dynastic than the Congress. But why might those parties which are better organized, as a whole, favor dynastic candidates? Here the answer may lie in the variation within the same party in procedures for preventing defection in local-level units. Consider, for example, the case of the BJP. The BJP as a whole has stronger constraints in the procedure for the allocation of tickets (and internal positions more generally) than most other parties in parliament, including the Congress. But the structures affecting cohesion in its local-level units can vary: Some BJP units have a closer organizational relationship with RSS affiliates than others (Thachil 2014) and so may have developed stronger procedures and norms to maintain local cohesiveness than others. Consequently, even though the BJP renominates dynastic MPs to a lesser degree than the Congress, it may be especially likely to renominate dynastic MPs in those localities in which these alternative devices of preventing defection are weak. The utility of dynastic ties in preventing or at least minimizing defection is perhaps the reason parties often openly announce preferential quotas for dynastic candidates. Indeed, they often announce not only the intention of using the dynastic principle, but also which family members they are likely to favor. Usually it is sons or daughters, which has the double advantage of being considered as a legitimate principle of succession, thus preempting challenges from other relatives including in-laws, siblings and cousins, and of allowing a peaceful generational transition within the party. According to one report, for example, Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, who himself succeeded his father, “has told leaders that he will give tickets only

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to their children. Jagan wants to promote young blood in politics, explained a YSRC leader.” The same report went on to note that the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), had made similar announcements. “Many TD leaders are over the hill and party president Chandrababu Naidu [himself the son-in-law of the party’s founder] wants to encourage their children. He has declared 30% of the TD tickets will be given to youth [mostly dynastic heirs]” (Asian Age 2013). At the same time, the concern for preventing the second type of disloyalty – a leadership challenge from within – helps determine the ethnic groups from among which dynasties are likely to be favored. In general, the groups which get tickets within a party are those that dominate factional competition within the party but at the same time do not threaten the position of the leadership. Non-dominant groups also get some tickets if allocating such tickets helps the image of the party without threatening the leadership. But groups that are neither dominant in the factional competition in the party nor valuable in shaping the image of the party are not likely to get tickets. Three chapters in this book – Chapters 5, 6, and 7 – build on this argument to explain variation in the degree of dynasticism across social groups in the Indian parliament. Basu links women’s low overall representation but high representation among dynasties in part to the organizational position of women within political parties. Women are not well represented in the internal organizational structure of most political parties. Consequently, she argues, they are less likely to be nominated as candidates. But those women linked to the families of powerful factions are especially likely to be renominated. Chauchard notes that SCs and STs are less dynastic than other groups, because they are not well represented in the factional competition within the Congress and the BJP, the two parties which win the largest number of SC and ST seats. “SC/ST politicians,” in his words, “do not have the same opportunities to create political dynasties because they tend to play a less dominant role in the executive of the main parties that return MPs.” Chandra notes that upper-castes dominate factions in the largest parties while in smaller, subaltern-led parties they constitute relatively non-threatening factions who at the same time help the parties in acquiring an “inclusive” image. Consequently, upper caste dynasties are favored, paradoxically, by both upper caste and subaltern parties. Before going further, it may be helpful to address other plausible explanations for the favoritism shown to dynastic candidates by political parties. One obvious alternative explanation is that parties favor dynastic MPs because they believe such candidates are more likely to win, not because they are trying to prevent local-level defections. But if we look at what they say and what they do, this consideration does not appear to be paramount in the selection of such candidates. In an explicit declaration made by the Congress

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party in 2013 about its ticket allocation policy, indicative of a broader attitude across political parties, it noted explicitly that “Winnability alone should not be the benchmark for deciding nominees of the party during elections.”17 The Congress party has sometimes announced that it will not field candidates who lost by a large margin in previous elections, but then frequently flouted such declared intentions. The Congress is not unique. A news report on dynastic candidates in the BJP in 2014 noted that winnability was not always the main criterion in selecting them either. “Winnability,” according to the report, “does not explain why even those who have lost elections for the party have been rewarded with tickets. Poonam Mahajan, the 33-year-old daughter of late Pramod Mahajan, has been nominated by BJP from Mumbai North-West constituency, even though she lost the 2009 assembly polls by a margin of 24,966 votes.” (Sharma 2014). In separate statistical work, Anjali Bolkhen and I show that in fact the selection of dynastic renominees is not driven by their prior electoral performance – but that the repeated endorsement of their political parties can then help them to go on to do better in future elections (Bohlken and Chandra 2014). Indeed, Poonam Mahajan, once renominated by the BJP despite her earlier loss, went on to win the 2014 parliamentary elections from Mumbai. Instead of, or in addition to, electoral performance, the central leadership is constantly concerned about loyalty. Indeed, the Congress party’s statement referred to above goes on to say that “a balance is required between loyalty and winnability.”18 The same point is reiterated across parties. For example, M. Karunanidhi, the leader of the DMK, has explicitly stated that he awards party tickets at least in part to reward service to the party. In his words, “(t)hose who worked hard, who acted bravely, who sacrificed their self-interest and who considered party as their soul have been selected as our party’s candidate” (Karunanidhi 2008, cited in Manikandan and Wyatt 2014). A second plausible possibility which also does not bear closer scrutiny is that dynastic candidates are more likely than non-dynastic candidates to have qualities such as wealth or brand recognition or political experience or political skill or network ties that may weight party decisions in their favor. The data we have on some of these qualities do not indicate that dynasties have these qualities disproportionately – as we have seen, they are wealthier, on average, than non-dynastic MPs, but they show no evidence of greater political skill and are often less experienced (see Chapter 8 in this volume).

17 18

Jaipur declaration, a strategy document released by the Congress Party at an All India Congress Committee (AICC) meeting in Jaipur, Rajasthan on January 20, 2013. http://aicc.org.in/. Jaipur Declaration, All India Congress Committee (AICC), January 20 2013. http://aicc.org.in/.

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But in the remainder of this section, we focus simply on the logic linking favoritisim for dynasts to these qualities. In popular discourse in India, wealth is often cited as the most important such quality. Dynastic MPs are believed to possess more wealth than nondynastic MPs on the reasoning that they inherit it from family members who have previously held office. This greater wealth may tilt the nomination decision in their favor for at least three reasons. First, in the absence of state funding, candidates have to invest their own resources to run a viable election campaign (Gowda and Sridharan 2012), and parties may thus naturally nominate wealthy candidates over those with more modest means. Second, parliamentary seats are often allegedly “sold” to aspiring candidates, and their wealthier status means that dynastic candidates may be more able to purchase their seats than non-dynastic candidates (Nagi 2008). Third, if dynastic candidates are among the major contributors to the party coffers, then by denying them renomination, the party also runs the risk of losing resources. The problem with this explanation, however, is that it does not distinguish dynastic renominees from all incumbents. If office brings wealth with it, then incumbents, including repeat incumbents, should be disproportionately wealthy too. Indeed, the logic of the argument that associates dynastic status with wealth requires that such wealth be amassed by incumbents, because if incumbents did not acquire such wealth, how would they pass it on to their heirs? Yet parties were more likely to renominate dynastic incumbents than non-dynastic ones. The discrepancy remains when we compare two groups of MPs – those who had dynastic ties but were first time MPs, and those who were not dynastic but were repeat incumbents. Dynastic first timers in the 2004 parliament, for example, were renominated at higher rates (66%) than nondynastic repeat incumbents (57%). While wealth may influence the selection of candidates as a general matter, it does not satisfactorily explain why dynastic candidates in particular are favored over others. Consider now the question of brand recognition. The literature on dynastic politics has highlighted name recognition as one of the primary factors affecting the performance of dynastic candidates in elections, suggesting by implication that it may affect prior party decisions as well (Feinstein 2010). And dynastic families themselves, as we saw from Badal’s words above, argue that the family name, much like Mercedes, is a credible brand. But if dynastic MPs have greater brand recognition because they inherit it from family members who have held office, then it follows that incumbents, and especially repeat incumbents, should have the same degree of name recognition. Why then are dynastic MPs favored especially? The same goes for other qualities believed to be associated with dynastic candidates such as political experience, political skill, or network ties: Their logic applies to incumbents, especially

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repeat incumbents, generally, and so does not explain why dynastic incumbents occupy a more favored position than non-dynastic incumbents. Finally, we must also raise the question of whether, instead of parties giving dynasties a leg up, it is dynasties which take over parties and consequently promote their own members. As I noted earlier in this chapter, the leaders of over a third of the parties in the 2014 Indian parliament have a dynastic background. The leaders of another ten have family members who followed them into politics (and often the leadership of the party), bringing the total of family-based political parties to two-thirds of all political parties in parliament. Might the renomination of dynastic MPs simply be an artifact of the prior takeover of these parties by dynastic leaders who then go on to nominate members of their own families? This hypothesis is not supported by the data. As we have seen, MPs related to the party leadership form only a small proportion of dynastic MPs in parliament. The majority of dynastic MPs in parliament, in other words, do not have a family connection with the party leadership and yet are renominated at greater rates. Further, even parties such as the BJP, which do not have a dynastic leadership, renominate dynasties – particularly locally rooted ones – at disproportionately high rates. However, Chapter 4 in this book suggests that having a dynast as the leader of a political party can, in conjunction with other variables, have an indirect effect on the selection of dynastic candidates from other families by weakening the internal constraints against nepotism within the party further. Dynastic leadership, according to Ziegfeld, does not necessarily explain the absolute levels of dynasticism among parties in India: All parties, for the reasons outlined here, have reasons to want to renominate dynastic candidates. But dynastic leadership may, in combination with other variables, help explain differences in the relative level of dynasticism across parties. 7

The role of voters: supporting dynastic nominees

So far I have argued that two structural features of the Indian state – dominance and discretion – give the relatives of existing MPs an incentive to enter politics, and that one structural feature of Indian political parties – organizational weakness, especially at the local level – leads parties to favor them in the nomination process. But once these party-stamped dynasts enter the electoral fray, do voters favor them over other candidates and, if so, why and under what conditions? It goes without saying that some voters in India must prefer dynastic candidates to others. We could hardly have had dynastic MPs in parliament if this were not the case. The survey cited in the prologue estimates this number as 46% of voters in the 2014 elections (Vaishnav, Kapur, and Sircar 2014). But we do not know why they prefer dynastic candidates when they do

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Table 1.14 Winning margin of dynastic MPs (2004–14) Winning margin Election

Dynastic MP

Non-dynastic MP

2004 2009 2014

14.54 11.36 13.65

11.64 8.98 15.53

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

and whether this preference is stable across elections. This question cannot be answered in any authoritative way without individual level survey data designed to reveal the preferences and the motivations behind these preferences across elections. We propose at best a suggestive answer to some of these questions here based on aggregate data. The aggregate election data suggest that voters can indeed give dynastic MPs an edge in elections (See Table 1.14). In the 2004 and 2009 elections, dynastic MPs won with bigger margins than others in the 2004 and 2009 elections (see Table 1.14). This edge was reversed in the 2014 elections, in which non-dynastic MPs actually won with slightly larger margins, a fact to which we return later in this section. The edge that dynastic MPs had in each election was small – 3% in 2004 and 2% in 2009. But in India’s highly competitive elections, this small edge is significant: 16% (89) of parliamentary constituencies in 2004 were won by a margin of less than 3% and 14% (78) of constituencies in 2009 were won by a margin of less than 2%. However, the size of the edge depends on party affiliation. In all three elections, for example, dynastic MPs in the Congress party won by larger margins than non-dynastic MPs in the Congress. But dynastic MPs from the BJP had a more variable performance: They did better than non-dynastic MPs in 2009, but not in 2004 or 2014. Indeed, the reversal of the dynastic edge in parliament overall in 2014 reflected the underlying importance of party affiliations for dynastic performance: In this election, dynastic MPs from the Congress again won with larger margins than non-dynastic MPs. As the BJP has a much greater representation in the 2014 parliaments than in previous ones, this reduced the difference in the performance of dynastic and nondynastic MPs present in the previous parliaments. We cannot distinguish from the aggregate data, furthermore, whether when a voter votes for a dynastic candidate he or she does so because of a preference for dynastic ties per se, or because of a preference for a party which happens to have nominated a dynastic candidate. In every constituency, voters vote for a

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single candidate. If their party has nominated a dynastic candidate, then their party preference may well lead them to vote for that candidate regardless of his or her dynastic ties. We know already from the Indian National Election Studies that the majority of voters take the party stamp into account when making a voting decision,19 and from previous election returns that independents rarely win in Indian parliamentary elections (or state legislative assembly elections for that matter). The highest number of seats won by independents in Indian parliamentary elections was in 1957, when they won forty-seven seats. Since then, the odds of independents winning have declined sharply and in the last two decades their seats have remained in the single digits. In the 2004–14 parliaments, six independents won in 2004, ten in 2009, and only three in 2014. This preference for party affiliation appears to apply to dynastic candidates as well: Not a single dynastic MP between 2004 and 2014 was elected as an independent candidate. Indeed, as Chapter 2 in this volume shows, even members of old regime dynasties in India’s early elections did better by adapting to party structures rather than by running as independents. Voters who prefer dynastic MPs, or the parties that nominate them, are not confined to any one constituency or any systematic cluster of constituencies. Dynastic MPs, as we have seen already, are found to some degree in parliamentary constituencies in all regions in India and in both reserved and nonreserved constituencies. Further, Francesca R. Jensenius shows in Chapter 3 in this volume shows that the socio-economic characteristics of the population in constituencies which send dynastic MPs to parliament do not differ in any systematic way from the socio-economic characteristics of constituencies which send non-dynastic MPs to parliament. [Jensenius does find systematic differences in the socio-economic characteristics of constituencies which send MPs from royal families to parliament – these constituencies have larger proportions of voters who are rural and illiterate. But MPs from royal families are only a small proportion of all dynastic MPs.] Finally, at least as far as we can judge from the aggregate data, the preference for dynastic MPs does not appear to be stable across elections. The same constituencies often switch from a dynastic to a non-dynastic MP and back again. Given the changes in the delimitation of parliamentary constituencies between the 2004 and 2009 elections, I confine my description of the extent to which the same constituencies switch between dynastic and

19

The Indian National Election Studies conducted by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies show that the majority of voters say that they take parties (as compared to individuals) into account when making their decisions, and that the proportion which believe that parties are important has increased over time www.lokniti.org/dataunit_time_series.php. See also Chandra (2004), Table 9.3.

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non-dynastic MP representation to the 438 constituencies which remained broadly the same between 2004 and 2014, by which we mean simply that they retained the same name. An overwhelming majority (94.42%) of these constituencies have either not had a dynastic MP at all or experienced at least one switch between a dynastic and non-dynastic MP between 2004 and 2014. Only a handful of constituencies (24% or 5.48%) have been represented by a dynastic MP continuously across all three parliaments. To the extent that we cannot distinguish any special characteristics in the populations of constituencies that send dynastic MPs to parliament, and to the extent that most constituencies do not have a stable association with dynastic representatives, we cannot locate the preference for dynastic MPs among some special type of voter. 8

Implications of dynasties for democratic politics

The primary objection to dynastic politics in a modern democracy is that it introduces a form of exclusion among elected representatives that is antithetical to democracy. The problem, it is worth emphasizing, is not exclusion per se but birth-based exclusion. Some form of exclusion, formal or informal, is inevitably associated with elected representatives in most democracies. Elected representatives, for example, are usually more educated, on average, than those who elect them. But education, because it is an acquired characteristic and can arguably also be seen as a qualification for office, is sometime seen as an acceptable, even desirable, basis for exclusion. Birth however, is neither an acquired characteristic nor, in a democratic system, a legitimate qualification for office. A ruling class for which birth is itself a qualification, therefore, is a prima facie illegitimate basis for democratic representation. There is no doubt that dynastic politics in India is exclusionary in this respect. Some have challenged this view by suggesting that representatives from political families in India have obtained office because of their qualifications and not because of their birth, which may either be incidental or a stepping-stone to acquiring these qualifications. The common analogy is with the entry of family members into other professions such as medicine or the law. As one politician says, “When a doctor’s son can become a doctor . . . why can’t a politician’s son follow suit?” (Ghatwal 2013). But, as Chapter 8 in this volume shows, dynasts are in fact less qualified when it comes to grassroots political experience, and as we have seen already, dynastic MPs in India do not do better than non-dynasts on standard indicators of performance. Family ties, in other words, do not assist them in obtaining the right qualifications: They have themselves become a qualification. This exclusionary aspect, however, is a product, not of dynastic politics per se, but of the institutional structures within which dynastic politics has arisen in

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India. The Indian state, I noted earlier, gives the relatives of politicians an incentive to run for office rather than choose other, non-political professions. And it is the lack of rules within party organizations, and of structures supporting party cohesion at the local level, which has made birth itself a qualification of office. In alternative institutional environments, in which parties require formal qualifications for the allocation of tickets, or institute procedures such as primaries to decide who the party nominee would be, it is possible that dynastic politics may occur, if at all, in a lesser degree. And, if political dynasties do emerge, they may well be associated with qualifications other than the accident of birth and thus have a different effect on democratic politics. The broader institutional environment in India, however, also places limits on the extent of birth-based exclusion. India’s multi-party system with coalition governments ensures a fluid electoral environment in which there are many bases for electoral advantage. Dynastic ties are only one of them. Caste, wealth, education, and party, which are only imperfectly correlated with dynastic politics, can confer electoral advantages too. Consequently, despite the increasing importance of dynastic politics, elections in India remain extraordinarily competitive. Indeed, the relationship with electoral competition distinguishes India’s new aristocrats in one key respect. An aristocracy is normally seen as a closed class, consisting of a handful of families who pass down class membership across generations. But India’s democratic aristocracy has open borders. India’s competitive elections have consistently produced new winners, and as these new winners enter parliament (or other elected bodies), they bring in new families with them. Just as victory produces entry, defeat produces exit. This means that as the composition of India’s parliament has changed, so has the composition of its aristocratic class. Some observers, including myself in an earlier essay, have suggested that even as electoral politics remains competitive, the increasing supply of dynastic candidates may “change the nature of competition in India from individualcentred to family-centred competition,” (Chandra and Umaira 2011) culminating in an entirely birth-based ruling elite. In Vir Sanghvi’s words: Once politics becomes entirely a family business, it will become even more disconnected from the people. Nor will anybody have a choice: in UP for instance, Ajit Singh’s son is in politics, so are Mulayam Singh’s children, so are assorted Congress dynasts etc. Where are the non-dynasts going to come from? The only option will be to vote for one dynast rather than the other . . . Slowly but surely, true democracy is replaced by a kind of feudalism in which the peasants are given the right to choose between various aristocrats. (Sanghvi 2009)

A closer look at the data suggest otherwise. If the individual-centered nature of competition in the Indian elections were giving way to family-centered

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competition, we should be able to detect it by looking at the degree of turnover between dynastic and non-dynastic MPs from the same constituency. If all MPs from a single constituency are dynastic, and they come from the same dynasty, this would indicate the absence of competition altogether. If all MPs from a single constituency are dynastic, but they come from different dynasties, this indicates that competition exists but is limited to dynastic contenders. But if dynastic and non-dynastic MPs switch places in a single constituency, this suggests not only that the system is competitive but that non-dynastic contenders are effective competition for their dynastic counterparts. As we saw earlier, only 5% (24) of India’s parliamentary constituencies have been continuously represented by a dynastic MP between 2004 and 2014. A subset of this small number of constituencies has indeed witnessed familybased competition: Eight of these twenty-four constituencies experienced a switch between dynastic MPs from different families. This small number suggests that the dampening effect of dynasticism on the competitiveness of the Indian elections may have been overstated, by us and others. There are also institutionally imposed limits to the extent to which dynastic politics can block the entry of new talent into the party system. Given India’s extraordinarily permissive party registration rules, aspiring political entrants who feel blocked in existing political parties can well form new ones. And given India’s fluid patterns of coalition and alliance politics, even new and small parties are often viable candidates for political power. As Chauchard notes in this volume, to the extent that creating new parties is likely to be costly and time-consuming, we can say that dynastic politics “delays the emergence of new leaders. But it would be an exaggeration to say that it altogether blocks their emergence.” Indeed, if we look at the rapid increase in party formation and contestation in parliamentary elections, it would be hard to say that new talent is being blocked. Paradoxically, furthermore, dynastic politics has also increased the inclusiveness of India’s representative class in some key respects at the same time that it has increased its degree of exclusiveness in others. It has provided a channel for representation for new social categories – women, Backward Castes, Muslims, and youth – who do not, or have not, found a space in politics through normal channels. The most striking example of this phenomenon is women, for whom the route to entry in representative institutions has been disproportionately dynastic. Women, as we have seen already, are one of the most under-represented groups in parliament. Dynasty has often been the channel by which the few women who obtain office have made it. As Basu notes: “If women’s dynastic ties violate the principle of democratic representation based on equal opportunities for qualified individuals, they have partially rectified the historical under-representation of women.” Had it not been for dynastic politics, the already low representation of women in parliament may have been even lower.

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The point extends also to other subaltern social groups such as Backward Castes and Muslims. Dynastic ties, we suggest, have functioned as one device through which the representation of these groups in parliament has increased. Privileged groups such as Hindu Forward Caste males certainly dominate India’s dynastic class and, as Chapter 8 shows, are more likely to substitute family ties for experience in the pursuit of office. But for “Forward Caste” candidates, family ties are simply one among the portfolio of resources which can give a candidate an edge in winning elections in India. They also possess a greater share of other resources, including wealth, education, and a powerful position in the factional structure of India’s largest political parties. For subaltern candidates, however, who are on average less wealthy, less well educated, occupy subordinate positions in the factional structure of large parties, and whose own parties are weaker and smaller, family ties can make a larger difference. But for dynastic ties, there may well have been even fewer subaltern MPs in parliament. Indeed, if we look at re-election rates of MPs from each type of group in the Indian parliament, in most cases, the lower down we go on the ladder of subalternity, the more that dynastic ties make a difference. In the 2009 elections, for example, dynastic MPs from the “Forward Castes” were 1.3 times as likely to get re-elected as non-dynastic MPs from the same category. But dynastic MPs from the Backward Castes were almost twice as likely to get re-elected as non-dynastic Backward Caste MPs. Dynastic MPs from Scheduled Castes and Muslims also had a greater edge in re-election than dynastic MPs from the “Forward Castes” (although those from the Scheduled Tribes did not). In the 2014 elections, re-election rates for all MPs dropped significantly compared to 2009 and dynastic MPs did not have an edge in relection rates. But dynastic MPs from most subaltern groups were still slightly more likely to be re-elected than dynastic MPs from the Forward Castes. In this sense, we can think of dynastic politics as an informal substitute for institutional devices such as affirmative action that serve to bring about some form of political equality. It is not surprising then that dynastic representation is especially high among under-privileged social groups such as women, Muslims, and Backward Castes, who do not have reservations to aid them. Among those groups who do have reservations – Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes – the prevalence of dynasticism is lower than average. Consider now the example of youth. India is distinguished among established democracies for the relative youth of its population and therefore the electorate.20 The median age in other established democracies such as 20

In this, India is different from established democracies, but similar to its South Asian neighbours. All data on median age across countries are from Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm.

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the UK and the US is forty and thirty-six, respectively. In India, it is twentyfive. The influx of young people among voters and contestants puts pressure on political parties to accommodate them. And parties have had a difficult time getting older politicians to make way for younger people despite repeated appeals to them to retire gracefully. Indeed, the age profile of Indian parliaments has been increasing while the median age of the Indian voter has been decreasing (Kumar 2014, xxvi). The 2014 parliament is now India’s “oldest ever parliament” at a time when India has its “youngest ever electorate” (Rukmini 2014). Dynastic politics is a way of easing the otherwise difficult transfer of power from the older generation to the young: Older generations in powerful positions are often more amenable to stepping down if they are able to hand over power to their children or other relatives. Consider the example of one not so young political successor, Debabrata Saikia, preceded in politics by his father, mother and uncle, who finally got his chance to fight elections at age 46, when the Congress pressed the older generation to retire. In his words: “Our family has been representing Nazira for a long time. Moreover, when Soniaji appealed to the older generation of leaders to retire gracefully, my mother immediately responded, at the same time informing her that I would like to be a candidate” (Kashyap 2011). Politicians, therefore, have actively begun to encourage dynasticism as a means of weeding the older generation out. Indeed, younger members of parliament are disproportionately dynastic: Of the twenty-six MPs under the age of thirty-five in the 2004 parliament, 62% came from political dynasties, while of the twelve MPs who are under the age of thirty-five in 2009, eleven (92%) come from political dynasties. Fewer younger people are making it to parliament, in other words, but those that manage to squeeze in are helped along by family ties. My point here, it should be clear, is neither to argue that political inclusion is the main effect of dynastic politics nor to defend dynastic politics as a normatively desirable channel to bring about political inclusion. The inclusion brought about by dynastic politics is limited in both numbers and substance. As dynastic politics brings subaltern groups into the corridors of power, it dilutes but does not dismantle older structures of privilege. Those women and young people most likely to gain entry are often from the families of already privileged groups. Their entry does signal some shift in power from older, male MPs to younger, female ones. But because they are from the same families, this shift in power is limited in degree. In the case of subaltern groups, while dynastic ties can help bring members of these groups into parliament, it arrests the process of the downward circulation of power within the group by restricting it to a family-based inner circle.

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But when looking at the relationship between dynastic politics and inclusion, the counterfactual we need to consider is what the level of inclusion would have been in the absence of dynastic politics. Even though dynastic politics has benefited subaltern groups less than it has the “Forward Castes,” it may well have increased the degree of representation of subaltern groups beyond the level at which they would have been represented otherwise. This inclusionary role, moreover, is not the product of some property intrinsic to dynastic politics per se, but of an institutional context in which there is a systematic bias against some social groups and a systematic bias in favor of dynasties. Indeed, in a democracy in which institutions introduce this bias, those groups which do not have dynasties of their own end up being at a disadvantage. REFERENCES Asako, Yasushi, Takeshi Iida, and Tetsuya Matsubayashi (2015). “Dynastic Politicians: Theory and Evidence from Japan.” Japanese Journal of Political Science, 16: 5–32. Asian Age (2013). “Legacy Does Rule in Politics.” June 16. www.asianage.com/print/ 231618. Bardhan, Pranab (1984). The Political Economy of Development in India. New York: Oxford University Press. Benedict, Kay (2013). “A Recipe for Success? Rahul’s Four Steps to Bag a Poll Ticket.” Mail Online, March 17. Bohlken, Anjali and Kanchan Chandra (2014). “Why Dynastic Legislators Do Better in Elections: An Institutionalist Explanation.” Working Paper. Chandra, Kanchan (2004). Why Ethnic Parties Succeed. New York: Cambridge University Press. ed. (2012). Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. (2015). “The New Indian State: The Relocation of Patronage in the New Economy.” Economic and Political Weekly Vol L No. 41, October 10 2015. Chandra, Kanchan and Wamiq Umaira (2011). “India’s Democratic Dynasties.” Seminar 622 (Special issue on Dynasties in South Asia), May 2011. Chandra, Kanchan, Anjali Bohlken, and Simon Chauchard (2014). Dataset on Dynasticism in the Indian Parliament. Chhibber, Pradeep (2001). Democracy without Association/s. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (2011). “Dynastic Parties: Organization, Finance and Impact.” Party Politics, May 5. Chhibber, Pradeep, Francesca R. Jensenius, and Pavithra Suryanarayan (2014), “Party Organization and Party Proliferation in India.” Party Politics July, 20(4): 489–505. Dal Bo, Ernesto, Pedro Dal Bo, and Jason Snyder (2009). “Political Dynasties.” Review of Economic Studies, 76(1): 115–42. Das, Sonali (2014). “I’m Here on Merit, Not Dynasty Politics: Yashwant’s Son Jayant.” Times of India, March 24. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/Im-here-onmerit-not-dynasty-politics-Yashwants-son-Jayant/articleshow/32579001.cms.

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Eggers, Andrew C, and Jens Hainmueller (2009). “MPs for Sale? Returns to Office in Postwar British Politics.” American Political Science Review, 103 (4): 513–33. Farooqui, A. and E. Sridharan (2014). “Incumbency, Internal Processes and Renomination in Indian Parties.” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 52(1): 78–108. Feinstein, Brian D. (2010). “The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections.” Legislative Studies Quarterly, 35(4): 571–98. Frankel, Francine and M. S. A. Rao, eds. (1989). Dominance and State Power in Modern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. French, Patrick (2011). India: A Portrait. London: Penguin. Fukui, Shigeko N. and Haruhiro Fukui (1992). “Elite Recruitment and Political Leadership.” PS Political Science and Politics, 25: 25–36. Ghatwal, Milind. “Poll Heat On, Rise of the Sons in MP.” Indian Express, June 25. Government of India (2006). A Report: Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India. Government of India: Prime Minister’s High Level Committee. Sachar Commission Report. (2010). Report on Employment and Unemployment Survey (2009–10). Government of India: Ministry of Labor and Employment, Labor Bureau, Chandigarh October 2010. (2011). MPLADS Annual Report 2009–10. New Delhi: Government of India, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, 2011, downloaded from www.mplads.nic.in. Gowda, M. V. Rajeev, and E. Sridharan (2012). “Reforming India’s Party Financing and Election expenditure Laws.” Election Law Journal, 11(2): 226–40. Jaffrelot, Christophe (2003). India’s Silent revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India. London: Hurst and Co. Jaffrelot, Christophe and Sanjay Kumar, eds. (2009). Rise of the Plebeians? : The Changing face of Indian Legislative Assemblies. New Delhi: Routledge. Jayal, Niraja (2006). Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffrey, Craig (2010). Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kashyap, Samudra Gupta (2011). “Santosh, Saikia Children in Cong Poll Family.” Indian Express, March 17. www.indianexpress.com/news/santosh-saikia-childrenin-cong-poll-family/763419. Kumar, Sanjay, ed. (2014) Indian Youth and Electoral Politics. New Delhi: Sage Publications 2014. Linden, Leigh (2004). “Are Incumbents Really Advantaged? The Preference for Non-Incumbents in Indian National Elections.” Working paper, www.leighlinden .com/Research.html. Majumdar, Sanjoy (2009). “India’s Politicians Keep it in the Family.” BBC News, June 10. news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8089734.stm. Malhotra, Inder (2004). Dynasties of India and Beyond: Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh. New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers India.

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Manikandan C. and Andrew Wyatt (2014). “Elite Formation Within a Political Party: The Case of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 52(1): 32–54. Mendoza, Ronald U., Edsel L. Beja, Victor S. Venida, and David Barua Yap II (2012). “An Empirical Analysis of Political Dynasties in the 15th Philippine Congress.” ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1969605. Mishra, Ashok K. (2010). “Its Family First, Party Later in Bihar,” Economic Times October 7. Mukherjee, Shruba (2009). “Raised to the Power of W.” Deccan Herald, May 30. www.deccanherald.com/content/5124/raised-power-w.html. Nagi, Saroj (2008). “Cong Tickets Sold, says Alva.” Hindustan Times, November 7. Prasad, Manoj (2009). “Soren & Co.” Indian Express, April 9. Przeworski, Adam (1991). Democracy and the Market. New York: Cambridge University Press. Querubin, Pablo (2010). “Family and Politics: Dynastic Persistence in the Philippines.” Manuscript, September. (2011). “Political Reform and Elite Persistence: Term Limits and Political Dynasties in the Philippines.” Manuscript, April. Rossi, Martin A. (2009). “Political Dynasties: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Argentina.” Universidad de San Andres, Working paper. Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Susanne H. Rudolph (1967). The Modernity of Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph (1987). In Pursuit of Lakshmi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rukmini S. (2014). “India Elects its Oldest Ever Parliament.” Hindu, May 26. www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/india-elects-its-oldest-ever-parliament/ article6020532.ece. Sanghvi, Vir (2009). “Politics of Inheritance.” Hindustan Times, May 30. Sharma, Supriya (2014). “BJP Candidates List Shows That it Loves Dynastic Politics Too.” May 17. http://scroll.in/article/bjp-candidates-list-shows-that-it-lovesdynastic-politics-too/?id=658714. Singh, Santosh (2014). “Niece vs aunt in battle for Jagjivan Ram Legacy.” Indian Express, March 20. Smith, Daniel Markham (2012). Succeeding in Politics: Dynasties in Democracies. PhD dissertation, UCSD. Taylor, Charles (1992). Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thachil, Tariq (2014). Elite Parties, Poor Voters. New York: Cambridge University Press. Vaishnav, Milan (2013). “Five Trends Shaping India’s Voting Landscape.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 10. Vaishnav, Milan, Devesh Kapur, and Nilanjan Sircar (2014). “46 percent of Voters Have No Problems Supporting Dynastic Candidates.” Times of India, March 23. Van Coppenelle, Brenda (2013). “Political Dynasties in the UK House of Commons: the Null Effect of Narrow Electoral Selection.” Manuscript, London School of Economics, November.

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Velasco, Carlos (2014). Parties, Dynasts and the Selection of Candidates: Evidence from India. Paper presented at Princeton University Comparative Politics Seminar, September 22. Verma, Arvind (2005). “The Police in India: Design, Performance and Adaptability.” In Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Public Institutions In India: Performance and Design. Delhi: Oxford University Press, eds., 194–258. Yadav, Yogendra (2000). “Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge.” In Francine Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava, and Balveer Arora eds., Transforming India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 120–45. Ziegfeld, Adam. Forthcoming. “Candidate Characteristics in Indian Elections: Who Wins Votes?” Asian Survey.

2

The “old regime” confronts democracy Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph

In May 2014, Dushyant Singh, of the Dholpur royal family in the state of Rajasthan, was elected to parliament for the third time in a row as a candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party. A few months earlier, his mother, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, the daughter of the former Maharaja of Gwalior and the wife of the former Maharaja of Dholpur, had been elected Chief Minister of the state of Rajasthan from the BJP. Her inauguration in the state capital of Jaipur, once the seat of Rajasthan’s most famous princely kingdom, had the pomp of a coronation. Around the same time, her sister Yashodhara Raje Scindia was elected to the state legislative assembly of Madhya Pradesh. And her estranged nephew, Jyotiraditya Scindia, fighting on behalf of the Indian National Congress, won the parliamentary elections from the constituency of Guna in that state. He represented the third generation of the Scindia family, which has held that seat for the last forty years without interruption. The success of generations of the Scindias in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh is remarkable because it is so exceptional. For the most part, India’s “old regime dynasties” – its Maharajas and landed aristocrats [jagirdars and zamindars] – have been eclipsed in its post-independence democratic politics. In other democracies, these former aristocracies have sometimes been able to hold on to power through representative institutions. In Britain, for example, the monarchy and the House of Lords function as a dedicated space for old-regime dynasties. Closer to home, in Pakistan, landowning rural elites held on to power longer and retain a significant foothold, even though they share space with new business, trading and professional elites (Cheema Javid and Naseer 2013). In India, however, the descendants of old regime dynasties constitute only 3% of the three twenty-first century parliaments [see Table 1.7 in Chapter 1], and only about 10% of India’s political dynasties. The ruling class in India now, and the dynastic ruling class, consist almost entirely of new elites whose founders rose to power in the postindependence era. This chapter attempts to explain why most old-regime dynasties did not survive the new order and why a few did by relating success and failure to their ability to adapt to party structures. It does so by describing a singular if not a 56

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unique event in Indian and perhaps in world history: an electoral contest between candidates of an old order composed of monarchs [maharajas] and landed aristocrats [jagirdars] whose electoral appeal was based on traditional status and an emergent new order whose candidates claimed the legitimacy of popular sovereignty as it was expressed in the opinions and votes of citizen voters. The contest was played out in 1952 during India’s first parliamentary and state legislative assembly elections in Rajasthan, a newly formed state of independent India composed of twenty-two erstwhile princely states. The election pitted erstwhile maharajas and jagirdars against Congress party candidates drawn for the most part from Rajasthan’s miniscule middle class, led by erstwhile leaders of Rajasthan’s State Peoples’ Freedom movement. We suggest that the indifference of old-regime dynasties to modern party structures and norms was important in explaining their subsequent electoral decline. The contest between old regime candidates and the candidates of the Congress party reached beyond the selection of representatives and the governments they might form to a struggle of political cultures and regimes. Candidates of the old regime paid little attention to party structures. Many fought as independents. They reminded their erstwhile dependents, inferiors and subjects that some were born to rule. Stressing their natural leadership of territorial communities, they pursued a strategy of vertical mobilization which appealed to common loyalties and obligations, invoked religious symbolism legitimizing the old order, employed the resources and sanctions available to them as local notables and enacted the drama and awe that surrounded their being and presence. Congress candidates endeavored to challenge traditional authority and to replace it with the ideas and behavior appropriate to representative democracy. But among the old order’s candidates, differences among members’ statuses and political capabilities introduced some heterogeneity in the methods of mobilization they employed. Territorial magnates tended to employ a quite different mix of methods and appeals than did those who had been in their service. The former tended to rely heavily on vertical mobilization, while the latter turned more readily to the political style, methods and appeals of modern popular and representative politics. Old regime dynasties, at their strongest in this first election, were "less prepared for the politics of the future" as a consequence of their indifference to party structures and, relatedly, the difficulty of adapting to the norms of participatory politics.1 But among the old order’s candidates, former courtiers 1

The old regime made something of a comeback in the 1960s when it learned to adapt to party politics by participating in the Swatantra Party. Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur gained the largest majority ever recorded in parliamentary elections as a Swatantra candidate. See Erdman (1967).

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who had learned to broker demands of competing interests were more likely to succeed in the politics of the future than those who had not. *** The polling booths, opened in the cool weather on January 4, 1952, allowed even desert dwellers to vote in comfort. The general election, Rajasthan’s first, provided a context for the people to judge the revolutionary events of the previous four years: the end of princely rule, the establishment of responsible and popular government and the attempt to uproot feudal authority and Rajput dominance. In Jaipur, capital of the new state, Congress leaders, despite overt signs of confidence, were by no means certain that what had been wrought in the name of popular demands would be ratified by popular mandate. The election reached beyond the selection of state and national representatives and the governments they might form to a struggle of political cultures and regimes. The viability and legitimacy of two political orders were being tested on the state of electoral politics. Candidates of the old regime reminded their erstwhile dependents, inferiors and subjects that some were born to rule, others to obey. Congress candidates endeavored to break the cake of custom and the hold of political fatalism and replace them with the ideas and behavior appropriate to representative democracy. Congress’ functions went beyond those normally pursued by political parties in more modern political systems by including as primary tasks political socialization and acculturation. In ordering the struggle between political cultures and regimes and the contest between rival parties and candidates, the election served to socialize politically non-literate dependents and subjects in the roles of citizen and voter and to acculturate them to a variety of political beliefs. More than the other contestants, Congress’ chances for success turned on its capacity to replace apathy and traditional obedience with participation and doctrinal adherence. The context of choice gave the advantage to modernizing forces represented by the Congress. The election established terms of debate and conduct that placed democratic authority and competitive politics at the center of the political universe. At the same time the hold of traditional loyalties to princes and noblemen, the capacity of territorial and caste communities to exhaust the scope of individual identity and self interest and the belief that a preordained few are born to rule, the many to obey, were well established and not easily displaced. Under such circumstances, each side borrowed from the other, the Congress appealing to traditional and ascriptive identities and interests to strengthen the individual and group voluntarism implicit in its party structure

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and norms, the old regime using the forms and techniques of party and interest group to bolster its command of traditional compliance. The administrative and logistic difficulties of this first election were staggering. The state’s election commission spent several years preparing a register of voters, designing and acquiring equipment for polling stations and training personnel in electoral procedure. During the election, the special control room set up at Jaipur by the chief electoral officer to coordinate and direct the conduct of the election and the work of the polling parties operated in three shifts around the clock. And the scarcity of trained personnel in Rajasthan and the country at large necessitated extending the election over sixteen days so that the specially recruited and trained staff could be used consecutively. Voting arrangements took account of non-literacy: ballots were dropped into one of several boxes each identified with the symbol of one of the various parties and independent candidates. Polling parties and their equipment reached the most remote corners of the state. In desert areas they sometimes requisitioned high-powered army vehicles after their ordinary transport had broken down and in the most distant reaches of Jodhpur and Jaisalmer they took to camel caravans. In many thinly populated areas, election officers provided the public buildings required for their work by pitching tents or erecting make-shift enclosures. Six hundred and twenty-two candidates contested the one hundred and sixty state assembly seats and seventy-four stood for Rajasthan’s twenty places in parliament.2 Great as the stakes were in this election, greater still were incomprehension and indifference; only 38% of the Rajasthan electorate as against 45% of the all-Indian in 1952 and 60% of the American electorate in the 1956 Presidential campaign, voted.3 Rajasthan’s participation must be judged in the general context of the struggle of political cultures and regimes in which indifference arose out of the pre-democratic attitude that political power is inaccessible to ordinary men as well as out of the more narrow context of an 8.49% literacy level.4

2 3

4

For an account of the entire 1951–2 elections, see Fisher and Bondurant (1956). See also Park and Kogekar (1956). This figure has to be an approximation because the official Report on the First General Elections in India, 1951–2 gives only the percentage of votes polled to votes that could be polled in contested constituencies (not percentage of voters voting to all qualified voters). Since in doublemember constituencies voters sometimes cast only one of their two votes, these percentages are misleading. Actual participation must be somewhat higher than the official percentage. India has compulsory registration and there is no gap between the number of eligible and registered voters. In the 1952 and 1956 United States presidential elections 62.7% and 60.4% of eligible voters cast ballots. See Campbell et al. (1960, p. 89, f.n. l). For discussions of voting participation particularly in the American context see Campbell (1960, chapter 5) and V. O. Key Jr. (1961, pp. 182–195). Basic Statistics Rajasthan 1956 (no date).

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More than a month elapsed between the day polling began and the day all results were known. The election was unrivalled by any in India for dramatic interest and plot development. Once the nobles realized that the “no-account” men standing for office under the Congress banner meant business, they electorally rushed to arms. Some identified themselves with parties of the right: the Jan Sangh, the Ram Rajya Parishad (God’s Rule Party, hereafter RRP) and the Hindu Mahasabha, all Hindu revivalist parties with the Jan Sangh most modern in ideas, social basis and organization, the RRP least so. A few joined forces with the Krishikar Lok Party (hereafter KLP), organized to represent middle level agricultural interests. In Rajasthan it sheltered under one roof candidates drawn from the Jat nobility and Jat peasants. Of those who stood under party labels, most did so under that of the obscurantist and reactionary RRP. The largest single group, however, stood as independents scorning the crutch of ideology, programs and organization, which a party context provided. The Kahatriya Mahasabha, created in an earlier day to promote social reform among Rajputs throughout the princely states of Rajasthan but quiescent for many years, came to life at this time to assume the new function of political direction and coordination of Rajput candidates, a task which it was able to carry out with only a marginal degree of effectiveness and success. In most Indian states Congress was opposed on the left by the communist, socialist and other parties but in Rajasthan, where it represented the new dispensation and found all of its opponents on its right,5 it was clearly the party on the left. The national press painted the leading personalities on the right, three maharajas (Jodhpur, Dungarpur, and Bikaner) and many major jagirdars, in colors at once spectacular and lurid. The spirited twenty-eight-year-old maharaja of Jodhpur, who had threatened to shoot states ministry secretary V. P. Menon three years earlier during the accession negotiations, led the Rajputs and their political sympathizers. His youthful aggressiveness, swashbuckling manner and natural self-confidence encouraged many to participate who would not have done so and infused all who stood for and with the old order with a sense of mission and victory. Clad in traditional dress rather than his more customary well-cut western suits, he and his kinsmen carried the campaign into the countryside. Astonished villagers saw at close range those whom the mysteries of social distance had in the past made awesome and heard those on whom they had always depended ask for their votes. Jai Narayan Vyas and his generation of freedom fighters,

5

The KHPP Socialists elected one MLA, the Communists none, and neither elected an MP. However, to some observers’ amazement, a Communist was elected in the Jodhpur by-election, to the seat left vacant when the maharaja of Jodhpur died.

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long opponent of the old regime and architects of the new, led the Congress into the election by nominating middle class professional men, prosperous peasants from large castes and a few businessmen from among those concerned to maintain or secure their standing with the new government. But the new order, unlike the old, lacked romance and dramatic personalities; the election, according to the press, was a battle between glittering evil and drab virtue. Victory in Rajasthan meant a great deal to the Congress nationally and press coverage of the election both reflected and enhanced the importance of the result. Without victory, Congress’ claim that progress and reform required the removal of feudal reaction from state and society and that both reflected popular desires and interests, would ring hollow. Prime Minister Nehru heightened this impression when, in the course of a series of vigorous attacks on the forces of the right, he implied that the princes were endangering their privy purses by participating in the election.6 Interest in the election centered more on the state assembly and the government it would make than it did on the national parliamentary results, a distribution of attention not peculiar to Rajasthan. Becoming a minister in a state cabinet or influencing its policy and administration is a more plausible goal for ambitious politicians than national ministerial office or influence while for the ordinary voter the state is a more comprehensible unit than the nation.7 And in Rajasthan, because the struggle between the old and the new orders centered on land reform legislation, a subject falling within the constitutional jurisdiction of the state governments, interest in the state assembly results was particularly intense. On January 20, when the polls closed and the first results began trickling in, the picture looked bleak for Congress. It was apparent that Jai Narayan Vyas, chief minister and an architect of the jagirdar abolition bill, would lose overwhelmingly to the maharaja of Jodhpur in Jodhpur city. This premonition was confirmed when the results of this prestige contest showed 62% of the vote cast for the maharaja and only 17% for Vyas. On the eve of this great victory, his highness, a passionate aviator, crashed fatally in his private plane.8

6 7

8

Times of India, December 9 and 10, 1951. See L. I. Rudolph (1958). In a sample survey of Madras voters, for example, we found that the then chief minister of the state, Kamaraj Nadar, and the then president of the Madras Pradesh congress committee and the leading figure of its Harijan community were almost as well known as the then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and considerably better known than the then president of the Congress, U. N. Dhebar. The relevant figures are 56% able to identify Nehru and 18% able to identify Dhebar. His highness crashed on January 26, 1952. See Times of India, Jan. 25, 28, 29, 1952, for events surrounding his death.

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His death disheartened his now leaderless followers, occasioned riots, and bereaved his people, forty thousand of whom reportedly shaved their heads in the customary mark of respect. Later returns continued to indicate a Rajput victory. In Jodhpur particularly they indicated a stunning triumph: final figures gave thirty-one of its thirty-five MLA and all four of its MP seats to the right. On January 28, Brij Sunder Sharma, finance minister in Vyas’ cabinet, went down to defeat. On February 11, the Hindustan Times headlined, “Congress Far Behind in Rajasthan.” On February 14, the Times of India observed that “before long the ruling caste in Rajasthan, which was dislodged from power on May 10, 1949, may find itself voted back to power.”9 “the current headache of the Rajput Mahasabha,” it continued, “is the selection of a leader to whom the formidable phalanx in the state assembly would give unreserved loyalty. So long as the maharaja of Jodhpur was alive, the question did not arise; he was their fountainhead of inspiration, their natural leader . . .”10 By February 5, the Congress sensed defeat and began canvassing desperate measures. The Rajasthan state congress committee, following the lead of an electoral officer in the former state of Bundi who had disqualified a jagirdar on the grounds that he held an office of profit in the government, considered challenging all elected jagirdars for this reason. Because jagirs were granted for services rendered and their incumbents promised continuous loyalty to the state and performed certain administrative duties, they resembled, it was argued, other public officials.11 Other Congressmen, predicting a wave of lawlessness in the wake of a Rajput victory, thought that president’s rule12 might be necessary soon after the election. The reply was not long in coming: If jagirdars were so useful to the state, why should they be abolished, a spokesman for them asked. “How can the Congress afford to raise such an issue in a law court,” he continued, “when it has itself given Congress nominations to many rulers and jagirdars to contest elections in various states of India and some of them have been declared elected.”13 While Congress and the jagirdars quarreled in the press, the number of Congress seats in the state legislature slowly crept upward. On February 12, the double member constituency of Hindaun in former Jaipur state went for Congress and what had seemed improbable a week earlier came to pass: Congress won the election, but by the narrowest of margins.14 The final count gave eighty-two of the Assembly’s one hundred and sixty seats to it, five to

9 12

13

10 11 Times of India, February 4, 1952. Ibid. Hindustan Times, February 5, 1952. President’s rule is the name given to emergency powers under the Constitution exercised by the central government in a state. It may be invoked under a variety of circumstances; inability of a state government to control law and order is one such circumstance. 14 Statesman, February 10, 1952. Hindustan Times, February 13, 1952.

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other parties of the left15 and seventy-three to the conglomerate party and independent candidates of the right.16 Of the twenty members of parliament elected from Rajasthan, Congress captured only nine, leaving a majority of the delegation in the right’s hands. Congress had won a legal but not a moral victory. If it could hold its slim majority together it had a right to govern Rajasthan for the next five years, but it was not equally clear that it had won popular endorsement for its political, social and economic reforms or a mandate to continue them. Congress’ share of the popular vote for the state legislature was only 39.5% against a national average of 42%. Both figures attest to the divided nature of Congress’ opposition. It enabled Congress to win majorities in eighteen of twenty-two state assemblies with pluralities of less than 50%. In Rajasthan, forty-nine of the eighty-two victorious Congress candidates were opposed by two or more opponents. The opposition did just half as well under the same circumstances, capturing 30% rather than 60% of its multi-cornered contest. Without such victories, Congress could not have won: the right captured about 50% of the popular vote, probably outpolling all the parties of the left.17 And beyond the whole election scene were those who did not vote at all, the 62% who for reasons of indifference, ignorance, apathy or fear did not go to the polls. Of those who might have voted but did not, some did not care enough for their former masters to save them; more heard but failed to respond to Congress’ call to free themselves from exploitation by creating a just and abundant world. The historical and psychological meaning of the election lies behind and beyond the figures in the perceptions, appeals and symbols employed in the campaign. Participating in an election conceded that legitimation of rule by birth and prescription was at an end; by doing so, the old order seriously undermined the credibility of its power and the legitimacy of its authority. Yet within the electoral context it managed to use, and by using preserve, much of the structure and values of traditional society and culture. Modern electoral processes rely heavily on party. Its professionals mobilize public opinion and integrate interests by interpreting political reality in terms of political doctrine, structuring alternative choices among men and issues and arousing and 15 16 17

The KLP leftists took three, the Socialists one, and the KMPP one. Of these seventy-three, we include thirty-five independents, twenty-four RRP candidates, eight from the Jan Sangh, two from the Hindu Mahasabha, and four from the KLP. The figure is not certain because it is impossible to ascertain the outlook of all independents who stood. But it is a fact that all independents who won were of the right, and the independent vote probably went mostly to the right. The Ram Rajya Parishad, Jan Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha collected respectively 12.3%, 5.9%, and 0.9% of the assembly vote. The independents received 27.5% of the vote, and the Krishikar Lok Party 8.3%. We would assign four of the seven KLP winners to the right. If one divided the KLP’s 8.3% half and half between left and right, these figures together would reach just over 50%. But as the independent vote cannot with confidence be assigned entirely to the right, this conclusion must remain problematic.

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persuading voters to support them. Rajput princes and jagirdars relied relatively little on such means. The natural associations of locality, caste and clan provided more familiar and available structures than party to mobilize electoral support. Confronted by a massive common threat, jagirdars and maharajas found that the ties of blood, history and duty, so tenuous when they were rivals under the old regime, could help them defend their values and interests under conditions of competitive democratic politics. Princely and jagirdars political leadership proved effective in mobilizing the still viable solidarity of state and feudal territorial communities. If jagirdars’ tenants, clients and servants often had reason to fear their erstwhile masters’ economic and physical power, they also had reason to respect and obey them. Only when such means proved feeble did the old order supplement them by turning to weakly articulated parties and modern forms of association and persuasion. The old order nominated as candidates natural leaders of society or their surrogates, men whose claim to authority still seemed to most rural folk as primordial as the father’s over his children. Men rather than measures were at the heart of the right’s electoral appeal. To campaign on measures implied that being born to rule and having had long experience in doing so were not sufficient qualifications for offices and to suggest that policy and its reception by public opinion was more relevant for the legitimacy of authority. Although the old order could not altogether avoid the claim that the support of organized public opinion legitimized governmental authority, it did so as much as possible. Jaswant Singh, former dewan of Bikaner state and subsequently leader of the old order in the legislature, overstated the case only a little when he said, “we came in without any program, without any party, and defeated these Congressmen.”18 The right’s candidates were most successful in areas where all aspects of Rajput clan-caste feudalism were mobilized simultaneously: the personal appeal of the maharaja, the interest and influence of his thakurs and the use of staffs and retainers. The ideal situation, realized in Jodhpur only, enabled the right to capture thirty-one of thirty-five MLA seats and all four parliamentary places falling within that former princely state. Elsewhere many thakurs were reluctant to act without their princes and when other maharajas did not give a lead they abstained or proceeded cautiously. In Jodhpur, thakurs and patrimonial retainers responded to the maharaja’s forceful and energetic leadership as their ancestors had to the calling out of the kher (feudal van) by their feudal lord and clan chief and administered a crushing defeat to the Congress. This result was not accomplished in a day or without effort. The maharaja proved to be an active and effective campaigner, sensitive to the fact that

18

Interview with Jaswant Singh.

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symbolic appeals could translate the attachments of Jodhpuris to his person and house into electoral support in the new setting. “The maharaja,” Chief Minister Vyas bitterly noted, “had his traditions, and the people couldn’t be shaken out of their slavish frame of mind.” His appeal was to the past and to the heart. The descendant of a royal house whose feats and foibles were celebrated in song throughout Marwar, he capitalized on the romance of his historic position. Children grew up on stories of Jodh Singh who founded the state and the Kota Raja who proved unworthy of his station. Among contemporary songs celebrating him, there was one to frighten and titillate village maidens, suggesting he might swoop down in his whirly-ghari, his plane, to carry them off. Moving by plane and jeep, he appeared in the most remote corners of distant districts, his substantial person plainly clad but wearing the brilliant Rajput turban.19 When he faced his former subject and protested: “The thirty lakhs of people of Marwar are my manifesto! I don’t care for my eighteen lakh privy purse, I’d rather see the smile on the face of the people of Marwar!” something elemental seems to have welled up in his listeners. “Slavery under the British was one thousand times better than the freedom of today.” He reminded them that he had tried to preserve the old order: “On August 15, 1947 [independence day], when I was directed by the Central Government to preside over the flag salutation ceremony held at Jodhpur aerodrome, I demonstrated my feeling of horror and sorrow by appearing in a black headgear. When the people asked me why this on a day of national rejoicing, I replied it might be anything for others, but it was the death anniversary of my thirty-six generations.” Yet he hoped that extinction could be postponed further: to the Goddess Chamunda, guardian deity of his house, he swore that if he were elected he would serve his people “in the same manner as [my] forefathers had served during the last seven hundred years.”20 The other major factor in the right’s electoral strength was the territorial interest which jagirdars might translate into votes; if the jagirdars were led by their maharaja, as they were in Jodhpur, the combination was likely to be unbeatable but if they were not they nevertheless could present a formidable challenge. The territorial interest of a jagirdar, like that of his eighteenthcentury English counterpart,21 started with his extended family, encompassed his servants, retainers and dependents, reached out to the artisans and merchants of the towns on his estate and culminated with his tenants. In the context of political democracy, these were the weightiest because as the most

19 20 21

Interview with Thakur Ayuwan Singh, who managed the ruler’s campaign. Times of India, January 1, 1952. The best introduction to this aspect of eighteenth-century English politics can be found in the works of the late Sir Lewis Namier, particularly (1957a); its continuation well into the nineteenth century is best described in Gash (1953).

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numerous group included within a jagir–popular sovereignty framework they had been transformed, at least in form, from those who obey to those who command. A major jagir ranged from 100 to 200 villages of various sizes and its population might reach 100,000 persons. If all of the voters of a jagir fell within the same MLA constituency, and they often did, a jagirdar could have a decisive influence among its 80,000 or so eligible voters. A jagirdar’s staff, particularly his revenue officials, were men to be reckoned with locally. Each village usually had such a man, generally an elder of standing answerable to the estate holder. At the time of the first general election, the land reform bill had not yet become law and, although the state had formally assumed the powers and responsibilities of revenue collection two years earlier in 1949, it continued for administrative functions to rely on the men who served the jagirdars. Loyalty, habit or prudence led many of them to throw their weight behind their erstwhile masters. Tenants in any case were more often than not likely to do the jagirdar’s bidding in this as in other matters, the experience of generations counting more than the indistinct, difficult to understand and risky counsel which the new men proferred. Standing atop the roof terrace of his white-washed “city palace,” a jagirdarMLA invited his visitors to view the fields and orchards which stretched to the distant hills that marked the border of his estate: “This was my jagir; this is my constituency.”22 To new voters but old inhabitants, the omnipresence of the raja’s historic influence was symbolized by the real estate of power, those reminders of an earlier day when every man’s security depended upon him, the forts which capped several of the surrounding hills. The sight of him, moving about still with ease and authority, his bearing often that of one born to command, a handful of faithful retainers attending to his needs and wishes, 22

Interview, Thakur Narayan Singh of Masuda. F. G. Bailey found “territorial interests” of a similar kind in Orissa, the state most like Rajasthan in its history and social structure. “former landlords and princes have been returned,” he writes, “with unusually large majorities in both elections [1952 and 1957], even those who scarcely bothered to run a campaign. However tyrannical and whatever were their extortions, these were the people to whom the peasant or tenant turned in times of difficulty in the past, and they were still doing so in 1956 . . . The candidate wants some kind of communication network which will put him in touch with the whole constituency: but his constituency is usually so constructed that he can only grasp a small part, and the very act of grasping this, puts the rest out of his reach. The people who escape this dilemma,” Bailey finds, “are those who have means of contact with a whole constituency or a large part of one. Now the fact that constituencies are roughly based on administrative units, and some of these units were based on Princes’ or landlords’ domains, has placed some ex-rulers and ex-landlords in a very fortunate position. Where this applies, not only does their name have a meaning in the whole constituency, but they are likely to have ties throughout the constituency. Finally these ties have the force of habits, even where they do not have a positive moral backing. The same is not true of a party organization like that of the Socialists and Communists nor in many Congress constituencies . . .” Bailey (1962, pp. 120–121). See also chapter 4, “Indigenous Political Units” of Bailey (1963, pp. 114–121) for a more extended discussion of these and related issues.

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elicited from most the respect and authority shown his family for generations past. During the election he and the other jagirdars who contested mobilized their interests. In most cases habit and benevolence joined hands with fear and coercion. “The jagirdars’ ‘hawildars’ [armed retainers],” former Congress chief minister Jai Narayan Vyas observed, “were their organization. The old rulers . . . still had a halo about them. And then in the rural areas, the revenue staffs could squeeze the people economically, and they might even beat them. The people didn’t realize that the jagirdars could be abolished.”23 For those who might want to act independently the secret ballot was not an obvious protection. Thakurs’ men saw to it that villagers came to the polling places and, as men touched by the magic of distant power and majesty and to some extent unrestrained by local custom or law, it seemed unlikely that they would not or could not know how ballots were cast. “The servants of jagirdars,” Vyas argued, “were at the polling booths and they made people physically afraid. They are poor people. How will they know that the jagirdar cannot know their vote? They know nothing of the secret ballot.”24 Some Congressmen charged that the jagirdars took the help of dacoits, the roving bands of renegade Rajputs and others who lived outside and often against the law.25 In November, 1951, hardly a month before polling began, dacoits in Jodhpur carried out a brutal raid, beheading seven, shooting nine and burning thousands of Rupees worth of Jat grains. No connection between the attack and the election was established but it served nevertheless to generate a climate of fear which influenced the voters. In western Rajasthan, a well-known dacoit visited a local polling station and announced that he wished to vote. When he was told that he was not on the voting list, he allowed that there must be some mistake. The startled and perplexed polling official took the hint and “gave” him a name from the voting register. After voting, the dacoit told the assembled villagers that they too should vote for the “right” man, a directive they apparently understood and followed.26 23 24 25

26

Interview, Jay Narayan Vyas. The revenue staffs had been formally taken over by the state prior to the election, but, as we indicated in Chapter 5, their loyalties were not equally transferred. Idem. For the use of force and violence as well as “treating” and other wiles used by betters to influence inferiors to vote the right way in a comparable period of English history, see, for example, Grego (1892) and Ostrogorski (1902). The basic work on emergent political behavior and the growing “independence” of politics in eighteenth-century England remains the classic radical account by Oldfield (1816), Six Vols. The pioneering work of Sir Lewis Namier, particularly Namier (1957b), and such recent works as Rude (1963), Christie (1962) and Black have brought the study of the transition of modern democratic politics to a new plateau of understanding. Gash (1953) makes clear, however, how persistent was the hold of aristocracy on political forms and consciousness. For the story we are indebted to Frank Hoeber, Susanne Rudolph’s younger brother and our research assistant, who heard it in Jodhpur from a source we judge reliable.

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It is doubtful that the right intentionally and systematically used dacoits to influence the elections. Prior to independence jagirdars to some extent protected localities with their armed retainers and reputations; in the Rajasthan of 1952, the police had taken over responsibility for local security but lacked the men and communications to be continuously effective, particularly in sparsely settled areas, and jagirdars were less interested and less able to afford the protection they once had. Under these circumstances and with a decided increase in dacoit numbers and activity, fear of them was greatly heightened. Dacoits who before 1947 might hesitate to molest defenseless banias (traders and moneylenders) or peasants for fear of offending a local jagirdar, often a fellow Rajput, now did so with more impunity. And some jagirdars told their tenants with an eye to the elections that they could protect them better than the Government’s police whose training was a poor substitute for Rajput valor and who, in any case, lacked their local knowledge and ties. The Congress candidate who bitterly remarked that many voters supported Rajput candidates for fear of dacoits was right, then, but not necessarily because jagirdars invited and organized dacoits to intimidate voters. Electoral violence did occur but it did so less as a result of dacoit activity than of long standing social tensions. Mystery and awe, habit and loyalty, dependence and fear were harnessed by patrimonial retainers to the electoral purposes of princes and noblemen. Jodhpur’s “connection”27 and the territorial interests of jagirdars throughout Rajasthan provided contexts for vertical mobilization which almost proved more than a match for the Congress party’s organization, ideology and program. Only Jodhpur produced a princely connection; elsewhere Rajasthan’s feudal society failed to respond with the same élan and effectiveness. Monarchs and aristocrats are not usually political friends and allies; the instinct of the first is to establish absolutism, of the second, oligarchy, and these instincts have a long history in Rajasthan. Jodhpur was not typical of Rajasthan’s princely states not only because its maharaja risked participating in the election but also because it had a strong prince and independent jagirdars. Many states had no nobility to speak of, to mobilize territorial interests. In Alwar, the maharaja held five-sixths of the land.28 In Kotah too the prince traditionally had held a large proportion of the land himself. A powerful nineteenth-century prime minister had completed the work of reducing the nobility to ceremonial status 27

28

In the eighteenth-century English sense of the word. Connection was used then by those who participated in and wrote about politics and later by scholars of eighteenth-century political history to describe the combinations of territorial interests, relatives and clients (of “patrons”) in and out of appointive and elective office, and “friends,” which gave some structure but not regularity or order to competitive politics in an aristocratic society that practiced representative government. Rajputana Gazetter, Vol. III, p. 236.

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by depriving them of their “feudal” tenures. In Ganganagar, the prosperous colony surrounding the canal built by Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner in this century and settled mostly by Jats from the Punjab, feudal tenures were never introduced. In the Jat-ruled states of Bharatput and Dholpur, the nobility was from the beginning without an independent territorial base.29 In some states, princely connections and territorial interests lay fallow: In Jaipur the maharaja lent his prestige and authority to the new order by becoming head of state (Rajpramukh), the thikanedar of Diggi preferred puja (prayer) to politics, the Raja of Khetri, the Cambridge educated head of the second largest holding, accepted an appointment as ambassador from the Congress government at Delhi. Only three princes stood for election. Prime Minister Nehru told them in speeches that while rulers of course had a right to contest, government might examine their special privileges, which included generous privy purses, if they did so.30 His speeches had a sobering effect on most. The irrepressible Jodhpur, however, told reporters that he would gladly risk his privileges: “After all, why should a Prince make a fuss about privileges?”31 and turned the threat against Government by telling his constituents that he valued their affection more than any privy purse. “It would be a sad day,” he told them, “if our Prime Minister were to give the impression that a Prince would have to pay a penalty for being a common man . . . The dead crust of formal dignity should now be replaced by putting it into direct and pulsating touch with the people, the very source of power and the fountainhead of all privileges . . .”32 But Jodhpur was alone. His fellow princes were the very model of prudence and discretion. The Maharaja of Bikaner, Ganga Singh’s grandson, did stand successfully for election to parliament as an independent. He was careful not to provide so broad a target as Jodhpur by dissociating himself from efforts to coordinate the right’s campaign and repudiating the notion that MLA’s standing within his MP constituency should ride on his coat tail: “One vote for me [for MP], one vote for whom you want [for MLA],” is how a Bikaner thakur characterized his campaign appeal. The Maharaja of Dungarpur, ruler of a small state in which the Bhil vote, in tribal lands unmanageable both by maharaja and nobles, counted heavily, was defeated. Some maharajas, such as Bundi and Bharatpur, participated indirectly by supporting brothers or as in Kotah, by letting it be known that they looked with favor on the candidacies of their former state officials. Had the major rulers, Jaipur, Udaipur and Bikaner, joined the fray with the same enthusiasm as Jodhpur, the feudal order would have gained an overwhelming victory. In the third general election of 1962, for example, the 29 31

30 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 60. Times of India, December 9, 1951. 32 Times of India, December 10, 1951. Idem.

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Maharani of Jaipur who stood at the head of a Jaipur connection won her MP seat with the largest plurality in India (157,684 votes) and the maharaja’s two sons and a goodly number of MLAs rode to victory on the strength of the Jaipur house’s appeal. That the princes on the whole abstained in the first great contest of 1952 was a posthumous tribute to Sardar Patel’s policy: by treating them generously and associating some with the newly independent state of India (Jaipur and Udaipur, it will be recalled, were made maharajpramukh and rajpramukh) he tied their wealth and honor to its fortunes and goodwill. Prudence too played a part: during and after the election when the nobles of Rajasthan gathered socially, Jodhpur nobles often taunted Jaipur thakurs across the scotch glasses that nothing better could be expected of those whose ancestors gained riches and honor by joining forces with the Moghul.33 Responsibility for the old regime’s electoral defeat did not rest with the princes only. Many jagirdars thought it humiliating to ask their former tenants and inferiors for support. Others found it distasteful to practice the manners and suffer the privations required by the campaign. “Some of these [Congress] men,” a cultured and cosmopolitan thakur observed, “have no standards at all. They get on a camel and travel through the constituency that way. They stay with, well, just about anybody, and they take their food from them . . . I have to go in a jeep, and must have a servant and driver with me. I have to make my own arrangements for food and accommodations. I don’t want to be beholden to these people and, well, I guess I ‘m just a little fastidious.”34 Some thakurs stood for election but did no campaigning, relying on their retainers, revenue officers and loyal village headmen to turn out the vote as they had counted on them for the revenue. A Bikaner thakur stated with some pride that he had never visited his constituency. Some baulked at appealing to female voters; an Udaipur jagirdar told the women who came to one of his election meetings to go home since he did not intend to win with their help.35 Even the maharaja of Jodhpur’s enthusiasm for democratic politics, more the exception than the rule, appeared at the very last minute. His change of heart, according to a tradition being conveyed by his close associates, was due to two conversations, one with Winston Churchill, who is said to have told him that he would soon be forgotten if he remained politically inactive. Only through leadership could he maintain his name and privileges. A Jodhpur jagirdar reported that Mountbatten had told his late prince that while he (Mountbatten) was no longer ruling an ancient dukedom, “I have public

33 34

35

They could not afford the joke too well, since Jodhpur had done the same. Interview. As many of the most telling sentiments in our notes were expressed in the course of social conversation, often by men still in politics, we cannot always in good conscience cite our sources by name. The Chief of Roopnagar.

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influence because I have used my resources to serve, to be a public position. Thus I have won respect among my people.” Accurate or not, these “conversations” expressed the climate of opinion of the Jodhpur connection. “With the princely States wiped off India’s map,“ Jodhpur himself told the press, “privileges are only a paltry make believe, if not a fool’s paradise. Shedding the old feudal and autocratic character,” he continued, “a Prince in free India should now rise to the level of the common man . . .” Expressing his new found convictions, he observed that “it would be far better for him to be a real servant with real power derived from the people than to be a dummy figure-head cut off from the nation’s Life stream. Speaking for myself, I glory in the fact of behaving like a common man.”36 There were occasional jagirdars who shared Jodhpur’s views and zest for politics. An MLA from Ajmer continued to attend festival days in the villages of his former estate, mending political fences, taking a personal interest in panchayat elections and “campaigning” virtually from house to house. His favorite appeal at once preserved his own dignity and spoke to his former dependents: “You have paid my father taxes all these years, and on that he has educated me. You should regard this as an investment in me, and let it pay you interest.”37 But he too was more the exception than the rule; twentieth-century rajput aristocracy, because it rigidly maintained social distance and failed to see the relationships between privilege and service in a time when the ranks of society were becoming more alike, was closer to eighteenth-century French than British aristocracy.38 “The Rajputs,” one of their political opponents observed, “are too luxurious to move about like Congressmen, and that will weaken them.”39 Rajasthan’s response to its natural leaders in the context of democratic and competitive politics was vitiated by the failure of many to act and by failure of those who did to exploit fully the sentiments and forms of the old regime. The limitations of princely connections and territorial interests for the conduct of democratic politics and their uneven and incomplete mobilization led the Rajputs to turn half-heartedly and with only partial comprehension to such modern forms of political party. The Kshatriya Mahasabha, the Rajput caste association, was new modeled to cope with economic and political problems after the princely states had been integrated into democratic India. Caste associations have emerged throughout India over the last century, transforming village based sub-castes from functionally diffuse and ritually regulated natural associations based on birth and locality to regional voluntary 36 38 39

37 Times of India, December 10, 1951. Interview, the late Raja Kalyan Singh of Bhinai. Interview. See Habakkuk, “England” and Mc Manners, “France” in Goodwin (1953) for an examination of each. Interview.

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associations of caste fellows concerned to further certain social and economic objectives through internal reform and political action.40 Of these, the Kshatriya Mahasabha was one. The Walter Krit Hitkarni Sabhas, named for a British political agent named Walter, were the progenitors of the Kshatriya Mahasabha. Walter hoped to promote caste solidarity and reform, particularly of the ruinous custom of giving dowries well in excess of means available, by setting up sabhas (societies) in each of the princely states. They had relatively little effect on dowries but their meetings, procedures, offices and annual reports helped acquaint Rajputs with the form and methods of modern organizations and give them a sense of themselves outside traditionally prescribed relationships and roles.41 At the close of World War II and in anticipation of the political changes that independence for British India would bring, the sabhas took on new importance and vitality. In 1947 and 1948 as the state of Rajasthan took shape, the usefulness of an organization paralleling this new unit of political action became apparent. A united Rajput association of Rajasthan was able in 1949 to join with the organized jagirdars of Madhya Bharat in a special organization. Its main purpose was to influence the Venkatachar Committee on land reform legislation to which it made an extensive representation. By 1951 the all-Rajasthan group, styling itself Kshatriya Mahasabha, had acquired the overt features of a modern voluntary association and was engaged in defending the economic interests of Rajputs, particularly as they related to jagirs. However modern the Kshatriya Mahasabha appeared, its latent character remained that of a natural association. Most of its members were bound together by ties of blood, marriage or friendship; social gatherings of Rajputs through at least 1956 were difficult to distinguish from meetings of the association. But professional training and achievement jostled great families and estates as attributes commanding respect and qualifying for office. A thakur of modest estate but with legal training proved an effective negotiator and eventually became general secretary. Another thakur with neither extensive lands or outstanding pedigree carried considerable weight because of his long experience as a senior official. Yet there was a curious and perplexing ambivalence toward such men; because the times required them, because they were useful, they were treated with respect and given the authority of office but those whose lands and families marked them as the natural leaders of a feudal society continued to dominate the affairs of the association. 40 41

See Rudolph and Rudolph (1967) for a more theoretical and detailed analysis of the role of caste in politics. The activities of the Walter Krit Hitkarni Sabha were mentioned in the annual Report on Administration of most Rajput states.

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Men of modest means and status were brought in for their talent and the support expected of all Rajputs. At the same time, the Mahasabha reflected the distribution of honor and power within the old order by remaining the bailiwick of the great jagirdars. Decisions were taken in camera by the ten to twenty major thakurs who recognized one another as class as well as caste equals. The formalities of open recruitment and democratically responsible leadership were further belied by the narrow membership base, even among Rajputs, and the infrequent and ceremonial manner with which that membership was consulted. Without a prince to form and lead a connection many Rajput candidates loosely affiliated themselves with parties. Thirty-five of the old order’s seventy-three MLAs affiliated with parties, twenty-four identified themselves with the RRP, the least modern of the available parties in organization as well as ideas. Founded in 1949 at Jaipur by Swami Karpatriji, a religious leader and Brahman, the RRP’s national organization was insubstantial and its arrangements in Rajasthan sufficiently simple not to arouse Rajput distaste for the discipline and subordination of modern party organization. The RRP won some support in other northern states but its greatest victories were won in Rajasthan where Rajput candidates mobilized vertically their territorial interests. Although for many Rajputs the RRP was no more than a political fig leaf, it brought those who used it into closer association with the assumptions and processes of modern society and competitive democratic politics than did independent candidacies or participation in the Kshatriya Mahasabha. Membership or adherence to the RRP was ostensibly open to all. It had the veneer of a political party whose formal organization goal was to gain power through electoral and parliamentary means. By interpreting the political universe in terms of their doctrines, aggregating and integrating diverse and often conflicting social forces and persuading and mobilizing citizens at large to vote for its men and measures, modern political parties seek to establish and legitimize their right to govern by winning democratic mandates. Like all parties operating in the context of competitive democratic politics, the RRP was driven in the directions of political integration by the organizational imperative to win elections. At the same time, it experienced the opposite imperative, which seizes such parties, the drive to differentiate itself from its competitors. The forces at work within the RRP struck an equilibrium, which gave the advantage to the differentiating impulse. The RRP’s high caste leadership, particularly its Brahman ideologues, believed that the nation’s salvation depended upon the religious and social purity of Hinduism. Behind the symbols and slogans of Ram Rajya (God’s rule) lay an obscurantist ideology committed to a social hierarchy based on birth and ritual status, Hindu fundamentalism and revivalism and reactionary

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social and economic policies. Its ideology and program ran counter to the democratic and secular values of the new regime and threatened the political rights of Muslims and the social and economic interests of lower castes. For most jagirdars who stood under its banner, the RRP’s appeal was essentially conservative; they were attracted by the protection to established economic and social arrangements offered by the invocation of religion. But the RRP was as much a radical as a conservative party. It spoke to “small” Rajputs and other twice-born castes who felt cheated by the changes brought in by the integration of the princely states and the democratic regime, dissatisfied with themselves and their fate, marginally attached to social interests, and looking for a cause capable of restoring significance to their lives and social circumstances. The younger sons of territorial magnates, Rajputs with little or no land, and members of twice-born castes who had served Rajput courts and estates or obtained modern educations but could not use them turned to the RRP as a means to build something new on the model of an ancient utopia. If most of the great jagirdars were primarily interested in preserving their wealth and status by negotiating a favorable land reform bill, the rank and file adherents of the RRP were more interested in saving Hinduism and through it their self and social esteem by banning cow slaughter.42 The feudal aristocrats saw politics as vulgar and necessary, the RRP militants as exciting and hopeful. For the territorial magnates without a princely connection, the RRP was a symbolic convenience; for the marginal, dispossessed or anomic, it represented a way to regain honor and power. The other parties of the right, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Jan Sangh, were less attractive than the RRP to Rajput conservatism. The Mahasabha had not recovered from the setbacks it suffered in 1948, when one of its former members assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, and in 1951, when the formation of the Jan Sangh created a near but more powerful rival. The Jan Sangh’s economic program threatened to compromise jagirdar interests; its leadership and organization required more subordination and discipline than most jagirdars were prepared to stomach. Although the Jan Sangh is confined by the “Hindi barrier” to those states in north India where some version of that language is spoken, it had the best claim of the three parties to national standing. Its leader, S. P. Mukherji, had broken with the Hindu Mahasabha in 1951 on the issue of secularism, insisting that membership in it, unlike that in the Mahasabha, be open to all citizens, including Muslims. Mukherji’s more rational conservatism was balanced, however, by the active support the Jan 42

That cow slaughter remains a highly charged issue for the orthodox became plain in the demonstrations before parliament at Delhi on November 7, 1966. It elicits responses similar to those elicited by Darwin’s concept of natural selection among southern fundamentalists in the United States.

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Sangh accepted from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a paramilitary organization led by S. S. Gowalkar, who as Guruji styles himself a holy man. The RSS, also linked in the public mind with Gandhi’s murder, combated Muslim and foreign ideological contamination within and the pressures of Pakistan and communism without by reviving and strengthening Hindu culture and character and advocating a centralized, authoritarian state and military preparedness.43 Nationally, the Jan Sangh’s greatest appeal was to bourgeois banias, the vaishya shop keepers, merchants, money lenders and traders of the towns and cities attached to their personal and commercial property and their religious practices but fearful of the forces of a corporate economy and alien ideas. In Rajasthan it eventually made an appeal to the bhumia Rajputs, holders of small estates whose interests increasingly diverged from those of the great jagirdars. Even more than the RRP, whose social basis was counter balanced by conservative jagirdar interests, the Jan Sangh’s national following was inclined to right radicalism. But for the moment it too created a marriage of convenience with jagirdars in Udaipur, where seven of thirteen MLAs representing the old order were elected on the Jan Sangh ticket. Representatives of the Kshatriya Mahasabha, the three parties and the Jodhpur connection met at Mandawa in Jaipur State. They succeeded in establishing a coordinating board and reaching an electoral understanding, which reduced but did not entirely eliminate internecine warfare in the constituencies by carving out areas of influence for the RRP in Jaipur, the Jan Sangh in Udaipur and His Highness Jodhpur in his state. They failed to agree on a common program. The Kshatriya Mahasabha pressed for a common stand on the defense of jagirdari leadership and interests as the best means to preserve the status quo and maximize electoral results. This was opposed by the Jan Singh. While willing to support the jagirdars’ right to compensation, it pressed them to give up their claim to their estates as one of the best ways to win votes. The RRP placed essentially religious issues first in intrinsic and practical importance. It argued that the coordinating board could mobilize popular support most effectively by supporting a ban on “cow slaughter” and opposing the Hindu Code, a bill designed to reform Hindu personal law.44 The effort to draft a common program foundered on these ideological and strategic differences.45 Despite its use of interest groups and parties, the old order fought the election primarily with the means of the past, territorial interests and princely connections. 43 44 45

For discussions of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Jan Sangh see Weiner (1956), and Lambert (1959). Levy (1963). Mr. Levy is completing a PhD dissertation on the legislative history of the postindependence Hindu Code. For information in this section, we are indebted to Thakur Ayuwan Singh, Madan Singh of Danta, Raghubir Singh of Jaoli and Kunwar Jaswant Singh.

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Who shall lead when the authority of ascriptive status is being replaced by that of organized public opinion? What principles shall govern the selection of candidates? Political equality opens the possibility of standing for election to everyone, but the exigencies of comprehensible and manageable choice by the electorate require that a few only shall do so. In a society that is just turning its back on natural leaders the task of narrowing the choice is shared by them and the political party. Rajputs selected candidates in a manner and for reasons which reflected the continuing hold of aristocracy on society: a thakur observed of the joint parliamentary board of the RRP and the Kshatriya Mahasabha: “We consulted with important people in the area, and gave tickets to the natural leaders of the people.” If territorial notables did not themselves stand their surrogates or clients did. The influence of aristocracy on candidate selection emphasizes again in another way how little party penetrated the political behavior and structures used by the old regime in the 1952 general election. That the hold of birth and land on social and political structures was stronger in some areas, weaker in others, is reflected in the differences among the candidates selected. These differences were shaped in part by disparities in the social and political history of different areas. In Kotah division (the former princely states of Kotah and Bundi), where the independence of the Kotah nobility had been destroyed by Dewan Zalim Singh’s centralization of power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,46 the candidates of the old regime included more former crown officials than territorial magnates: of ten Rajputs who stood, six were former princely state officials, one was the Maharaja of Bundi’s brother and only three were jagirdars. A captain in the state forces, a member of the maharaja’s personal staff, the inspector general of police, the revenue commissioner and the comptroller represented the old order in Kotah. They benefited from their association with the status of the maharaja’s court and name and from the awe with which those who have power in traditional society are regarded. But these factors could not equal for electoral purposes the staff, resources and mobilizable vote of a territorial interest. The old khalsa [maharaja’s land] staffs were not attached to the court bureaucrats in the personal way in which jagir staffs were to their late lords. This difference led the former state officials toward the party affiliations and campaign methods of modern politics and away from the independent candidacies characteristic of territorial notables. All the candidates with palace backgrounds contested under party labels. Their campaign appeals and methods were closer to their Congress opponents than their jagirdar allies. At market 46

Banerjee (1951). Seventy-five percent of Kotah’s villages were held by “the crown while in Rajasthan as a whole the proportion was only forty.” See Singh where he reports that 1,660 of 2,199 Kotah villages were khalsa [crown lands].

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days and public meetings they talked more in terms of local issues than local obligations and bid for the support of village and caste headmen more in terms of interest than of loyalty. In contrast to the Kotah nobility the “panchpana sardars” of the Shekhawati area in Jaipur state had maintained strong territorial interests, resisting for two centuries the efforts by Jaipur maharajas to centralize power at their expense. Confronted by the Congress electoral challenge, several large neighboring jagirdars joined their territorial interests to form a powerful local connection. Thakur Raghubir Singh of the estates of Bissau and Surajgarh, Thakur Bhim Singh of Mandawa and Thakur Devi Singh, cousin to both, combined their interests with those of a common uncle, the Rawal of Nawalgarh, and the Raja of Khetri,47 whose neighboring jagir was wealthier and more populous than a number of Rajasthan’s princely states. Despite their RRP label, party organization and methods were relatively unimportant in the successful conduct of their campaigns. In Jodhpur and Udaipur too candidates reflected the historically conditioned distribution of power and prestige, as well as the decisions of their princes. The Udaipur court, confronted for centuries by a powerful nobility, had comparatively little financial, administrative or military influence. For this reason and because the maharaja chose neither to stand himself nor to be politically active on behalf of others, former crown officials played little part in the election, leaving the old order to be represented almost entirely by jagirdars. In Jodhpur, where the palace and the aristocracy were fairly evenly balanced and the maharaja chose to stand, the old regime’s candidates reflected that fact: thirteen jagirdars, six former state officials, eleven Rajputs without major estates, some non-Rajputs drawn from the professional classes and the maharaja. The caste and occupational distribution of the right’s candidates substantiates the importance of traditional status in the selection of candidates.48 Sixty-seven percent of all victorious MLA candidates, Congress included, were “twice-born” (of the higher castes) and among those of the right almost

47

48

Khetri accepted the appointment from the Government of India as Ambassador to Laos and did not stand for election. A Cambridge graduate and one of the ablest of Rajasthan’s noblemen, his loss was sorely felt. Although the only other English University man among the Rajput leadership, Bissau, attended Oxford, he received the main benefit of Khetri’s territorial interest, which may prove that clan is thicker than the old school rivalries. Nawalgarh lent his influence but did not stand. The 1931 census was the last to include caste data – the 1941 census was curtailed due to the war, and the 1951 census dropped caste enumeration as a matter of policy, lest enumeration itself strengthen the institution of caste. All subsequent references to caste distribution in Rajasthan will, therefore, be based on the 1931 figures. Obviously they have lost their precision in relation to the 1950s or 1960s but they remain the best means to approximate current proportions.

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all were (96%).49 Of these, 84% were Rajputs, traditionally the ruling caste. The degree to which ascriptive status affected leadership selection is made clear by the fact that Rajputs made up about 6% and twice-born (including Rajputs) about 20% of Rajasthan’s population. Occupation too reflected the hold of traditional status on leadership: 78% of the right’s MLAs and 40% of all MLAs were members of the old feudal ruling classes – jagirdars, members of royal families, courtiers and former state officials. The latent structures of traditional society in natural associations of birth and locality provided it with both natural leaders and the human and material means to contest the election. What was not said during the election campaign was in several respects more important than what was. By failing to challenge the constitutional changes of recent years the old order strengthened its legitimacy and excluded the possibility of reactionary civil war. Second, the primary reliance of the old regime on its candidates’ traditional right to rule rather than on appeals to ideology or interest and the considerable electoral success which rewarded this approach made clear to Congress that it would have to respect the interests and rights of the old order if it wished to avoid a rupture in the political community. The Rajputs would have liked to confine their appeals for electoral support to the sentiments surrounding their traditional status as rulers and warriors. But Congress’ militant attack put them on the defensive. The campaign forced jagirdars, their friends and allies to turn in part from the traditional concern for men and their qualities to a new concern for measures and their consequences, from who they were to what they would do. The old regime developed an explicit defense of its role in terms of the disadvantages of modern centralized bureaucracy. The dislocations, complexity, impersonality and expense of administration under the Congress raj were not transitory, but inherent in the new regime, the jagirdars charged. “I used to 49

These data are based on our comprehensive survey of the occupation, education and caste of all Rajasthan candidates in the 1952 election who received 10% or more of their constituency’s vote. Gathering such data raises very considerable difficulties. Not every candidate or even legislator in Rajasthan easily understands why an American interviewer would be interested in details of his personal life. Questions about social background may be better received in America because Americans are more accustomed to them and more likely to consider such questions legitimate. In Rajasthan as in India generally even elite populations like MLA candidates are not likely to be as familiar with such surveys or to regard them as legitimate as are comparable American populations. For these reasons, as well as for logistical ones, we decided to speak with a limited number of knowledgeable individuals whom we judged from other interviews to be both reliable and sympathetic with our research objectives. Our informants were distributed among the four divisions of Rajasthan, at least four from each but more in the case of Jaipur because of its large number of constituencies, and among the Congress and opposition ranks. We asked each to help us identify the education, caste and occupation of as many individuals from his division as he was able to. In most cases, we were able to get at least two persons to confirm these facts with respect to any one candidate, and we checked the results against biographical data where it was available. The data may be fallible in a few cases, but we would judge that such possible errors would not significantly affect the proportions.

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keep your tank [dammed pond]” a Rajput candidate told his former tenants, “and gave you full grazing rights for your bullocks. Now, when the tank breaks, they beat the drums to call you together for work on the dam. If I had done that, they would have called it begar [forced labor], but now, when they do it, they call it shramdan [work gift]. And now,” he continued, “you must pay for your grazing. When you had trouble about land, you came to my garh [house], not a great distance, and I or my officials could hear you. Now you must go far to the district town to see to a case. You had one ruler who knew you and took an interest in you. Now you have many, and they are far away.”50 The jagirdars, like sensitive nineteenth-century Indian civil servants, such as Metcalfe or Munroe, saw that administrative centralization and rationalization were at least initially a mixed blessing in a rural and parochial society. The Rajputs did not take readily to the notion that government through design and a deliberate marshalling of resources should refashion the social and economic environment. To provide order and justice based on traditional conceptions were government’s great tasks; intentionally to change the social environment was to engage in sacrilege. To this rather vague philosophic conception of government was added the immense fact that such changes in Rajasthan were directed for the most part at their interests and privileges; land reform, Congress’ great issue, was carefully obscured by jagirdars behind a cloud of traditional rhetoric. The national parties of the right, the RRP and Jan Sangh, generally supported socially conservative, nationalist and communal policies.51 Modern ways aped the west and betrayed India’s heritage. “In their [Congress] anxiety to make Bharat a carbon copy of the west,” the Jan Sangh manifesto charged, “they have ignored and neglected the best in Bhartiya life and ideals.”52 Both parties scored as weak the government’s policy toward Pakistan and opposed the Hindu Code Bill [reform of personal law, particularly as it affected women] and cow slaughter. The RRP called for the return of Ram Rajya, the rule of the divine Rama, under whom dharma, duty according to caste and stage of life, was fully realized.53 For villagers whose moral instruction and entertainment from childhood featured the adventures of Rama and who annually celebrated the victory of good over evil at Dussera by marking his victory over the villain Ravana, the appeal had more than an apocalyptic meaning. The RRP counseled those concerned about economic and social inequality that “a change of mind” and a “state of mutual cooperation among individuals” would

50 51 52 53

The late Raja Kalyan Singh of Bhinai. The word “communal” is used in India to designate sentiments on the part of a religious or caste community which place that community’s welfare first in matters of public policy. Manifesto of All-India Bharatiya Jana Sangh (1951, p.1). Bharat is an ancient word for India. See the Election Manifesto of the All-India Rama Rajya Parishad (no date).

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remedy the situation; as a practical measure it proposed to turn over the sanitation department to untouchables. In ancient times, it reminded the voters, “men with means were always looking for someone who would receive from India, while the deserving person avoided to accept.”54 “This vast land of ours,” founder Swami Karpatriji warned in the party’s manifesto, “should not be made a laboratory for making political experiments at the cost of the national existence of thirty-three crores of men and women. It is not wise to be led astray by those doubtful ‘isms’ which have never borne fruit in any age, and in any country. Without introducing any . . . political doctrine to you,” he told the party adherents, “I take you back to the same divine path . . . trodden by your ancestors for millions of years [sic], without there being any turning back from their decisions. And by following this rosy, divine path, they had always felt tranquil in mind, and led a happy and most contented life.”55 Because the Jan Sangh and the RRP symbolized for Nehru and the Congress communalism, fundamentalism and chauvinism, they were the object of some of their sharpest attacks in the 1951–2 campaign. The Jan Sangh and the RRP played a curiously ambivalent role in Rajasthan’s first general elections. They were at once the parties of right radicalism and reaction at the level of ideology and policy and of modern politics at the level of social organization and function. In the struggle between the new and the old regimes they served to socialize traditional Rajasthanis in modern political assumptions and conduct even while they spread ideas inimical to a secular and democratic state. Vertical mobilization, the marshalling of political support by traditional notables in local societies organized and integrated by rank, mutual dependence and the legitimacy of traditional authority, was a central feature of the old order’s approach to the election. But the imperatives of popular and competitive politics could not be wholly satisfied by the resources and methods involved in vertical mobilization. To them were added those of political parties and the Rajput caste association, a structure embodying both ascriptive and voluntary features and capable of horizontally mobilizing the caste community. Because they reached beyond the local and parochial compass of territorial interest, parties and quasi-voluntary associations obliged Rajputs to rationalize and generalize their political ideas and methods in ways that would appeal to unknown citizens drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds. The old order’s differential response to the election revealed the heterogeneity that varying historical circumstances had introduced among its members’ statuses and political capabilities. Territorial magnates tended to employ a quite different mix of methods and appeals than did those who had been in

54

Manifesto of All-India Bharatiya Jana Sangh, (1951, pp. 23–5).

55

Ibid., p. 39.

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the service of princes or jagirdars. The former tended to rely heavily on vertical mobilization while the latter, except when they received systematic help from a prince or major jagirdars, turned more readily to the political style, methods and appeals of modern popular and representative politics. Those jagirdars who stood at the head of territorial communities did not, on the whole, rely upon or help create party and interest structures. As natural leaders representing traditionally integrated territorial interests they could avoid questions of ideology and policy and the effort to persuade strangers of their relevance and appeal. For courtiers and states services candidates, however, direct ideological appeals and efforts to broker the demands of organized interests in the context of party structures were a likely requirement of political success. In this first election the territorial magnates tended to be more successful but they paid the price of being less prepared for the politics of the future. REFERENCES Bailey, F. G., “Parliamentary Government in Orissa (1947–1959)”. Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies. Vol. 1, No.2 (May 1962) pp. 120–121. Politics and Social Change, Orissa in 1959. University of Chicago, 1963. Banerjee, Anil, The Rajput States and the East India Company. Calcutta: A. Mukherjee, 1951. Basic Statistics Rajasthan 1956. Rajasthan, India: Directorate of Economics and Statistics, No date. Black, Eugene C., The Association, British Extraparliamentary Political Organization 1769–1783. Campbell, Angus et al., The American Voter. New York, 1960, p. 89, f.n. l. Christie, Ian, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform. 1962. Election Manifesto of the All-India Rama Rajya Parishad. Bombay: N. S. Press, Maharashtra, no date. Fisher, Margaret W. and Joan V. Bondurant, The Indian Experience with Democratic Elections. Indian Press Digests-Monograph Series. Berkeley, CA, 1956. Gash, Norman, Politics in the Age of Peel. London, UK, 1953. Goodwin, A., ed., The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century. London, UK, 1953. Grego, J., A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering from the Stuarts to Queen Victoria. London, UK, 1892. Key, V. O. Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy. New York, 1961. pp. 182–195. Lambert, Richard, “Hindu Communal Groups in Politics”. Leadership and Political Institutions in India. Richard Park and Irene Tinker, eds. Princeton, NJ, 1959. Levy, Harold, M. A. Thesis, Department of Political Science. University of Chicago, 1963.

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Manifesto of All-India Bharatiya Jana Sangh, 1951. p. 1. “Bharat is an ancient word for India.” Namier, Sir Lewis, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III. London, UK, 1957a. The Structure of Politics in the Reign of George III. London, UK, 1957b. Oldfield, T. H. B., The Representative History of Great Britain and Ireland: Being a History of the Countries, Cities and Boroughs of the United Kingdom from the Earliest Period. London, UK, 1816. Six Volumes. Ostrogorski, N., Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. London, UK, 1902. Vol. I. Park, Richard and Sadanand Kogekar, Reports on the Indian General Elections 1951–52. Bombay, Maharashtra, 1956. Rude, George, Wilkes and Liberty. 1963. Rudolph, L. I., “Democratic Assumptions and Political Realities in India”. Paper delivered before the Association for Asian Studies, 1958. Rudolph, Lloyd I and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition. Chicago, IL, 1967. Weiner, Myron, Party Politics in India. Princeton, NJ, 1956. NEWSPAPERS Hindustan Times, February 13, 1952. Hindustan Times, February 5, 1952. Rajputana Gazetter, Vol. III, p. 236. Statesman, February 10, 1952. Times of India, December 10, 1951. Times of India, December 10, 1951. Times of India, December 9, 1951. Times of India, December 9 and 10, 1951. Times of India, February 4, 1952. Times of India, January 25, 28, 29, 1952. Times of India, January 1, 1952.

3

A sign of backwardness? Where dynastic leaders are elected in India Francesca R. Jensenius1

Early one morning in March 2014, just prior to the national elections in India, a chai-wallah (tea vendor) in Jaipur in Western Rajasthan was serving cups of sweet milky tea as usual. For him it was just a normal day – until a lady in a green silk sari arrived and asked for tea. The lady was Vasundhara Raje, born into the erstwhile royal family of the Scindias and married into the royal family of Dholpur in Rajasthan. She has served in India’s parliament five times, in the Rajasthani state assembly four times, and was the Chief Minister of Rajasthan at the time of writing this chapter. The chai-wallah was overwhelmed by the meeting, saying that the Maharani (queen) had left him “stunned” (Singh 2014). Vasundhara Raje’s great electoral success in successive elections has been the result of, among other things, the strong support from her party (BJP), her wealth, and her hard work. But as the remarks by the chai-wallah suggest, it may also in part be the result of poor voters being impressed by a member of a traditional royal family. Jaffrelot (2011) explains Vasundhara Raje’s success in the 2003 elections by emphasizing precisely this electoral appeal: “For a Maharani to solicit their support ended up intriguing and then seducing the voters.”2 Dynastic politics in India, especially the presence of members of the royal families in political positions, is often described as a remnant of a pre-modern, feudal past. Subramanya (2012), for instance, asks how political parties have “managed to remain dynastic rather than be truly democratic” [emphasis added],

1

2

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Kanchan Chandra and Romain Carlevan for their extensive and insightful comments on previous versions of this chapter, and Susan Hoivik for excellent language editing. All tables and figures, unless otherwise cited, use data from Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014). India has a long and important history of royal families. Before independence from the British Raj, there were 565 Princely States governed by royal families, of which 21 major ones had their own governments (Corbridge and Harriss 2000). At the time of independence, the Princely States acceded to India or Pakistan, but the rulers retained some of their privileges. With the 26th Amendment to the Indian Constitution of 1971 the royal families lost their special privileges, including their “privy purses,” but they still enjoyed considerable respect and recognition in their local communities (Rudolph & Rudolph, in this volume). They were also often quite wealthy, which helped them gain political influence and stay in power as democratically elected “Maharajas” (Carlevan 2013).

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implying in her use of the term “remain” that dynasticism in India represents the persistence of the non-democratic past. In an article titled “Democracy vs dynasty in India,” Lal (2009) similarly writes about the “feudalistic moorings” of the Congress Party: “ones that permeate Indian society at all levels right from party posts dominated by royal houses to the landed zamindar class.” Prior to the 2014 parliamentary elections there was considerable focus on dynasties, probably largely because Rahul Gandhi (the grandson of Indira Gandhi) was running as the unofficial prime ministerial candidate for the Congress Party. In discussions of the Nehru-Gandhi “clan,” dynasties have been spoken of as a feudal remnant that has prospered because of poverty, but also as one of the reasons why India has remained poor.3 Similar to how modernization theorists expected that economic growth, better education, urbanization, and democratization would go hand-in-hand, there seems to be an implicit expectation that dynasties will gradually disappear as voters become better educated, wealthier, and more able to make independent electoral choices. For example, in the words of Baijayant Jay Panda, a prominent Member of Parliament (MP): “as more and more young Indians get connected to the world, there will be a breaking down of established modes of feudalism. That includes dynastic politics” (quoted in Biswas 2014). If this link between “backwardness” and dynasties exists, we should expect those constituencies (political districts) that elect dynastic politicians to be poorer than other ones. While we do not have empirical evidence of such patterns in India, Mendoza et al. (2012) have indeed found that, in the Philippines, areas ruled by dynastic politicians tend to be poorer and with greater income inequality. However, not everyone assumes dynasties in Indian politics to be something outdated that will disappear as the country develops. India’s dynasties have, in fact, been referred to as “modern political hybrids” (Tully 2012). It has similarly been argued that political dynasties are a product of democratic politics in India, resulting from the fact that weak party organizations and high returns to office make it attractive to field family members (see introduction to this volume and Chandra and Umaira 2011). In their work on Punjab, Cheema et al. (2013) hold that dynasties there are not the result of a stagnant pool of elite families, nor are they particularly tied to feudal or landed power. Rather, they find new dynasties emerging in families with all sorts of backgrounds. Can India’s political dynasties be thought of as remnants of feudal traditions, or not? Are dynastic politicians more likely to be elected in areas with poor and uneducated voters? And can we see a change in these patterns over time? This chapter provides a partial answer to these questions by comparing the socio-economic characteristics of parliamentary constituencies (PCs) that have

3

For example, see Daniel (2011).

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elected dynastic politicians – defined as MPs who were preceded by a family member in democratic politics – in 2004, 2009, and 2014 (14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabha) to other constituencies. In this first effort (to my knowledge) at relating dynastic representation to constituency-level characteristics, I create constituency-level estimates of socio-economic variables by aggregating block-level Indian Census data from 2001 to the PC level using geocoded (GIS) maps. I then explore the relationship between dynasticism and economic backwardness – measured using indicators of urbanization, poverty, and literacy. A positive association between a constituency’s degree of “backwardness” and dynastic representation would support the interpretation of dynasticism in India as a remnant from the past. No relationship, or a negative one, would support an interpretation of dynasticism in India as more of a modern phenomenon. Two clear patterns emerge from this empirical exercise. First, there is no overall systematic difference between constituencies that elect dynastic and nondynastic politicians. This supports the argument that dynastic politics in India is actually a modern phenomenon: it is not particular to socio-economically backward constituencies. Second, there is indeed a systematic difference between constituencies that elect dynastic politicians with royal backgrounds and those that elect dynastic politicians from non-royal families. MPs from royal families are more likely to be elected from constituencies that are more rural, poorer, and with fewer literate voters, and they are also more likely to be re-elected from exactly the same constituency as their family members. Dynastic MPs with a royal background represent only a small proportion of parliamentarians in India today: some 3% of all MPs elected in 2004, 2009, and 2014, and about 10% of the dynastic MPs. They may therefore seem to be marginal or unimportant. Yet, as we know that there used to be more royals in elected office in India in previous years, these low figures actually lend support to the argument put forward in this chapter and elsewhere in this volume: as India has been modernizing, the space for “traditional” dynasties seems to be shrinking, making way for their “modern” counterparts – democratically elected dynastic families. The empirical findings presented in this chapter are correlations and should not be interpreted as causal relationships. Still, they point to a potentially important distinction between royal dynasties and political dynasties worth further exploration. The former may indeed be a remnant of feudal India that will gradually disappear, whereas the latter seems to be an integral part of democracy in India that is here to stay. 1

Data

A main challenge in studying elections in India is that the boundaries of the electoral constituencies differ from those of the administrative boundaries. Administratively, India is divided into states, districts, blocks, villages (and

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towns with wards) that fit nicely into each other. For each of these units, the government collects large amounts of information – among other things, through the decennial Census. India is also divided into more than 4,000 State Assembly Constituencies (ACs) that fit into administrative districts (but cross block boundaries), and several of these ACs are then aggregated into 543 Parliamentary Constituencies (PCs) that often cross district boundaries.4 These constituencies are drawn up by the Delimitation Commission of India, and the most recent delimitation was implemented in 2008. While all of India’s electoral results are reported at the constituency level, the socio-economic characteristics of constituencies must be estimated from other levels of analysis. Banerjee and Somanathan (2007) created PC-level estimates of Indian Census variables by roughly matching districts to PCs. This yields fairly imprecise estimates, although it is a great improvement on having no data at all. The rapid development of geocoded mapping technology (GIS) makes it possible to match both villages and blocks to political constituencies with some precision. In a recent work, Bhavnani and Jensenius (2015) created area-weighted estimates of India’s pre-delimitation ACs from blocklevel census data. Similarly, Jensenius (2013a) created AC-level estimates of census variables based on mapping village-level census data to constituencies – but also reported that inaccuracies in the village-level GIS maps render these estimates somewhat biased. This chapter examines the characteristics of both pre- and post-delimitation PCs. In this case, area-weighted estimates of census variables at the PC level were created by overlaying GIS maps of India’s almost 6,000 administrative blocks (usually called Tehsils, Mandals, or Police Circles) and maps of India’s PCs from before and after the 2008 delimitation.5 This made it possible to 4 5

The full 2008 delimitation report is available at [URL] eci.nic.in/delim/. See Jensenius (2013b) for a review of the work of the Delimitation Commissions. All the maps are from the company MLInfo, accessed through the library of New York University. To overlay the maps, I used the union tool in QGIS. The maps are not perfectly aligned, so some errors will inevitably remain using this method. To try to reduce the errors due to imperfectly aligned maps I excluded overlapping areas that are in different states, and also areas that constituted less than 3% of a PC or less than 3% of a block. Using area weighting rather than population weighting to aggregate the numbers for the PCs may introduce some bias in the estimates, since people are not evenly distributed across blocks. However, this is more a problem with absolute numbers than with the proportions (such as literacy rate) that I use in this chapter. Since constituencies in cities are particularly prone to error using this method of areaweighting the data, because they are geographically small, I manually checked the matches for the major Indian cities and altered the ones that were clearly mismatched, for example several of the constituencies in Mumbai. The manual corrections were based on consulting the Indian delimitation reports from 1976 and 2008. The conclusions in this chapter are also robust to excluding the largest cities altogether, and also to including all the overlapping areas (not excluding the areas constituting less than 3% of a PC or block). The full list of matched areas and the estimated census values for each PC are part of the replication files available at www.francesca.no/publications.

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Table 3.1 Categories used in the chapter MP from democratic dynasty

MP from royal family

No Yes

No

Yes

Non-dynastic Royal non-dynastic

Dynastic Royal dynastic

identify what proportion of the area of each block overlapped with which PC. These proportions were then used to create area-weighted PC-level estimates of the variables in the Indian Census from 2001.6 The resulting dataset has PC-level estimates of the variables included in the Indian 2001 census, including the literacy rate, occupational distribution, and proportion of urban population of each of India’s PCs before and after the 2008 delimitation. These data were then merged with the dynasty dataset used in this book (see Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014), that includes information about the politicians elected to the Indian parliament in 2004, 2009, and 2014. 2

Categories used in this chapter

The dataset introduced above enables us to examine the socio-economic characteristics of PCs that elect dynastic politicians. The dataset includes information about the 543 MPs who were elected to the Indian parliament in 2004, 2009, and 2014, while the census data are all from 2001. While most of this book focuses on the democratically elected dynasties, in this chapter I operate with a further distinction: whether or not politicians also hail from a royal family. Table 3.1 provides an overview of the four mutually exclusive categories used in this chapter: non-dynastic politicians from non-royal families (Non-dynastic), dynastic politicians from non-royal families (Dynastic), politicians from royal families without other family members preceding them in democratic politics (Royal non-dynastic), and politicians from royal families where family members have preceded them in democratic politics (Royal dynastic). The categories Non-dynastic and Dynastic are slightly different from those used elsewhere in this book: I use them to describe those MPs who have or have not been preceded by a family member in democratic politics, but who do

6

I chose to use block-level maps rather than village-level ones because the block-level data include both the urban and rural data in the census without relying on the exact location of a town or village, and because many of the variables of interest are not available below the block level.

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not hail from a royal family. The category Royal non-dynastic includes MPs who are from royal families but have not been preceded by a family member in democratic politics. Royal dynastic is used of MPs from royal families where a family member preceded them in democratic politics. The category Royal non-dynastic may seem somewhat paradoxical, since descendants of royal families are all “dynastic” in some sense. So, let us consider the contrast between Jyotiraditya Scindia (MP in 2004, 2009, and 2014) and K.C. Singh Baba (MP in 2004 and 2009). Jyotiraditya Scindia is a descendant of the ruler of Gwalior, but was also preceded in democratic politics by several family members – including his father, Madhav Rao Scindia; his grandmother, Vijaye Raje Scindia; and his aunt, Vasundhara Raje Scindia. By contrast, K.C. Singh Baba is a descendant of the ruler of Kumaon, but is the first member of this royal family to obtain a political office in democratic politics. He is therefore an example of a Royal non-dynastic politician. I examine these two types of royal politicians – those who have been preceded by a family member in democratic politics and those who have not – in order to be in line with the coding of dynasties in the rest of the book, while at the same time exploring the characteristics of politicians from the royal families that were the traditional dynastic elite in India. Several studies of the circumstances under which royals succeed in politics – including Chapter 2 by Rudolph and Rudolph in this book – point to a distinction between royal families that are successful in mastering the art of democratic politics, and those who are not. In his seminal study of the Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh, Brass (1965) argued that political parties in India were most successful when they established firm roots in local traditions, and similarly, that traditional rulers succeeded in gaining power only when they played the democratic political game successfully. He told the story of how the Congress Party chose to give tickets to royals in two neighboring districts, but that only one of them succeeded in politics. Of the two, the Raja of Mankapur succeeded in leveraging his economic dominance in the area for political gain. He therefore became the “uncrowned king of Gonda district” (Brass 1965, p. 70) and managed to establish a post-independence political dynasty. Similarly, Jaffrelot (2011) has argued that members of royal families in India have had an advantage in electoral politics because of their access to money, muscle power, and prestige, but that only those who managed to adapt to electoral politics have been politically successful. In his view, the Scindias – Vasundhara Raje’s family and India’s most prominent political royal family – have succeeded by managing to combine rootedness in a territory with political innovativeness. If the advantage of being part of a dynasty comes from mastering the skills of democratic politics, then MPs from royal families who also have a

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Table 3.2 Number of cases in the dataset for each category of parliamentary constituencies

MPs elected in 2004 (N) (Percentage) MPs elected in 2009 (N) (Percentage) MPs elected in 2014 (N) (Percentage)

Non-dynastic

Dynastic

Royal non-dynastic

Royal dynastic

428 (78.8) 377 (69.4) 422 (77.7)

98 (18.0) 147 (27.1) 107 (19.7)

6 (1.1) 3 (0.6) 3 (0.6)

11 (2.0) 16 (2.9) 11 (2.0)

democratic track record should be better positioned than MPs from royal families previously not active in democratic politics. On the other hand, if the advantage of being part of a dynasty is related to name-recognition, local prestige, or a family history of political power, all royals will have those advantages whether or not they happen to have a family member who directly preceded them in politics. Table 3.2 shows the number and percentages of politicians in each of the four categories of interest for each of the parliaments included in the dataset. We see that most of the MPs in the dataset were Non-dynastic (79% in 2004, 69% in 2009, and 78% in 2014), a fairly large share were Dynastic (18% in 2004, 27% in 2009, and 20% in 2014), and very few were Royal non-dynastic (1.1% in 2004, 0.6% in 2009, and 0.6% in 2014), whereas most of the royals were also dynastic (2% in 2004, 2.9% in 2009, and 2% in 2014). 3

Where are dynastic politicians elected from?

The first pattern to examine is the regional variation in where Non-dynastic, Dynastic, Royal non-dynastic and Royal dynastic politicians have been elected. Figures 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3 show the locations where politicians in each of these categories were elected in 2004, 2009, and 2014. We see that PCs with dynastic MPs from non-royal families are spread across the country, although the proportions of dynastic politicians are somewhat higher in North-West, North-Central, and North-East India than in South India. Although this is not apparent in the maps, one of the states with the highest proportion of dynastic MPs is the National Capital Territory of Delhi (with 43% dynastic MPs in 2004, 71% in 2009, and 14% in 2014). Regarding MPs from royal families, there is a clearer geographic clustering: although the number of MPs from royal families is very low in all regions, they are found mostly in the North-Western, North-Central, and Eastern regions. The South and West only had a handful of MPs with royal backgrounds, and there were none from the North-Eastern states.

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14th Lok Sabha Non-dynastic MP Dynastic MP Royal non-dynastic MP Royal dynastic MP

Figure 3.1 Dynastic and royal parliamentarians in the 14th Lok Sabha Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

One obvious explanation for the greater geographic clustering of MPs from royal families is that they tend to run for election in the former princely states, which were concentrated in the north of the country. For example, “Rajasthan” literally means “land of kings” and was formed mainly from 22 former princely states (Rudolph and Rudolph 1968, p. 105). The map in Figure 3.4 shows the location of princely states in colonial India. Comparing this map with the previous ones allows a rough assessment of the relationship between the location of the constituencies in which present-day MPs from royal families are elected and the location of the erstwhile princely states. We see that the constituencies from which MPs from royal families are elected are,

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15th Lok Sabha Non-dynastic MP Dynastic MP Royal non-dynastic MP Royal dynastic MP

Figure 3.2 Dynastic and royal parliamentarians in the 15th Lok Sabha Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

indeed, typically located within the region of a former princely state.7 This is corroborated by one of the few empirical studies on the topic (Carlevan 2013, p. 10), which reports that 93% of the Members of Legislative Assemblies in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh who have come from royal families have been elected from a constituency located within their old princely state. 7

It would have been preferable to show more precisely whether PCs with MPs from royal families were located in previous princely states, but unfortunately I do not have access to GIS maps with the borders of princely states that would enable such a comparison. Iyer (2010) manually coded which districts in India overlapped with previous princely states, but since these codes provide only an estimate for the overlap between princely states and districts, and the PCs do not map well onto those districts, this was too rough an approximation to seem useful for my purposes.

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16th Lok Sabha Non-dynastic MP Dynastic MP Royal non-dynastic MP Royal dynastic MP

Figure 3.3 Dynastic and royal parliamentarians in the 16th Lok Sabha Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

But, as the map of princely states shows, there are much fewer MPs from royal families than there were princely states. The princely states were dispersed widely across regions in India, including in the West, South, and North-East. MPs from royal families, however, appear to win disproportionately from constituencies in India’s northern half, and not from the West, South, or North-East. In other words, there are many areas that used to be part of princely states but do not have politicians from royal families. The clustering of MPs from royal families, then, may simply be an accentuation of a general tendency towards greater dynasticism in North-West and North-Central India.

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CHINA Kabul

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s

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KASHMIR & JAMMU Peshawar NW Srinagar FRONTIER PROVINCE Rawalpindi

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INDIA BEFORE PARTITION The representation of boundaries are reproduced from the map in the India Office List, 1940, prepared by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute and printed John Bartholomew and son Lod. They are not necessarily authoritative.

Midnapore

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Figure 3.4 Location of princely states in India before independence

Source: The British Library Board. Retrieved from [URL] www.bl.uk/reshelp/_ndhelp region/asia/india/indianindependence/map1/large14213.html, December 22, 2014.

Some royals are also fielded in areas far from their royal roots. Jawant Singh, for example, is from a royal family in Rajasthan, but was nominated by BJP and won in Darjeeling parliamentary constituency in 2009.8 Interestingly, female royals seem to have an electoral advantage both in the area they were born into and in the area they married into. A good example is Vasundhara Raje, born into the royal family of the Scindias of Madhya Pradesh and married into the royal family of Dholpur in Rajasthan, who succeeded in politics in Rajasthan. Another example is Maharani Chandresh Kumari Katoch, 8

However, when BJP refused to give him a ticket in the 2014 election he chose to run as an independent candidate in Rajasthan.

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daughter of Maharaja Hanwant Singh of Jodhpur in Rajasthan and married into the royal family of Kangra in Himachal Pradesh, who first served several political terms in Himachal Pradesh, but was later elected as MP from Jodhpur in India’s 14th and 15th Lok Sabhas. 4

The local rootedness of dynastic MPs

In the previous section I show how Dynastic politicians are elected all across India, while Royal dynastic politicians tend to run for election in previous princely states. But how rooted, generally, are Royal dynastic politicians and other Dynastic politicians? Figure 3.5 shows the percentage of politicians who were preceded by a family member in precisely the same constituency (Rooted). The Non-dynastic politicians are not included in this analysis, since they per definition did not have any family member in power before them. Here we see another clear difference between the politicians from democratically elected dynasties and from royal dynasties. In all the three elections under study, a clear majority of Dynastic politicians were either preceded by a family member at another level of politics or ran for election in a different

Figure 3.5 Local rootedness of dynastic parliamentarians in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabha

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constituency than their family member(s) (Not rooted). Royal dynastic MPs, on the other hand, were much more likely to run for election in the same constituency as a family member. Among those that were Rooted in a constituency, the Dynastic MPs had fairly short family histories in the same constituency (on average 1.8 family terms in 2004, 1.8 family terms in 2009, and 2 family terms in 2014), while the Royal dynastic MPs had generally been preceded by several family members in the same constituency (on average 3.9 family terms in 2004, 3.6 family terms in 2009, and 4.5 family terms in 2014). Both the high propensity of being elected in the same constituency as family members, and the major difference in the number of family members succeeding each other in the same constituency, suggests that the royal politicians are much closer to the notion of “inheriting” their positions than MPs from political dynasties. 5

A rural–urban divide?

The next natural thing to examine when exploring the differences between PCs that elect Dynastic and Non-dynastic politicians is the extent to which they win in rural or urban constituencies. Although India is often talked of as one of the world’s rising economies, approximately 70% of its population still lives in rural areas. In popular debate it is common to distinguish between the rural Bharat [India] and the modern and urban India.9 The rural populations are often referred to as more “backward”: more traditional in outlook, more likely to marry within their caste and religion, more likely to be part of “vote banks,” and more likely to be involved in semi-feudal clientelistic relationships. Is there, then, an urban–rural divide in the propensity to elect dynastic politicians? Figure 3.6 shows estimates of the proportion of the population living in urban areas in PCs that elected dynastic MPs in 2004, 2009, and 2014. The data are from the 2001 census, which records people as living in an urban or rural area, and have been aggregated to the PC level from block-level data as described above. The plots presented are bean plots, which illustrate the approximate distribution of the proportion of the population in each PC that is urban, for each of the four categories of constituencies. For example, for the 14th Lok Sabha, the first bean in the figure summarizes the information about the proportion of the population that was urban in each of the 428 PCs that had a Non-dynastic MP. The bean has its minimum at 0 and its maximum at 1, indicating that among these constituencies there were constituencies with no

9

See for example Bamzai (2013).

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Figure 3.6 Proportion urban and dynasticism in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabha

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urban population at all and some with a completely urban population. The fact that the bean is thickest at the bottom suggests that most of the constituencies had a low proportion of urban population. The horizontal line in the middle of the distribution, and the figure written above it, shows the average proportion of urban population among these constituencies.10 As we can see in Figure 3.6, the constituencies with a Non-dynastic MP in 2004 had an average urban population of 28%; constituencies with a Dynastic MP had an average of 26%, whereas the constituencies with royal MPs had average urban populations of 23% and 13%. The constituencies with royal MPs were therefore clearly less urban. The same patterns emerge in the data from 2009 and 2014. These patterns hold when we examine data for the proportion of farmers living in these constituencies. The distribution of the proportion of farmers is very similar in PCs with Non-dynastic and Dynastic MPs (averages of about 10% across the years), while there is a jump to the proportion of farmers in PCs with MPs from royal families (about 14% for Royal dynastic MPs and about 11% for Royal non-dynastic MPs). These differences are not enormous, and should not be exaggerated given the small sample sizes, but there are some reasons to expect such differences between constituencies with MPs from royal families and other constituencies. Turning again to the story of the success of the Raja of Mankapur, Brass (1965) emphasized control of land as one of the Raja’s main political assets: he had many farmers who leased land from him and were financially dependent on him in various ways. This could indicate that royals are the most politically successful in areas where their families control considerable amounts of land. 6

Poverty

We see a similar pattern in the data for the proportion of “marginal workers” across the different categories of constituencies. Marginal workers are defined in the census as those who had worked less than 6 months during the previous year (but had been engaged in some work during the period).11 These are workers who are typically poor and probably dependent on local land-owners and other local strong-men to get work. As with the rural population discussed above, I would therefore expect them to be more likely to support traditional elites, like politicians from royal families who control large areas of land.

10 11

The density shape used is a polygon given by a normal density trace and its mirrored version. This is created by the function beanplot in R as described in Kampstra (2008). The Indian Census of 2001 gives the following definition: “Those workers who had not worked for the major part of the reference period (i.e. less than 6 months) are termed as Marginal Workers.” [URL] censusindia.gov.in/Metadata/Metada.htm#2m.

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Figure 3.7 shows the proportion of marginal workers in the different types of constituencies across the years. The data are again presented with bean plots, illustrating the distribution within each category of PCs. Also here the average in each category is shown with the line in the middle of the distributions, with the average value written above the line. On average there were about 9% marginal workers in the PCs in the sample. There was virtually no difference between the percentage of marginal workers in PCs with Non-dynastic and Dynastic MPs (averages of about 9% and 8% respectively), while there were about 11% marginal workers in PCs with royal MPs across the years. Again, the differences are not dramatic, but provide another piece of evidence in support of the overall pattern: PCs with Non-dynastic and Dynastic MPs do not differ systematically from each other, whereas PCs electing members of royal families do differ somewhat from other constituencies. 7

Education

Finally, let us see whether the same pattern – that PCs electing royals differ from other PCs – is reflected in literacy rates. Literacy is another measure of poverty, but illiterate voters may prefer royal politicians for slightly different reasons than marginal workers do. While marginal workers may opt for royal politicians because of their economic dependence on them, illiterate voters may also choose elite politicians because of their “glamour,” as exemplified in the story at the beginning of this chapter. There is probably a strong correlation between the proportion of marginal workers and illiterates in a constituency, but it is still of interest to examine them separately, in case the mechanisms unfold differently. The average literacy rate in India, according to the Indian Census of 2001, was 65%.12 Figure 3.8 shows the breakdown by type of constituency. Here too we see that whereas the distributions of literacy rates in PCs with Non-dynastic and Dynastic MPs are very similar (averages of 65% and 64% literacy, respectively), the percentages are slightly lower for PCs with MPs from royal families (the Royal non-dynastic MPs were elected from constituencies with literacy rates of 64%, 58%, and 59% across the three election years, whereas the Royal dynastic MPs were elected from PCs with literacy rates of 56%, 62%, and 59% across the years). Thus, literacy patterns also support the overall argument that constituencies that elect dynastic politicians do not differ greatly

12

The Census of India defines literate as: “A person aged 7 years and above who can both read and write with understanding in any language has been taken as literate.” [URL] censusindia. gov.in/Metadata/Metada.htm#2m. Consistent with the calculations of the Census of India I have calculated literacy rate as the number of literate persons divided by the number of persons aged 7 or older.

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Figure 3.7 Proportion marginal workers and dynasticism in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabha

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Figure 3.8 Literacy rate and dynasticism in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabha

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from places that elect non-dynastic MPs, but that there seems to be something different about places that elect royal MPs. 8

What is different about the royals?

Two clear patterns emerge from the empirical work. First, that there are no systematic differences in the characteristics of PCs that elect Non-dynastic and Dynastic MPs. And second, there are some differences between PCs with MPs from royal families and the rest. The first pattern is fascinating in its own right, as it goes counter to the expectation that dynastic politics is somehow feudal and associated with poverty and “backwardness.” Having other family members in politics might be a political asset, but in a network society like India it may be just one out of several possible assets. Those politicians who do not have family members in politics are likely to have other strong networks that enable them to achieve positions of power, such as connections in important businesses or religious organizations. According to this line of reasoning, dynasties are but one expression of a network-oriented society. They should not be seen as traditional, but rather as an integral part of modern democracy in India. In fact, the whole idea of juxtaposing the modern and the traditional is difficult in India, as noted by Brass (1965, p. 2): “In India, modernization is not a one-way process; political institutions modernize the society while the society traditionalizes institutions.” On the other hand, the pattern whereby PCs that elect royal politicians are somewhat poorer and more rural than other PCs does support the idea of royal dynasties being associated with more traditional and perhaps more “backward” values. The numbers of MPs from royal families are small, and the patterns are not very strong, so their importance should not be exaggerated. Yet, it does seem that India’s royal families tend to be more successful in democratic elections in poorer and more rural areas, and also that they are more rooted in one particular area. There may be several reasons for this. As mentioned, it could be the result of voters being tied to land owned by traditional elites, and therefore financially dependent on former landholders and royal families. Thachil (2014) describes how the service-oriented relationships between political parties and voters in India today are no longer clientelistic, as there are no expectations of reciprocity; however, it may be that the relationships between voters and some former royal families still resemble the traditional patron–client relationships that once dominated Indian politics and that make people feel either coerced or induced to support traditional elites. Another reason could also be, as mentioned, that voters are dazzled by the glamour of politicians who come from royal families. That voters in India fall for glamour is not unheard of, as shown by the many celebrities-turned-politicians

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in India. In fact, as reported in Jensenius (2013a, p. 117), in interviews with voters and politicians the glamour of politicians is often brought up as an explanation for both vote choice and electoral turnout. Once again, it should be emphasized that the patterns I have shown are not very strong: Although the average PC that elects a member of a royal family is poorer and more rural, some of the PCs that elect royals are wealthy and urban. Take, for instance, Gurgaon constituency, on the city border of Delhi, a constituency that has become a wealthy suburb to the city. Here the scion of the Rewari dynasty, Rao Inderjit Singh, has long been a political force. It is also important to bear in mind that the patterns noted in this chapter are correlations. Although there seems to be something different about the places that elect royals, the relationship might in fact be spurious: Historically, there were more princely states in North India – and royals tend to run for election in the states they come from. The pattern we see may therefore be driven by the fact that North India is poorer. However, there is one further argument that supports the patterns I have presented in this chapter – that royal politicians seem to be a remnant from the past, while political dynasties are the name of the game of democracy in India. Here I am referring to the circumstance that the number of royal politicians seems to be dwindling, while the number of dynastic politicians is stable or even increasing. In the 1957 election in Madhya Pradesh, 20 out of the 23 dynastic politicians elected to the state assembly were from royal families (Carlevan 2013): while the figures are much lower now. 9

Conclusions

This chapter has probed into the descriptive characteristics of what distinguishes Indian parliamentary constituencies (PCs) that elect dynastic and royal Members of Parliament (MPs) from other PCs. Two clear patterns emerged. First, there is no systematic overall difference between PCs that elect Nondynastic and Dynastic politicians from non-royal families. This suggests that, contrary to the expectations of many, electing candidates from political families is not associated with poor education or lack of knowledge, but is simply an integral part of Indian politics. However, places that elect MPs from royal families are somewhat different, as they tend to be elected from the same constituency as their family members. These PCs are also generally somewhat more rural, have more farmers and marginal workers, and have lower educational levels. Thus, the evidence presented here does not indicate that the political dynasties in India are a remnant of a feudal past that will gradually disappear as India grows wealthier. However, it does suggest that royal dynasties are more associated with poverty and traditional values and may be dwindling in numbers as Indian voters become wealthier and better educated.

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REFERENCES Bamzai, S. (2013). “A fight between Bharat and India: The country’s urban and rural divide will determine the next year in politics.” Mail Online India. Retrieved from [URL] www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2255531/A-fightBharat-India-The-countrys-urban-and-rural-divide-determine-year-politics.html. Banerjee, A. and Somanathan, R. (2007). “The political economy of public goods: Some evidence from India.” Journal of Development Economics, 82(2): 287–314. Bhavnani, R. and Jensenius, F.R. (2015). “Socio-economic profiles for India’s old constituencies.” In Alam, M. S., and Sivaramkrishnan, K. C. eds. Fixing Electoral Boundaries in India: laws, Processes, Outcomes and Implication for Political Representation. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Biswas, S. (2014). “Is India’s politics becoming less dynastic?” BBC. Retrieved from [URL] /www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-28478544. Brass, P.R. (1965). Factional politics in an Indian state: The Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Carlevan, R. (2013). “Modern maharajas? Studying the political families of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh since the 1950s.” Presented to Explaining Electoral Change in Urban and Rural India (EECURI) Network March 2013. Chandra, Kanchan, Bohlken, Anjali, and Chauchard, Simon (2014). Dataset on dynasticism in the Indian Parliament. Chandra, K. and Umaira, W. (2011). “India’s democratic dynasties.” Seminar, 622. Cheema, A., Javid, H., and Naseer, M.F. (2013). “Dynastic politics in Punjab: Facts, myths and their implications.” Working Paper No. 01–13, Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives. Corbridge, S. and Harriss, J. (2000). Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu nationalism and popular democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Daniel, F.J. (2011). “Gandhi clan blamed for keeping India in poverty.” Reuters India. Retrieved from [URL] /in.reuters.com/article/2011/12/26/india-corruptionidINDEE7BP0A120111226. Iyer, L. (2010). “Direct versus indirect colonial rule in India: Long-term consequences.” Review of Economics and Statistics, 92(4): 693–713. Jaffrelot, C. (2011). “What princely democracy? The case of the Scindias.” Seminar, 622. Jensenius, F.R. (2013a). Power, performance and bias: Evaluating the electoral quotas for Scheduled Castes in India. PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley. (2013b). “Was the delimitation commission unfair to Muslims?” Studies in Indian Politics, 1(2): 213–29. Kampstra, P. (2008). “Beanplot: A boxplot alternative for visual comparison of distributions.” Journal of Statistical Software, 28. Kumar, S. (2014). Indian youth and electoral politics: An emerging engagement. New Delhi: SAGE India. Lal, N. (2009). “Democracy vs dynasty in India.” Retrieved from [URL] www .worldsecuritynetwork.com/India/Lal-Neeta/Democracy-vs-dynasty-in-India. Mendoza, R.U., Beja, E.L., Jr., Venida, V.S., and Yap, D.B. (2012). “Inequality in democracy: Insights from an empirical analysis of political dynasties in the 15th Philippine Congress.” Philippine Political Science Journal, 33 (2):132–45.

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Rudolph, L.I. and Rudolph, S.H. (1968). “The political modernization of an Indian feudal order: An analysis of Rajput adaptation in Rajasthan.” Journal of Social Issues, 24(4): 93–128. Singh, A.K. (2014). “Maharani Raje’s roadside cuppa sets off charcha.” Times of India. Retrieved from [URL] /timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Maharani-Rajesroadside-cuppa-sets-off-charcha/articleshow/31705918.cms. Subramania, R. (2012). “Economics Journal: The price of political dynasties.” The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from [URL] /blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/03/21/ economics-journal-the-price-of-political-dynasties/. Thachil, T. (2014). “Elite parties and poor voters: Theory and evidence from India.” American Political Science Review, 108(2): 454–77. Tully, M. (2012). “Political dynasties: It runs in the family.” Retrieved from [URL] /indiatoday.intoday.in/story/political-dynasties-independence-day-specialmark-tully-congress-it-runs-in-the-family/1/212729.html.

4

Dynasticism across Indian political parties Adam Ziegfeld

Although dynasticism is pervasive across parties in India (see Figure 1.1 and Table 1.2), political parties nevertheless vary in the degree to which they are dynastic. The Indian National Congress (or Congress) is a dynastic party par excellence. Its party president, Sonia Gandhi, the widow of the former party president and prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, is the fifth member of the NehruGandhi family to have held this position. And, in the 2004, 2009, and 2014 Lok Sabha elections combined, Congress elected 396 MPs, of which 145 (or nearly 37 percent) had family members precede them in politics. But, not all Indian parties are as dynastic as Congress. In the 2004, 2009, and 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) – a small Marxist-Leninist party enjoying considerable support in three of India’s states – elected a total of sixty-eight MPs, of which ten (or 15 percent) were members of political dynasties. During the same period, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), elected eighteen MPs, of which only two (or 11 percent) had family members precede them in politics. The CPM and TRS are very different from Congress. For one, neither the CPM nor the TRS has a leader who is dynastic in the sense of having been preceded by a family member in politics, though the TRS’s founder and leader, K. Chandrasekhar Rao, has not hesitated to have his children follow him (Reddy 2014).1 Furthermore, unlike Congress, the CPM is a highly organized party. Advancement within the CPM requires demonstrated ideological commitment to the party’s communist principles and sustained activity in one of the party’s frontal organizations, such as its labor unions, newspapers, or women’s wings. No single leader can thwart party norms and single-handedly nominate the relatives of other party members. Though the TRS is, unlike the CPM, far more autocratic in its functioning, it differs from Congress in another respect. The TRS is a very young party, having been founded only in 2001.

1

In 2014, K. Chandrasekhar Rao’s son and nephew won seats in the Telangana legislative assembly, and his daughter won a seat in the Lok Sabha.

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RJD TRS JD(U) CPI SHS CPM TDP AIADMK BJP AITC BSP DMK SAD SP Other INC BJD NCP LJP 0

20

40 % Dynastic MPs

60

80

Figure 4.1 Dynasticism by Party Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

Therefore, the party does not have, as Congress does, a large pool of people who grew up in families affiliated with the TRS or who are the children or grandchildren of party members. The contrast between Congress, on the one hand, and the CPM and TRS on the other, raises a more general question: Why are some parties more dynastic than others? As Figure 4.1 shows, Indian political parties vary considerably in the share of their elected MPs that are dynasts. The figure includes only the eighteen parties that won ten or more seats in the 2004, 2009, and 2014 Lok Sabhas combined. The remaining MPs elected from parties winning fewer than ten seats in the three legislatures are grouped into the “Other” category.2 At one extreme sits the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), based primarily in the state of Bihar, whose thirty-three MPs include only three dynasts (about 9 percent). The Lok Jan Shakti Party (LJP), which is also based mainly in Bihar, sits at the other extreme. Eight of the party’s eleven MPs (nearly 73 percent) are dynasts. What accounts for this variation?

2

The “Other” category includes 131 MPs or about 8 percent of all observations. Since the focus of this chapter is parties, I exclude independent candidates throughout.

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The burgeoning literature on dynastic politics says surprisingly little about why dynastic legislators are numerous in some parties and virtually absent in others. For the most part, recent studies of dynastic politics either seek to establish a causal relationship between holding office and subsequently having family members enter politics (Dal Bó et al. 2009, Rossi 2009, Feinstein 2010, Querubin 2013) or explore the effects of dynastic politics (Mendoza et al. 2012, Chhibber 2013, and Asako et al. 2015). Across these studies, parties receive little attention, and when they do, it is often to note similarities in levels of dynasticism. For example, Mendoza et al. (2012) show that in the 15th Philippine Congress, the four largest parties were all overwhelmingly dynastic, while Dal Bó et al. (2009) present evidence that levels of dynasticism in the Democratic and Republican Parties in the United States have been almost indistinguishable since Reconstruction. Two exceptions are Chandra’s opening chapter in this volume, which builds on an earlier article (Chandra and Umaira 2011), and Chhibber (2013), both of which draw on the Indian experience. Chandra and Umaira (2011), as well as Chapter 1 of this book, do not explicitly seek to explain variation in levels of dynasticism across parties, but they suggest two important factors that facilitate dynastic politics: the role of the state and the absence or weakness of party organization. Whereas “the increasing returns associated with state power” that incentivize politicians to bring their family members into politics apply broadly across India and should therefore not explain variation in levels of dynasticism across Indian parties, organizational weakness is not constant across parties and can therefore potentially account for differing levels of dynasticism. Indeed, Chhibber (2013) argues that organizationally weak parties are more dynastic than parties with stronger organizations.3 According to both arguments, strong party organizations create bulwarks against the promotion of dynasts. This chapter builds on these arguments by drawing attention to political parties’ internal workings, including their party organization. Moreover, like Chandra and Umaira, it takes a supply and demand approach to dynasticism, theorizing both about where dynastic candidates come from (their supply within parties) and how they secure nomination (parties’ demand for these candidates). High levels of dynasticism within a party require both a pool of politicians with family in politics and a selection procedure that allows a party to nominate many dynastic candidates.4 3

4

Chhibber also argues that the absence of supporting civil society organizations and centralized party finance encourage dynasticism. In effect, his argument about civil society is a variation on the broader argument about party organization since he theorizes that civil society organizations have much the same effect as party organizations. For the purposes of this chapter, since data on losing candidates are not available, I assume that, for each party, levels of dynasticism in the Lok Sabha roughly approximate levels of dynasticism in the candidate pool more generally.

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However, in addition to party organization, this chapter points to two additional factors that should influence levels of dynasticism across parties: party age and party leaders’ own experiences with dynastic succession. Briefly, the chapter argues that older parties, parties in which a single leader wields autocratic control over a weak organization, and parties whose leaders are either dynasts or actively paving the way for family members to succeed them should exhibit higher levels of dynasticism than younger parties, parties in which more power is vested in the party organization, and parties whose leaders are neither dynasts nor laying the groundwork for their own dynastic succession. The comparison between the highly dynastic Congress and the less dynastic CPM and TRS illustrates the logic behind these claims. First, older parties should have a larger pool of potential dynasts than younger parties, thereby increasing the supply of dynastic candidates. Second, parties run in an autocratic fashion by a single leader should be easily able to nominate large numbers of dynastic candidates, whereas parties that are less autocratically run and have greater power vested in their organizational wings will be less able to do so, thereby diminishing the demand for dynastic candidates. Third, parties whose leaders are either dynasts or actively preparing for a dynastic succession should be more willing to nominate dynasts for parliamentary seats than those who have neither benefited from nor plan a dynastic succession. This third factor also influences the demand for dynastic candidates. The remainder of this chapter proceeds as follows. The next three sections address the hypotheses about party age, internal organization, and dynastic leadership succession in turn. Each section explains in greater detail why certain kinds of parties should be more dynastic than others and then presents evidence in support of the section’s hypothesis. Next, I consider all three hypotheses together, before addressing several alternative hypotheses. 1

Party age

Chandra and Umaira (2011) as well as Chandra’s opening chapter in this volume argue that both supply and demand factors shape dynastic politics: relatives of politicians must want to enter politics (supply) and parties must be willing to nominate dynastic candidates (demand). Focusing first on the supply side, high levels of dynasticism in a party require a supply of potential candidates with relatives already involved in politics. Old parties satisfy this requirement. By the 2000s, the children, grandchildren, and perhaps greatgrandchildren of politicians active in the early decades after Indian independence were old enough to enter politics. Assuming a healthy measure of continuity in party membership across generations, then old parties should have a substantial pool of potential dynastic MPs, as politicians’ children and grandchildren join their ancestors’ party. Such intergenerational continuity in party

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membership should be common (though not universal). If an aspiring politician has a family member in one party but not another, then her likelihood of securing a party nomination should, in general, be higher in the party in which she has a relative who wields power and has access to important decision-makers. By contrast, newer parties should, on average, have a much smaller pool of potential dynastic candidates. New parties often attract an influx of aspiring entrants into politics, particularly among those who perceive a lack of opportunity in existing parties. Such aspirants may be particularly likely to try their fortunes in new parties precisely when they lack family connections in politics that might help them to advance in older parties. As a result, newer parties should have fewer dynastic politicians in their candidate pool. This logic about the relative dearth of dynastic candidates in new parties should only apply to parties that are truly new political formations, as opposed to a faction of an existing party that splits off to form a new party. In the case of party splits, much of the new party’s personnel typically belonged to the old party. Consequently, a new splinter party is likely to be populated almost as heavily by dynastic politicians as the old party from which it split. A party’s age should influence, but not rigidly constrain, the size of its pool of dynastic MPs since families do not always remain in the same party. As Chandra points out in Chapter 1, the Scindias are a good example of a family spanning more than one generation across more than one party. Vijaya Raje Scindia was a prominent member of the Jana Sangh and later the BJP. Her daughters Vasundhara Raje and Yashodhara Raje and grandson Dushyant Singh (son of Vasundhara) have all served as BJP MPs. Meanwhile, Vijaya Raje’s son Madhavrao and grandson Jyotiraditiya have both been elected as Congress MPs. Even within Congress’ ruling dynasty, the Gandhis, two prominent members – Maneka and Varun Gandhi, the daughter-in-law and grandson, respectively, of Indira Gandhi – are BJP parliamentarians. While these examples highlight how a party’s age need not wholly determine the size of its pool of dynastic candidates, it is hard to imagine that cross-party dynasties are more common than dynasties within a single party. And, so long as dynasties within parties are more common, then a party’s age should influence the size of its supply of dynastic candidates. Are older parties, in fact, more dynastic than younger parties? One obvious way to answer this question is to focus on parties’ founding dates, tabulating the number of years that have elapsed since a party’s founding. In fact, the correlation between the number of years elapsed since a party’s founding5 and 5

Since the share of dynastic MPs aggregates MPs from the 2004, 2009, and 2014 elections, I cannot calculate separate measures of the time elapsed since a party’s founding for each of the three elections. I therefore calculate the number of years elapsed between a party’s founding and 2014.

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the share of a party’s MPs who are dynastic is actually negative, though very small (-0.02), for parties winning a total of ten or more MPs in the three elections under consideration. The correlation is slightly stronger but also negative (-0.14) if I also include parties winning between five and nine MPs. In other words, the correlation between party age and dynasticism is weak and in the unexpected direction, suggesting that older parties are actually less dynastic than newer ones. A major problem with focusing on the date of a party’s founding is that many of India’s recently established political parties are not, in fact, truly new. A recently established party may actually be a successor to or splinter from an older party and therefore be populated by a cadre of politicians long active in politics. Thus, a party’s founding date can be misleading as an indicator of the size of the party’s pool of former politicians or current senior politicians who could give rise to political dynasties. For example, the Janata Dal (United) (JD[U]) and Janata Dal (Secular) (JD[S]) were founded in 1999, when the Janata Dal split. Members of the former Janata Dal populated both parties. The Janata Dal split occurred largely along geographic lines, with the Bihar unit of the Janata Dal comprising most of the JD(U) and the Karnataka unit comprising much of the JD(S). In this way, neither the JD(U) nor the JD(S) was a truly new party at the date of its founding; rather, they more closely approximated the state units of the former Janata Dal. Moreover, from the perspective of the number of potential dynastic politicians, both the JD(U) and JD(S) trace their lineages back to the socialist parties of the 1960s and 1970s that merged to form the Janata Party in 1977, which then later merged into the Janata Dal. By contrast, parties like the TRS and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) were, at the times of their foundings, entirely new parties. In both cases, the party leaders had previously been politically active. K. Chandrasekhar Rao had earlier been a member of both Congress and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), while Kanshi Ram – the BSP founder – has established BAMCEF and the DS-4, both of which were political organizations dedicated to the advancement of the lower castes. However, both the BSP and TRS were founded as entirely new parties; they did not inherit a core of party personnel from another party. One way of potentially dealing with the problem of new parties that are not truly new is to focus instead on the founding date of the party from which a new party is descended. Among parties winning five or more MP seats, there are parties that are splinters from Congress, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the Communist Party of India (CPI), and the Janata Dal. Using these “parent” parties’ founding dates instead, the correlation between the time elapsed since a party’s founding and its levels of

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dynasticism is positive – 0.07 for the group of parties with ten or more MPs and 0.09 for the group with five or more MPs – but still relatively modest.6 Another strategy is to simply separate major parties into three groups: old parties, splinters from old parties, and new parties. I classify a party as old if it was founded prior to the Emergency, which was declared in 1975. The Emergency marks an important generational shift in Indian politics. The years just before the Emergency witnessed the fading of the generation of political leaders active prior to or just after independence and the emergence of a new generation of leaders. Following the Emergency, many politicians retired from active politics, and the new generation of politicians assumed greater importance. Of the fifty-three parties gaining legislative representation in the Lok Sabha elections of 2004, 2009, or 2014, sixteen are coded as old. The only party whose coding as an old party is somewhat ambiguous is the BJP because it was founded in 1980. The BJP is treated as an old party because it was the renamed successor of the Jana Sangh, which was founded in 1951 but briefly merged into the Janata Party in 1977. The BJP was not a faction of the Jana Sangh but a continuation of the original party. Given the unusually high degree of continuity between the two, I treat the BJP as an old party. Parties are coded as splinters if they represent direct descendants of parties that are (or would be) coded as old. These are not instances of name changes; they are parties that split from larger parties but took with them personnel from the previous parties. There are seventeen splinter parties: six from Congress, one from the DMK, nine from the Janata Dal, and one from the Republican Party of India. One coding decision is worth noting. The Janata Dal, which produced nine of the splinter parties, was actually founded in 1988, well after the Emergency. However, because the Janata Dal traces its roots back to several of the components of the Janata Party, namely the Bharatiya Lok Dal and various socialist parties, the remnants of the Janata Dal are treated as splinters, because the parties from which they are descended would be coded as old, for much the same reason that the BJP is coded as old. Coding the descendants of the Janata Dal as splinters rather than as new parties ultimately aims to preserve the spirit of the splinter party coding. These are parties that inherited a large cadre of politicians with a long history in politics, as opposed

6

Using the natural log of years elapsed since founding also results in small, positive correlations: 0.03 for parties with ten or more MPs and 0.02 for those with five or more MPs. The parent parties are the DMK (for the AIADMK and MDMK), Congress (for Trinamool Congress, NCP, and YSR Congress), the Janata Dal (for the BJD, JD[S], JD[U], LJP, RJD, RLD, and SP), and the CPI (for the CPM). For descendants of the Janata Dal, I use the Janata Dal’s 1988 founding date. However, a case could be made – given the Janata Dal’s origins in previous parties – that an older founding date would be more appropriate. Using older founding dates for the descendants from the Janata Dal increases the size of the positive correlation between the time elapsed since a party was founded and the party’s share of dynastic MPs.

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Old Parties 80 60 40

% Dynastic MPs

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r PI HS PM MK JP the MK AD INC S C D B O D S A AI

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r P ) P P (U ITC S BJD C the LJ N O A

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P BS

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th

P TD

TR

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0

Figure 4.2 Dynasticism by party age Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author.

to parties that emerged de novo onto the political scene. Finally, there are twenty new parties, most of which are relatively small. Figure 4.2 presents the share of dynastic MPs by party, clustering the parties by their age. Only larger parties – those winning ten or more MPs in the three legislatures combined – have their own bars. The remaining small parties are grouped together as “Other.” Since some smaller parties are new, some old, and some splinter parties, “Other” bars appear in each of the three panels in Figure 4.2. Each panel includes a dashed reference line at 20 percent, as a way of drawing attention to those bars that exhibit well below average levels of dynasticism. Among MPs from political parties (that is, excluding independents), 390 of 1,611 – or about 24 percent – are dynastic. Therefore, a party whose share of dynastic MPs is less than 20 percent is well below average. The top two panels, for old parties and splinter parties, exhibit considerable heterogeneity, ranging from some of the lowest levels of dynasticism to some of the highest. Importantly as well, the two panels resemble each other quite closely. The presence of highly dynastic parties among the ranks of splinter parties should not be surprising since these splinter parties typically inherit from their parent party a reservoir of former politicians and senior politicians who could be the basis for political dynasties.

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In contrast to the heterogeneity in the share of dynastic MPs in old and splinter parties, India’s new parties exhibit relatively little variation. They range from the aforementioned TRS (with 11 percent dynastic MPs) to the BSP (with 24 percent dynastic MPs). Whereas only one of the new parties exceeds 20 percent dynastic MPs, nearly half of old parties and the majority of splinter parties include more than 20 percent dynasts in their ranks. Given the absence of any highly dynastic new parties, newer parties exhibit, on average, lower levels of dynasticism. In short, focusing on parties’ founding dates fails to reveal compelling evidence in favor of the hypothesis that newer parties are less dynastic than older parties. However, when distinguishing new parties from those that are old or splinters from old parties, it becomes immediately apparent that new parties are not particularly dynastic. Of course, as Figure 4.2 reveals, several old and splinter parties also exhibit relatively low levels of dynasticism. But, as the next sections make clear, several of these exceptions to the age argument are either relatively well organized parties or those that have not experienced a dynastic succession. Nevertheless, given the mixed evidence presented in this section, the support for the age hypothesis is suggestive, but hardly overwhelming. 2

Internal autocracy and organization

The supply of dynastic candidates in a party should not alone suffice to explain varying levels of dynasticism across parties. As Chandra writes in Chapter 1, “It is all very well for the families of politicians to want to be in politics. But so does everyone else . . . Faced with this immense pool of contenders why do political parties award tickets to family members?” If, in every party, the pool of candidates ultimately nominated to contest parliamentary seats perfectly reflected the pool of aspirants for nominations, then variation in the share of dynastic MPs across parties would simply be a function of the share of dynasts within the party more generally.7 Given the large absolute number of dynastic MPs in India’s parliament, it would certainly seem that dynastic politicians are favored in the allocation of tickets in many (if not most) parties, gaining a far greater share of the nominations than their numbers would warrant. However, dynastic MPs are more highly overrepresented in some parties than others. Given a pool of potential candidates, some of which are dynasts, why do some parties nominate more dynastic candidates than others? Put another way, why does the share of dynastic MPs more closely reflect the overall pool of aspiring candidates in some parties but disproportionately favor dynasts in other parties?

7

This assumes that dynastic MPs are elected at roughly the same rate as non-dynastic MPs.

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This section argues that in more highly organized parties, the share of dynastic MPs should, on average, more closely reflect the share of dynastic politicians in the pool of potential candidates than in parties that are internally autocratic and unorganized. Parties with well-developed organizations usually have more transparent, routinized procedures for internal party advancement that permit a broad cross-section of the party – including a healthy number of non-dynasts – to advance through its ranks.8 Given the vast number of ticketseekers relative to the number of potential candidates who are dynasts, this tendency to permit a comparatively representative cross-section of ticket aspirants to win party nominations should mean that highly organized parties exhibit lower levels of dynasticism than autocratic parties that more readily allow for dynasts to win a disproportionate share of a party’s tickets. Consider the case of an autocratic party in which a single leader and her inner circle dominate decision-making within the party. When a party operates autocratically, a party leader faces no constraints on ticket allocation; she may nominate whom she likes. She may nominate family members, friends and cronies, and their families. When a single leader or a very small number of leaders are the gatekeepers to ticket allocation, then dynastic politicians are likely to have a considerable advantage over other aspirants. Because of the political connections that they likely have thanks to their family in politics, dynastic candidates should have better access to autocratic party leaders who make decisions about ticket allocation. Thus, autocratically run political parties should permit high levels of dynasticism in which dynasts are disproportionately represented among those who actually receive a party’s nomination in elections. The opposite of an autocratically run political party is a democratically run party. However, in India few parties are internally democratic. In practice, rather, the opposite of an autocratic party is one that is well organized. Even when parties are not internally democratic, a strong party organization mitigates autocratic tendencies within the party. Autocratic leadership typically requires that the lion’s share of responsibility is centralized in the hands of an individual and her coterie and that the autocratic leader makes decisions about promotion within the organization. Strong organizations are difficult to reconcile with autocratic leadership since well-developed organizations mean that responsibility sits with multiple individuals and promotion within the organization occurs either according to transparent norms or rules or thanks to some measure of consensus among multiple leaders. 8

In a related vein, Chandra (2004) details how the Congress party machinery prior to the late 1960s permitted politicians of multiple castes to rise up through the party. In particular, Chandra credits Congress’ internal democracy with allowing a multiplicity of castes to advance within the party.

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In a party with a strong organization, in which offices and responsibilities are clearly delineated and responsibility is delegated to various offices within the organization, a single party leader is less likely to be able to unilaterally push through her preferred set of nominees for MP seats. She will be unable to populate a party entirely with her relatives, friends, and their families. An organization with transparent rules for promotion and ticket allocation will likely come far closer to nominating the most qualified set of candidates. Unless having family in politics is systematically correlated with being a better candidate (which contributions to this volume suggest is not the case), then a more organized party should produce a set of MP candidates that is more representative of the underlying pool of potential candidates. We do not know exactly what the pool of potential candidates looks like and how dynastic that pool is. However, given the high returns to political office in India (Chandra and Umaira 2011), the number of aspirants for a ticket is always vast, while the number of politicians’ relatives is limited. The strength of a party’s organization and the extent to which a party leader operates as an unchecked autocrat can, of course, vary over time. Indeed, a party leader intent on promoting her own kin may intentionally weaken the party organization so as to remove major obstacles to either a dynastic succession or the promotion of other dynasts within the party’s ranks. In this way, internal autocracy within a party may ultimately be the product of a party leader’s preference for dynastic MPs. An autocratic mode of functioning is not, therefore, a fixed party characteristic that causes dynastic politics and is entirely unrelated to other factors influencing levels of dynasticism. Internal party autocracy may be part of a leader’s broader strategy for privileging dynastic candidates. At the same time, party leaders do not necessarily enjoy unlimited latitude to weaken (or strengthen) a party’s organization. Therefore, the extent to which a party leader exercises autocratic control cannot be entirely reduced to her own preferences. Not all party leaders who wish to weaken their party’s organization so as to promote dynastic candidates will necessarily be able to do so. This argument about party organization as a bulwark against dynasticism develops one aspect of the argument that Chandra makes in this volume and elsewhere according to which weak party organization favors dynasticism because family functions as a substitute for party organization and because a weak organization is ill equipped to block a leader’s nomination of dynasts. Her claim is essentially the same as what I have argued here. This argument about party organization also resonates with Chhibber’s (2013) contention that weak party organization is important in creating dynastic parties. Chhibber contends that a weak party organization is important in ensuring that a leader can appoint a relative as her successor. He argues that when there is no party organization, no ties to civil society organization, and a high level of

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centralization in party finance, then party leaders face few rivals within their parties that could disrupt plans for a dynastic succession. The crucial difference between Chhibber’s argument and the one in this chapter concerns the outcome of interest. Whereas Chhibber explains whether a party’s leader is a dynast, this chapter is interested in the share of a party’s MPs that are dynastic. The distinction is an important one. About half of dynastic parliamentarians in India belong to what Chapter 1 calls locally rooted dynasties, in which family members precede them in politics in the same parliamentary seat. In other words, dynastic MPs in India are not mainly the relatives of party leaders. Rather, many are members of dynasties that enjoy local prominence but not necessarily national notoriety and who will never vie for their party’s leadership. Chhibber’s argument is similar in that it too contends that strong party organizations can prevent dynasticism within a party; however, whereas Chhibber’s primary concern is whether an organization can prevent a party leader from nominating a relative as her successor, my concern is whether a party organization can prevent a party leader from nominating her own and other people’s family members as the party’s candidates in parliamentary elections. Are autocratically run parties more dynastic than those that are more highly organized? Classifying parties based on how internal decisions are made is a difficult task. I therefore rely on several different measures to code parties as either autocratically run or not. Although I would ideally want to use a continuous measure of how autocratic a party is in its internal decisionmaking, the coarseness of the available data do not permit such a fine-grained coding. Rather, I construct a dichotomous variable, coding a party as either autocratic or not. The variable constitutes a conservative measure of whether a party is autocratic. It incorporates and combines three different measures of party organization and decentralization. I code a party as autocratic only if it is not coded as organized or decentralized based on any of these measures. Thus, the resulting variable treats a party as autocratic only if the measures agree that the party is neither organized nor decentralized. The components of my measure are the following. First, I rely on a variable from the Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014) dataset on dynastic legislators in India that is used throughout the various contributions in this volume (and hereafter referred to as the CBC data). Their data include a variable which codes parties as organized or not. This variable captures the conventional wisdom that the BJP, CPI, and CPM are significantly better organized than other major parties in India.9 Based on my own fieldwork in West Bengal, I supplement this variable by coding the Forward

9

Their measure is for 2004. I extend their coding to 2009 and 2014 as well.

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Bloc and RSP as organized, as both parties are relatively well organized in West Bengal, the state where they are most electorally successful. Second, I use another variable from the CBC data that codes parties as decentralized or not. Although decentralization of power is not the same thing as a strong party organization, high levels of decentralization should be incompatible with high levels of autocracy within a party since autocracy implies that a small number of actors at the top of the party wield most power. Therefore, a party that is relatively decentralized is unlikely to be highly autocratic in its functioning. This variable builds on work by Farooqui and Sridharan (2014) on the process through which tickets are allocated. It codes the BJP, CPI, CPM, and DMK as decentralized. In other words, this variable is strongly correlated with the organization variable, except that it codes the DMK as decentralized, which is consistent with recent work by Manikandan and Wyatt (2014). Third, I use a measure of party organization from Chhibber, Jensenius, and Suryanarayan (2014) (hereafter referred to as the CJS data). Based on secondary sources, the authors code parties on a scale ranging from 1 to 3, with 1 being the least organized and 3 being the most organized. They complete this coding for state elections, assigning parties separate scores for each election, thereby allowing a party’s score to vary across states. Among their codings of recent elections, they coded one election from 2000 or later for each major state. I apply their most recent codings to parties competing in the 2004, 2009, and 2014 elections.10 I treat any state unit of a party as organized if it received a score of 2 or 3 in the CJS data and unorganized if it received a score of 1. Any MP from a party unit that is organized is therefore coded as being from an organized party. One advantage of using the CJS data is that it permits variation in codings within the same party across space.11 Any MP from a party that is coded as not being from an organized party in the CBC data, not being from a decentralized party in the CBC data, and not being from an organized party in the CJS data is therefore coded as being a member of an autocratic party. All others are coded as being from an organized (or non-autocratic) party. Using this classification scheme, forty-four parties are autocratic and eight are organized (or non-autocratic). Because Congress MPs meet the first two criteria for being classified as autocratic but the CJS codings for Congress vary from state to state, some Congress MPs are coded as being from an autocratic party but others are not. Figure 4.3 presents levels of

10 11

I apply the CJS codings for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh to Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand, respectively. One drawback of using the CJS dataset is that it does not include especially small parties or small states. As a result, I am somewhat more likely to code small parties as autocratic. However, the figures presented throughout this chapter focus mainly on larger parties.

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Figure 4.3 Dynasticism by mode of decision-making Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author.

dynasticism by party, based on my classification of parties as autocratic or not. As in Figure 4.2, Figure 4.3 only features large parties; smaller parties are aggregated as “Other.” Note that there are two bars representing Congress, because of variation in the state-level codings, as well as two bars for “Other,” since some small parties are autocratically run and others are not. Again, each panel features a reference line at 20 percent. The parties coded as less autocratic (and more organized) are not generally very dynastic. Indeed, the BJP, CPI, CPM, RJD, and Shiv Sena, as well as the smaller parties, all exhibit relatively low levels of dynasticism. Within this category of organized parties, the highest levels of dynasticism are among Congress MPs. Interestingly, however, among Congress MPs, dynasticism is lower in states whose party units are coded as organized than in states whose party units are coded as autocratic. Among the autocratic parties, there is considerable heterogeneity in how dynastic parties are, ranging from low levels of dynasticism to relatively high levels. This heterogeneity among autocratic parties stands in stark contrast to the more muted variation among the less autocratic, more organized parties. Focusing on the reference line at 20 percent, whereas most of the more organized parties’ bars are below the 20 percent line, the majority of the

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autocratic parties have more than 20 percent dynastic MPs. Indeed, the autocratic parties include all of the parties with the highest shares of dynastic MPs. All told, Figure 4.3 suggests that, on average, more organized parties exhibit lower levels of dynasticism than more autocratic parties. Furthermore, a total of 30.9 percent of MPs from autocratic parties are dynasts as compared to 19.6 percent for organized parties. Thus, the evidence with regard to autocratic parties supports the hypothesis that autocratic parties tend to be more dynastic than those that are less autocratic and better organized. 3

Dynastic leadership succession

The previous section discussed how a weak party organization can permit the nomination of dynastic candidates. However, the political connections and access to party leaders that can advantage dynastic candidates in the context of autocratic political parties are helpful only so long as the party leader in charge of allocating party tickets is indifferent to or in favor of dynastic candidates. Highly discretionary nomination procedures common in autocratic parties could also depress dynasticism if a party leader actively frowns on dynasticism. In such a case, an autocratic party leader could use her discretion to ensure that relatively small numbers of dynasts receive the party’s nomination. Unlike a party’s age or its internal functioning, a party leader’s preferences about dynasticism are particularly difficult to observe. One reasonable proxy for a leader’s preferences is her own experience. Presumably, leaders who secured control of their parties through dynastic succession or who have groomed their progeny to succeed them are unlikely to be opponents of dynasticism. They should be particularly unlikely to take a stand against dynasticism, lest they endanger their own or their presumptive successor’s position in the party. By the same logic, if a party leader secures her position through a means other than dynastic succession, then this leader should be more likely to be indifferent or actively opposed to the promotion of dynastic candidates. A leader may actively prefer or oppose dynastic candidates for several reasons. One possibility is that leaders prefer dynasticism or oppose it because, in doing so, they bolster their own legitimacy as party leader. For example, Jayalalitha came to power as head of the AIADMK by thwarting the dynastic succession of the former leader MGR’s wife Janaki. Nominating candidates on the basis of their family ties might undermine her own claim to power within the party. Among leaders who have come to power through dynastic succession, nominating politicians who are similarly bred for politics might be a strategy for demonstrating the rectitude of their own claim to power. Along similar lines, leaders’ preferences about dynastic candidates might reflect their beliefs about the best way to preserve their own power. Some party

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leaders might actively encourage dynasticism as a way of creating a loyal group of followers. By allocating tickets to multiple members of a family, a party leader can potentially cement the loyalty of that family. In contrast, other party leaders might view dynasticism with suspicion as it may create alternative power centers within a party. Concentrating a large amount of power within a family might inadvertently create a powerful rival. This latter rationale may explain the relatively low levels of dynasticism within the AIADMK. By most accounts, Jayalalitha has been ruthless in preventing anyone else within the AIADMK from accumulating too much power. Part of this strategy of centralizing power may include a refusal to indulge too heavily in dynastic politics lest it generate a cadre of potential rivals. A leader’s own experience as either a dynast or not may well shape her calculations about whether dynasticism within the party is more likely to serve a beneficial purpose by creating loyal supporters or a negative purpose by creating a set of possible rivals. Alternatively, leaders may promote or oppose dynastic candidates as a way to quell dissent within a party. On the one hand, promoting a dynastic candidate with a “claim” to a particular legislative seat could allow a leader to avoid wading into a factional dispute pitting various non-dynastic ticket aspirants against one another. Leaders who are themselves dynasts are perhaps more apt to view dynasticism as a means for keeping the peace. On the other hand, particularly if a party has multiple prominent leaders, avoiding the promotion of dynasts may be a means of preventing severe factional conflict. Party rank and file may tend to closely identify certain families with particular leaders or factions within the party. By selecting candidates on more meritocratic grounds, rather than on the basis of their families, leaders may be able to successfully select candidates who are not clearly identified with one faction or another. In doing so, leaders might forestall factional conflict. Leaders who are not dynasts and who are not paving the way for a dynastic succession may be especially apt to see dynasticism as a divisive phenomenon. The need to keep factionalism at bay may explain why the JD(U) is a relatively undynastic party. Unlike most parties, the JD(U) has multiple identifiable leaders – Nitish Kumar, Sharad Yadav, and formerly George Fernandes. Planning for a dynastic succession at the top of the party would likely provoke internal turmoil as it would imply the ascendancy of one of the party’s leaders over the other. A similar logic may prevail in the nomination of candidates. The party might opt for a more meritocratic selection of candidates rather than the nomination of family members of party loyalists closely associated with one of the party’s leaders as a means for avoiding a broader factional conflict within the party. For any of these reasons – and perhaps more – a party’s leader may actively oppose or favor dynastic candidates, and this preference is likely to be correlated with a leader’s own experience as either a dynast or the founder of a dynasty.

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To what extent do parties that have experienced a dynastic succession or appear poised to do so actually exhibit higher levels of dynasticism among their MPs than parties in which there has been no dynastic leadership succession? To answer this question, I use a variable from the CBC data that codes parties based on whether they have a dynastic leader or not. A dynastic leader is one who is related to a previous party leader or who is laying the groundwork for one of her relatives to succeed her as party leader. Of the fifty-four parties elected to the 2004, 2009, and 2014 Lok Sabhas, thirty-one have dynastic leaders and twentythree do not. Figure 4.4 presents levels of dynasticism across parties based on dynastic leadership succession. The left panel of Figure 4.4 includes major parties that have not experienced (and have no plans for) a dynastic leadership succession, while the right panel shows those parties that have. As with the previous two figures, the parties in the left panel – where we would expect lower levels of dynasticism – exhibit consistently low levels of dynasticism. Only the BSP crosses the 20 percent reference line. By contrast, the majority of parties that have experienced dynastic successions have shares of dynastic MPs well in excess of 20 percent. Moreover, among those parties that have experienced a dynastic succession and exhibit low levels of dynasticism, all but one are new parties (TRS, TDP) or parties that are less autocratic (RJD, Shiv Sena). No Dynastic Succession

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Figure 4.4 Dynasticism by leadership succession Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

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The exception is the Trinamool Congress, which is actually a recent addition to the group of parties classified as having experienced or having plans for a dynastic succession. In the 2004 and 2009 elections, the Trinamool Congress was not coded as having a dynastic leader in the CBC data. However, for 2014, the party is coded as having a dynastic leader because the party’s leader, Mamata Banerjee, had recently inducted her nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, into politics. Abhishek is, as of 2014, an MP and head of the Trinamool Congress’ youth wing (Bhattacharya 2013). He is not perhaps as widely known as the presumed successor to the Trinamool leadership, but he has nevertheless been described as Mamata’s heir (PTI 2014), in spite of her stated stance against dynastic politics. Thus, the Trinamool Congress may be in the midst of a change in its treatment of dynastic candidates. Unfortunately, the trend over time is difficult to discern because of the party’s poor performance in 2004, when it won only two MPs. Neither was dynastic, but with such a small number of MPs, it is hard to know whether the lack of dynastic MPs was a function of chance or an underlying pool of candidates that was largely nondynastic. In 2009, 16 percent of Trinamool MPs (three of nineteen) were dynasts, and the figure in 2014 – 17 percent, or six of thirty-five MPs – is relatively similar. The hypothesis articulated in this chapter about dynastic leadership succession would suggest that if Abhishek Banerjee is, indeed, projected as the Trinamool’s future leader, then we should observe a noticeable increase in the share of dynastic MPs over time. Finally, turning to individual MPs, there is a stark difference in the share of MPs who are dynasts among parties that have not experienced a dynastic succession (15.6 percent) as opposed to parties that have (32.5 percent). Thus, the evidence supports the third hypothesis about dynastic leadership succession as a factor shaping levels of dynasticism within a party’s legislative delegation. 4

Putting the hypotheses together

So far, I have considered each of this chapter’s hypotheses in isolation from one another. This section briefly considers all three hypotheses at once. Figure 4.5 presents six different panels based on the different combinations of variables discussed in the preceding sections. Given the three dichotomous variables – relating to a party’s age, whether a party is autocratically run or not, and the presence or absence of a dynastic leader – there are eight possible combinations of variables.12 In practice, only six are found in the data. Looking first at the left and middle panels of the top row, these are parties that have only one of the characteristics hypothesized to be associated with 12

For the purposes of this figure, I treat splinter parties as old parties since they exhibit similar levels of dynasticism.

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Figure 4.5 Dynasticism by age, internal autocracy, and dynastic succession Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author.

higher levels of dynasticism. With the exception of the BSP, which exhibits about average levels of dynasticism, all of the other parties or groups of parties in these two panels exhibit low levels of dynasticism. Among those parties with two of the characteristics expected to enhance levels of dynasticism, the share of dynastic MPs is also relatively low, particularly for the two parties – JD(U) and AIADMK – that are old and autocratic but have not experienced a dynastic succession. The parties that are new but also autocratic and have experienced a dynastic succession – TRS and TDP – also exhibit low levels of dynasticism, but the smaller parties in this category are more dynastic. That being said, the one medium-sized party in the “Other” category in the lower left panel – the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), with seven MPs – is fairly undynastic, with only one dynastic MP. Finally, the parties that are old and have a dynastic leader but are less autocratically run are diverse in their levels of dynasticism. The RJD and Shiv Sena have few dynastic MPs, whereas the DMK and Congress (in states where it is better organized) have far more. Again, it is worth noting that Congress in the states where it exhibits only two of the characteristics exhibits lower levels of dynasticism than in those states where it has all three traits. In sum, focusing on these first five

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panels, levels of dynasticism are relatively low, though the three highest levels are found among those parties with two of the traits rather than one. Finally, considering the bottom right panel, almost all of the highest levels of dynasticism occur among those parties that combine all three traits – old age, autocratic internal functioning, and a dynastic leadership succession. Congress MPs in these states are more dynastic than in those with only two of the traits, and the aggregate category of others has a greater share of dynasts than the “Other” parties in the remaining panels. Among the parties in the bottom right panel, the only outlier is the Trinamool Congress. On the one hand, the Trinamool Congress may, in fact, run contrary to the expectations outlined in this chapter. On the other hand, given the recentness of its plans for a dynastic succession, the Trinamool Congress is arguably more like the JD(U) and AIADMK – also old (or splinters), also autocratic, but without a dynastic succession – than the other parties in the bottom right panel. I further test the association between the variables focused on in this chapter and dynastic MPs through a regression analysis. Given the very small number of observations, I do not attempt to control for all factors that could possibly influence levels of dynasticism in a party. Rather, I focus on whether there are substantively large and positive associations between the party characteristics discussed in this chapter and a party’s share of dynastic MPs. To do so, I run a number of regressions, each with a slightly different specification. In all of them, the dependent variable is the percentage of a party’s MPs who are dynasts. The two key differences across the different models involve the number of observations and the independent variables. First, I run models with different numbers of observations. In one set of models, I only consider parties with ten or more MPs, yielding eighteen observations. In another set of models, I additionally consider parties with five or more MPs, which yields a total of twenty-eight observations. Second, I vary how I construct the independent variables. For one group of models, I enter each of the three party characteristics separately as dichotomous variables. For another group, I create an additive index that assigns a party one point for each of the three characteristics that I expect to enhance levels of dynasticism. These two different approaches yield four separate models – eighteen observations with one independent variable, eighteen observations with three independent variables, twenty-eight observations with one independent variable, and twenty-eight observations with three independent variables. In addition, I test whether alternative codings of some parties influence my results. Because Congress was considered organized in some states and not organized in others, I see whether coding Congress as autocratic or organized influences the results, Additionally, since the Trinamool Congress had a dynastic leader in one

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election (2014) but not the others, I test whether coding the party as having plans for a dynastic succession or not influences the results. I therefore run each of the four different types of models described above with each of the alternative codings for Congress and Trinamool Congress, for a total of sixteen models. I estimate each using ordinary least squares. For all of the models using the three separate independent variables, the estimated coefficients for each independent variable are substantively large, ranging between 7 and 17. That is, parties with the relevant characteristic are associated with between 7 and 17 percent more dynastic MPs than parties without the characteristic.13 In other words, these coefficients suggest that the characteristics described in this chapter are strongly associated with levels of dynasticism. However, with the exception of one model (of the eight), none of these coefficients reaches conventional levels of statistical significance. Given the small number of observations and the fact that some of the variables are somewhat correlated with one another, the absence of statistically significant findings is not surprising. When, however, I combine these dichotomous variables into a single additive index, running a simple bivariate regression, the estimated coefficient for the index variable is, in all models, substantively large (between 11 and 13) and statistically significant at the 5-percent level. The alternative codings for Congress and Trinamool Congress do not substantively alter the results. Thus, a simple regression analysis confirms the patterns evident in the preceding tables. 5

Alternative explanations

The previous sections suggested a supply and demand rationale for explaining variation in levels of dynasticism across parties, focusing on a party’s age, internal decision-making, and dynastic leadership succession. This section addresses several important alternative explanations related to the size, success, and location of parties. Size and geographic breadth The first alternative that I consider is whether a party’s size determines levels of dynasticism. Several mechanisms could explain an association between party size and dynasticism. For one, running a party as a family business could place a limit on a party’s size. If a family wishes to place family members in most positions of power, then a limit exists on how large a party can get. Since most legislative candidates come from within or close to the constituencies in

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Full results are available at www.adamziegfeld.com.

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which they contest,14 a single family should only be capable of providing candidates for a limited number of seats, which in turn limits the party’s potential size. Even broadening the pool of potential dynastic candidates to close associates of the family, the number of potential candidates from within a family’s inner circle will necessarily be limited and cap the size of a party. Looking at the relationship somewhat differently, small parties might tend to be more dynastic because the demands of a larger party would place limits on its ability to remain dynastic. Chandra (2004) argues that well-organized parties with competitive rules for advancement better enable parties to incorporate multiple factions and groups of elites. If a small party wishes to expand, then doing so might require more elaborate organizational structures to resolve potential conflicts within the party and delegate responsibility across an increasingly wide sphere of political activity. But, if organization places a check on dynasticism, then parties that wish to remain dynastic might need to content themselves with remaining small. Put another way, if family is meant to serve as a substitute for party organization (Chandra and Umaira 2011), this may only work so long as a party remains small. Beyond a certain size, family may no longer be able to substitute for organization. Figure 4.6 shows the relationship between levels of dynasticism and party size. The figure plots the natural log of the number of a party’s MPs against its share of dynastic MPs. Each observation is marked by the party’s abbreviation. The figure only includes parties with ten or more MPs. The dashed line is a linear prediction from a bivariate regression in which the share of dynastic MPs is the dependent variable and the log of the number of MPs is the independent variable. As the figure shows, there is only a very modest negative association between a party’s size and its share of dynastic MPs. The coefficient from the bivariate regression predicting the share of dynastic MPs is very imprecisely estimated, nowhere close to conventional levels of significance (p-value = 0.51). Moreover, when adding in the small parties winning between five and nine MPs, the estimated coefficient from the bivariate regression becomes even smaller in size and still remains far from statistical significance. One extension of the size argument should be that national parties tend to be less dynastic than regional parties because regional parties are more geographically compact and therefore amenable to functioning as family businesses. An obvious piece of disconfirming evidence for this hypothesis is that Congress is noticeably more dynastic (37 percent dynastic MPs) than the BJP (16 percent 14

Based on the data in Ziegfeld (forthcoming), which looks at candidates for state-level office in Haryana from 1991 through 2010, 73 percent of MLA candidates are natives of the constituencies from which they contested, and 92 percent are natives of the district in which the constituency they are contesting in is located. Although these data are from Haryana, I see no reason why this state should systematically differ from other states in the share of local candidates.

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dynastic MPs). Other parties that have historically won MPs from multiple states include the CPI (13 percent dynastic MPs), CPM (15 percent), and BSP (24 percent). Given that Congress is on the higher end of dynasticism, the BJP, CPI, and CPM on the lower end, and the BSP in about the middle, there appears to be no clear differentiation between national and regional parties. Success A second possibility is that a party’s level of success influences its share of dynastic MPs. Dynastic candidates are quite plausibly lower quality candidates, on average, than their non-dynastic counterparts because of the advantage conferred on dynastic candidates in the allocation of party tickets. As Bohlken shows in this volume, dynasty is frequently a substitute for political experience at the state and local levels. If dynastic candidates are of lower quality, then they may be more vulnerable when parties face a rough election year. In elections in which political circumstances conspire against a particular party, only the party’s highest quality candidates may survive the political onslaught, while relatively low-quality candidates from the opposing party may eke out victories. Thus, one possibility is that more successful parties are more dynastic because even their low-quality dynastic candidates win.

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Figure 4.7 reveals an essentially flat relationship between a party’s success in elections and its share of dynastic MPs. Figure 4.7 is identical to Figure 4.6 except that the x-axis represents the share of contested seats that a party won in the 2004, 2009, and 2014 elections. As with Figure 4.6, only parties with more than ten MPs are included, and the dashed line is a linear prediction based on a bivariate regression with the level of dynasticism as the dependent variable and the share of contested seats won as the sole predictor. The estimated coefficient on the share of contested seats won is very small (0.03) and very imprecisely estimated (p-value = 0.86). However, many large parties allow frivolous candidates to contest using their party label in states where they are not strong (e.g. Samajwadi Party outside Uttar Pradesh, Shiv Sena outside Maharashtra). A party could conceivably do well in its stronghold but lose a high percentage of the seats it contests because it fields many non-serious candidates outside its stronghold. The solid black line in Figure 4.7 is the linear prediction based on a bivariate regression in which the dependent variable is the share of contested seats won in seats where the party won at least one-sixth of the vote. When candidates win less than one-sixth of the vote, they forfeit the deposits they make when declaring their candidacies. By excluding candidates with forfeited deposits, I exclude frivolous candidates who are unlikely to win no matter the party’s 80 LJP

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fortunes in an election. The solid black line is noticeably positive, and the estimated coefficient is much larger (0.21) and estimated more precisely (p-value = 0.31), though still short of statistical significance. Thus, while the evidence in Figure 4.7 does little to strongly support the alternative hypothesis that more successful parties are more dynastic, ruling out this alternative entirely may be premature. Location A final alternative is that most of the observed variation across parties is actually a function of where in India the parties are active. Of the eighteen parties featured in the figures in this chapter, fifteen won nearly all of their MP seats in a single state. Thus, if certain regions of India are more likely to produce dynastic MPs, then variation in parties’ shares of dynastic MPs may be driven by region-wise variation in dynasticism. One important version of this argument is an economic one. Given the argument that politicians have an incentive to engage in dynastic politics because of the high returns to accessing the state, we might expect that in wealthier states with greater private sector activity, politicians have less of an incentive to colonize the state as a means for enrichment, as their progeny can instead turn to the private sector. To test for this possibility, I calculate the share of MPs from each state that are dynasts. In Figure 4.8 I plot these state-wise shares of dynastic MPs against two economic variables. The first, in the left panel, is the gross state domestic product (GSDP) per capita in Indian rupees. For each state, I take the average of the GSDP for the eight fiscal years from 2004–5 to 2012–13. Each year’s figures are in 2004–5 constant prices. The second economic variable, in the right panel, is the number of new non-government companies registered in each state in 2008–9 per one million people. The GSDP per capita is an overall measure of wealth. However, since some relatively prosperous states are heavily agricultural, the GSDP may not actually capture opportunities for upward mobility through the private sector, which is why I employ, as an alternative, the number of new companies founded. Both panels include linear prediction lines from bivariate regressions in which the dependent variable is the share of dynastic MPs from a state and the sole independent variable is either the GSDP per capita or number of new companies per million inhabitants. For both panels, I exclude states that elect two or fewer MPs in each Lok Sabha, since the idiosyncratic success or failure of a single dynastic candidate can dramatically raise or lower the state’s overall share of dynastic MPs. I also exclude Delhi because it is a prominent outlier in terms of wealth and private sector activity per capita. The left panel provides no support at all for the hypothesis that wealthier regions exhibit lower levels of dynasticism. The fit line indicates a positive

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association between wealth and dynasticism, though the coefficient in the bivariate regression is not statistically significant (p-value = 0.25). That is, wealthier states are more dynastic, not less. Including Delhi does virtually nothing to alter the results. Turning to the right panel, the fit line is modestly negative, as expected, but the coefficient from the bivariate regression is very imprecisely estimated (p-value = 0.64). Additionally, when including Delhi – which is a major outlier in that the number of new companies per million inhabitants dwarfs the numbers in any other state – the association becomes positive. In short, there is no evidence that wealthier states or states with more private sector activity are less dynastic. If anything, there is suggestive evidence of the opposite. Nevertheless, variation in dynasticism across regions exists. An alternative account based on a party’s location is that cultural differences between regions explain different levels of dynasticism, which in turn shape which parties are more dynastic and which are less. Cultural arguments could take a variety of forms. One might be that cultures with higher degrees of trust, particularly across social groups, are less likely to promote dynasts than cultures with low levels of trust. Where trust is low, party leaders may feel a greater need to vest

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power in the hands of family members (whom they can trust) than in nonrelations, particularly if non-relatives come from groups perceived as distinctly “other.” Another potential cultural argument could be that regions more heavily steeped in traditional Hinduism will favor dynasticism because of the greater resonance of the caste-based notion of hereditary occupation. Areas where expectations of hereditary occupation have broken down more thoroughly may be more hostile to politics becoming a hereditary occupation than in those areas where traditional caste norms are more firmly entrenched. A variant of this argument about a possible link between traditionalism and dynasticism might be that levels of dynasticism are higher in places where the norm of joint families remains intact. In such regions, party leaders may be more likely to see extended family members as distinctly more loyal than other potential aspirants for party tickets. Given a large pool of potentially loyal nominees, a party leader could therefore populate her party heavily with family members. By contrast, where the tradition of the joint family has broken down and people tend to conceive of the family mainly in nuclear terms, politicians may see only a very small number of people as qualitatively more loyal, limiting their ability to populate the party with candidates who are innately loyal. If politicians see little difference between extended family members and non-relatives, they may be less likely to favor candidates with dynastic ties. Whatever the precise argument, if culture is the overriding explanation for which parties are dynastic and which are not, then we should observe fairly uniform levels of dynasticism across parties within regions. Figure 4.9 plots shares of dynastic MPs across parties by region. As with previous figures, it only includes groups with ten or more MPs. Certainly, we see lower levels of dynasticism in regions such as the west of India and the northeast. However, within each region there is considerable variation. Within west India, the BJP exhibits exceedingly low levels of dynasticism (7 of 108 MPs), while the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) exhibits very high levels (ten of twenty-two MPs). While levels of dynasticism are generally high in north-central and northwest India, the BJP still exhibits below average levels of dynasticism. East India, for example, includes parties with the lowest levels of dynasticism (RJD) as well as the highest (LJP). Taking a closer look at the two parties that have an electoral presence across all six regions – the BJP and Congress – further reveals that partisan differences in levels of dynasticism are not driven entirely by regional differences. We know that levels of dynasticism are lower in the BJP than in Congress. However, this difference could be driven by regional variation in dynasticism if the BJP won the lion’s share of its seats from areas where dynastic MPs are less common and Congress won most of its MPs from places where dynastic

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MPs were more common.15 If so, then we would actually expect to see that the two parties exhibit relatively similar shares of dynastic MPs within the same region, even though they differ in the regions from which they win a preponderance of their seats. Figure 4.10 plots the share of dynastic MPs in the region as a whole (on the x-axis) against the share of dynastic MPs in a party (on the y-axis). If regional variation drove levels of dynasticism, then the observations for both Congress and the BJP would be close to the solid line depicting a oneto-one correspondence between a region’s share of dynastic MPs and a party’s share of dynastic MPs. Instead, the observations for the BJP and Congress are quite far apart, particularly in the west and northwest, which exhibit the lowest and highest levels of dynasticism, respectively. To be clear, Figures 4.9 and 4.10 certainly do not diminish the important observation that regional variation across India in the prevalence of dynastic MPs exists. However, these figures effectively rule out the possibility that 15

For example, imagine that Congress and the BJP both had 15 percent dynastic MPs in one region and 40 percent dynastic MPs in another region. But, if the BJP won most of its seats in the former region and Congress in the latter region, then the BJP would have a lower overall share of dynastic MPs than Congress.

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regional variation entirely drives variation in dynasticism across parties. Sufficient variation across parties within the same region suggests that there are important partisan differences in levels of dynasticism that region cannot account for. This variation is particularly pronounced in the BJP and Congress, where the BJP is uniformly less dynastic across all regions than Congress. These persistent differences across region indicate that there are differences at the level of the party at work. Put another way, cultural differences across regions (or, indeed, perhaps some other set of cross-regional differences) may constitute an additional explanation that can help shed light on why some parties are more dynastic than others, but such explanations cannot replace party-based accounts. Conclusion To conclude, this chapter has developed an argument about how the supply of and demand for dynastic candidates influences levels of dynasticism across Indian political parties. It builds on existing arguments about party organization, but also draws attention to a party’s age and experience with dynastic

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leadership succession to account for variation in the share of dynastic MPs across parties. Evidence on the association between dynasticism and party age was mixed, but the evidence was stronger with regard to a party’s internal decision-making (autocratic versus organized) and dynastic leadership succession. Furthermore, taking all three variables into account together does a good job distinguishing highly dynastic parties from those exhibiting more modest levels of dynasticism. In terms of alternative hypotheses, the chapter showed that smaller parties, regional parties, and parties based in wealthier regions are not more dynastic. Parties that win a greater share of the seats they contest are not more dynastic, though there is suggestive evidence that parties that win a greater share of the seats in which they are competitive are more dynastic. Additionally, although the regions in which a party wins its seats cannot fully account for differences in levels of dynasticism across parties, the region in which a party wins its seats is potentially an additional, complementary explanation to the ones offered here. Some of the chapter’s more tentative findings suggest important avenues for future research into dynastic politics. First, since age was the variable for which the data are the least persuasive, one important question is to what extent new parties rely on political neophytes to run in elections. Or, do new parties that do no inherit a cadre of longstanding politicians from a parent party acquire such a cadre through defections? If defectors heavily populate new parties, then this could explain why the candidate pools in new and old parties alike are heavily populated by dynasts. Second, developing metrics of candidate quality could go a long way in helping to discern whether successful parties are, in fact, more dynastic. Honing in on seats where parties are competitive, are dynastic candidates indeed lower-quality candidates, making them more vulnerable to defeat when a party’s overall fortunes are sagging? Finally, although region – and, by extension, cultural arguments – cannot explain away differences across parties in their share of dynastic MPs, differences across parties cannot explain away regional differences either. If parties winning seats in some regions are more prone to dynasticism than parties successful in other regions, then future research would do well to develop and test hypotheses about what cultural elements may be at work. REFERENCES Asako, Yasushi, Takeshi Iida, Tetsuya Matsubayashi, and Michiko Ueda. 2015. “Dynastic Politicians: Theory and Evidence from Japan.” Japanese Journal of Political Science 16: 5–32. Bhattacharya, Ravik. 2013. “Didi Looking to Stem Rot with Image Makeover.” Hindustan Times, January 19. Available from www.hindustantimes.com. Last accessed September 10, 2014.

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Bohlken, Anjali and Kanchan Chandra. 2014. “Why Dynastic Legislators Do Better in Elections: An Institutionalist Explanation.” Unpublished manuscript. Chandra, Kanchan. 2004. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Headcounts in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chandra, Kanchan and Wamiq Umaira. 2011. “India’s democratic dynasties.” Seminar 622: 14–21. Chandra, Kanchan. 2014. “Hardly the End of Dynastic Rule.” Economic and Political Weekly 49: 25–28. Chandra, Kanchan, Anjali Bohlken, and Simon Chauchard. 2014. “Dataset on Dynastic Ties in Indian Parliaments 2004–2014.” Unpublished dataset. Chhibber, Pradeep. 2013. “Dynastic Parties: Organization, Finance, and Impact.” Party Politics 19: 277–295. Chhibber, Pradeep, Francesca R. Jensenius, and Pavithra Suryanarayan. 2014. “Party Organization and Party Proliferation in India.” Party Politics 20: 489–505. Dal Bó, Ernesto, Pedro Dal Bó and Jason Snyder. 2009. “Political Dynasties.” Review of Economic Studies 76: 115–142. Farooqui, A. and E. Sridharan. 2014. “Incumbency, Internal Processes and Renomination in Indian Parties.” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 52: 78–108. Feinstein, Brian D. 2010. “The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 35: 571–598. Kohli, Atul. 1990. Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manikandan, C. and Andrew Wyatt. 2014. “Elite Formation within a Political Party: The Case of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 52: 32–54. Mendoza, Ronald U., Edsel L. Beja, Jr., Victor Soriano Venida, and David Yap. 2012. “An Empirical Analysis of Political Dynasties in the 15th Philippines Congress.” Asian Institute of Management Working Paper 12–001. Querubin, Pablo. 2013. “Family and Politics: Dynastic Incumbency Advantage in the Philippines.” Unpublished manuscript. PTI. 2014. “Meet Mamata Banerjee’s Political Heir and Nephew Abhishek, Who Is Eyeing for Gold in Diamond Harbour.” www.dnaindia.com, May 10. Last accessed September 10, 2014. Reddy, K. Srinivas. 2014. “KCR Sworn In: Heads Cabinet of 11 Ministers.” The Hindu, June 2. Available from www.thehindu.com. Last accessed September 9, 2014. Rossi, Martín A. 2009. “The Causes of Political Dynasties in Democratic Countries.” Unpublished manuscript. Ziegfeld, Adam. Forthcoming. “Candidate Characteristics in Indian Elections: Who Wins Votes?” Asian Survey.

5

Women, dynasties, and democracy in India Amrita Basu

The 2003 Bollywood film Satta (Power) charts the life of a fictional character, Anuradha Sehgal, a young middle class woman who is catapulted into politics by her conservative, politically powerful father-in-law to sustain his family’s political dynasty. Anuradha runs for office in place of her husband Vivek, who has been imprisoned for shooting a bar hostess. She realizes that a political career will allow her to escape domestic drudgery and abuse. Once elected, she refuses to let her in-laws and party leaders (including a political advisor with whom she has an affair) manipulate and control her and learns to navigate the corrupt underworld of politics. She then resigns and appoints an ethical, incorruptible leader to take her place, thereby using power to challenge its abuses. Satta captures the hostility that women face in both private and public life and the constrained opportunities that their membership in politically powerful families provides. There are strong presumptions that women will faithfully represent their families because women are thought to be defined by men. Anuradha could have been inspired by one of the many prominent Indian women politicians who have ascended to office through family ties, including: Congress president Sonia Gandhi, widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and daughter-in-law of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; Sheila Dikshit, Chief Minister of Delhi from 1998 to 2013 and daughter-in-law of nationalist leader Uma Shankar Dikshit, who was Cabinet Minister and Governor of both West Bengal and Karnataka; Rabri Devi, who served three terms as the Chief Minister of Bihar as a result of her marriage to former Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav; or Member of Parliament (MP) Supriya Sule, daughter of Sharad Pawar, president of the Nationalist Congress Party. Like Anuradha, these women would have been unlikely to enter politics in the absence of dynastic ties. Satta’s optimistic ending leaves us wondering whether women who are elected to office can free themselves from dependence on powerful family members and chart an independent course. Perhaps Anuradha best represents Congress party head Sonia Gandhi – even more than the filmmakers anticipated. Just a year after the film was released Sonia Gandhi made Manmohan Singh 136

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prime minister while retaining significant power behind the scenes. After attempting unsuccessfully to turn over the reins of power to her son, Rahul Gandhi, she has re-emerged as the major power in the Congress Party since her party’s dismal performance in the 2014 parliamentary elections. Scholars have focused on dynastic women at the apex of Indian politics and accorded less attention to their roles as MPs. In all three parliaments with which this book is concerned, women formed a small proportion of MPs: 8% in 2004, 11% in 2009 and 12% in 2014 (See Tables 1.5 and 1.11 in Chapter 1 for all figures cited in this paragraph).1 However, an overwhelming proportion of this small number of women parliamentarians – 58% in 2004, 69% in 2009, and 43% in 2014 – have had family members precede them in politics, making them the group that is most dependent on dynastic ties for representation. Dynasticism among women MPs, as Figures 5.1–5.3 show, is not confined to any particular region in India: constituencies which have sent women and dynastic women to parliament are scattered widely across the country. By way of comparison, only 17%, 25%, and 19% of male MPs in the 2004, 2009, and 2014 parliaments respectively have had family members precede them in office. This chapter seeks to interpret and explain the phenomenon of dynasticism among Indian women parliamentarians and its implications both for women’s exercise of power and for Indian democracy. I assess the widely held view that the large numbers of MPs who have family ties shows that Indian democracy is becoming increasingly monarchical. Along these lines, an article in the Guardian states that the greater importance of family name over individual merit “strikes at the very core of democracy . . . non-family upstarts can only dream of power from the sidelines.”2 Contrary to the plausible assumption that women’s ties to political dynasties represent a resurgence of tradition, I consider them a product of democratic processes. Relatively modern and republican in nature, these dynasties emerge from the ballot box rather than from aristocratic lineage or wealth accumulated before 1947. As Kanchan Chandra argues in the introduction to this volume, India’s dynastic families differ from traditional aristocracies in several important respects: birth alone does not guarantee entry, they must win elections, have open borders, and represent diverse social groups. The family, among other institutions, is remarkably adaptable to modern, democratic processes and familial terms are often used to establish familiarity and closeness with political leaders.3 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, for 1 2 3

The figure for 2009 does not include Ingrid Mcleod, who was nominated to represent the AngloIndian Community. Karri (2009). For an early and still influential development of this argument see Rudolph and Rudolph (1984).

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14th Lok Sabha (2004)

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Figure 5.1 Dynasty and women MPs in the 2004 parliament Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014.

example, was affectionately known as Bapu (father). Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Raghuraj Pratap Singh from Uttar Pradesh (UP) is one of several male politicians who are known as Bhaiya (elder brother). Among women political leaders, Jayalalitha is known as Amma (mother), Mayawati as Behenji (sister) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sushma Swaraj as Beti (daughter). Invoking the family enables leaders to forge an aura of intimacy with citizens and to reach across ethnic, class and religious divisions.

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15th Lok Sabha (2009)

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Figure 5.2 Dynasty and women MPs in the 2009 parliament Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

Three factors, all rooted in modern political processes, explain both the low levels of women’s representation and the high levels of dynasticism among female MPs in India. First, the increasing violence and criminalization of politics has deterred women from running for office in recent years. Dynastic women may be more protected from these dangers than women who come up through the ranks. Second, political parties are biased against women, as evidenced by their organizational structures and record in nominating women

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16th Lok Sabha (2014)

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Figure 5.3 Dynasty and women MPs in the 2014 parliament Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

candidates. Third, the absence of reservations in both national and state legislatures has impeded women’s representation. This chapter critically examines four commonly held assumptions concerning the tensions between dynasticism, women’s power and democratic principles. The first is that by virtue of unfair advantages that accrue to members of influential families, dynasticism violates the principle that candidates should be elected above all on the basis of their qualifications for office. A second

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assumption is that dynastic women MPs are less qualified than other candidates and are vulnerable to being seen as tokens and figureheads, thereby discrediting them and all women who occupy political office. A third is that dynasticism symbolically and literally strengthens the identification of women with the family rather than women’s identities and interests as citizens. The fourth is that dynasticism unfairly benefits educated, upper class/upper caste women at the expense of other candidates. I question most of these assumptions. The notion that women from dynastic backgrounds enjoy unfair advantages assumes that women and men have equal opportunities to be elected to parliament. However, societal prejudices, electoral processes and party biases and structures have limited women’s representation in the national legislature. Women’s dynastic ties have partially rectified the historical under-representation of women. As Kanchan Chandra notes in the introduction to this volume, dynastic politics has paradoxically been an equalizing force. It provides a channel for representation of groups that are under-represented through normal democratic channels. She writes, In this sense we can think of dynastic politics as an informal substitute for institutional devices such as affirmative action that serve to bring about some form of political equality . . . Had it not been for dynastic politics, the already low representation of women in parliament may have been even lower.

Thus the impact of dynastic ties on women’s representation must be evaluated not only in accordance with abstract principles but also within the context of women’s historic under-representation in the Indian parliament. Furthermore, dynastic women do not become serious political contenders unless they have prior political experience. Given party biases against nominating female candidates, women have often achieved political visibility and power through their participation in social movements. The first and most important instance of this was their participation in the anti-colonial nationalist movement, which, in fact, provided the basis for the creation of political dynasties. Women were active both in movements led by Congress and, to a smaller extent, the Communist party. A number of them gained power in Parliament as a result of their activism. Since Independence, women have often entered political institutions by participating in social movements, such as the JP Narayan-led movement for democracy, the BJP-led Ayodhya movement and ethnic self-determination movements. If dynastic ties undermine democratic principles of political representation, so too does the under-representation of almost half the population. Women have arguably relied on family ties in part to counteract discrimination by political parties and the broader society.4 The majority of dynastic women had 4

Guha (2012) www.indiatogether.org/women/authority/authority.htm.

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male rather than female relatives precede them in politics: in 2009, for example, the family members that preceded dynastic women MPs were nineteen husbands, thirteen fathers, seven fathers-in-law, three uncles, two grandfathers and two brothers (Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014). Only four of them had preceding female relatives (three mothers and one mother-inlaw – Indira Gandhi, who herself followed her father Jawaharlal Nehru into politics.). Mayawati, the head of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), four times Chief Minister of UP and, since 2012, a member of Rajya Sabha, would have found it harder to succeed as a dalit (Scheduled Caste (SC) or untouchable) woman without intimate ties to Kanshi Ram. Jayalalitha Jayaram, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and head of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), needed the backing of former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu MG Ramachandran to surmount the anti-Brahminical sentiment that, as a Brahmin, she confronted. Meira Kumar would not have become the first woman and dalit to be elected Speaker of the Lok Sabha had she not been the daughter of former Deputy Prime Minister Jagjivan Ram. And without ties to the Gandhi/Nehru family, Sonia Gandhi would have had a more difficult time withstanding the BJP’s hostility toward her for being a foreign-born woman. Family ties have been crucial to women’s exercise of power. The association of women with the inner domain of the family and community, a legacy of the colonial and nationalist eras, has persisted to this day.5 Thus, even nondynastic female political leaders often achieve and retain power by cultivating non-biological familial relations. But as I show, women who are elected to Parliament as a result of biological or putative family ties do not necessarily carry out the mandates of male family members and indeed often challenge gender inequalities within the family. The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows: Section 1 describes the links between low representation and high dynasticism in Indian politics. Section 2 shows the pervasiveness of dynastic metaphors to describe women in Indian politics, regardless of whether they have family ties. Section 3 provides a general explanation for low representation and high dynasticism. Section 4 examines why the representation of dynastic women MPs varies considerably among political parties, particularly between the BJP and Congress. Section 5 explores the implications of dynastic ties for women’s legislative performance. I conclude by addressing the implications of women’s dynastic ties for reservations for women in state and national legislatures.

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Chaterjee (1993).

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Low representation, high dynasticism

India is not unique with respect to the large number of women from political families who are elected to high office. In recent years, for example, there has been a near-simultaneous rise of prominent female politicians, all dynastic, in twenty-two countries around the world.6 Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra succeeded her brother, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Former United States (US) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed her husband, former President Bill Clinton to office. In the US Congress, female legislators are nearly three times as likely as men to come from dynastic families – 31.2% versus 8.4%, respectively.7 Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner followed husband and former President Nestor Kirchner. Korean President Park Geun-hye followed her father and former President Park Chung-hee. Nationally prominent female politicians in every major South Asian country – Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi in India, Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Chandrika Kumaratunga in Sri Lanka, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, Sushila Koirala in Nepal and, if we include Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi – all have dynastic ties. The proportion of women legislators who have family ties is even greater in the Philippines than in India; from 2001 to 2010, according to a recent study, the percentage of women legislators who were dynastic, broadly defined, was 72%. In the Philippines, however, dynastic ties are equally important for female and male politicians. Thus 66.5% of male legislators who served during this period also had dynastic ties, leading the authors of the study to conclude that “political dynasties in the Philippines are gender neutral.”8 A disproportionately high level of dynasticism accompanies low levels of women’s representation in the Indian parliament. When India elected its first Lok Sabha in 1952, there were only 4% (22 out of 489) female MPs. In the 16th Lok Sabha in 2014, women MPs occupy 11.4% of seats (62 out of 542 members). In the fourteen general elections in between, the electoral fortunes of Indian women traced what can only be described as an uneven path. The slow, if not dismal, increase in women’s national political representation parallels the slow increase in women’s candidacy in the years since independence. India’s record is even worse when viewed comparatively. The current international average of women representatives is 22.3% of all lower or single house seats.9 Of the 188 countries for which the Inter-Parliamentary Union has compiled data on the representation of women in the lower house, India does 6 7 9

“Women in political dynasties: The distaff of office.” Economist. 07 July 2011. Web. April, 8 2013. www.economist.com/node/18926213. 8 Dal Bó et al. (2009). Mendoza et al. (2011). “Women in National Parliaments: World Classification.” Inter-Parliamentary Union (2014).

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Table 5.1 Women candidates and MPs in Lok Sabha elections, 1951–2014

Year of election

Total candidates

Women candidates

Percent of Candidates who are women

Total seats

Women MPs

Percent of MPs who are women

1951 1957 1962 1967 1971 1977 1980 1984 1984 1989 1989 1991 1991 1996 1996 1998 1998 1999 1999 2004 2004 2009 2009 2014

1874 1519 1985 2369 2784 2439 4629 5312 491 6160 510 8668 502 13952 529 4750 477 4648 453 5435 417 8070 440 8204

45 66 67 83 70 143 162 39 198 56 326 48 599 49 274 38 284 51 355 45 556 43 640

3.00% 3.30% 2.80% 3.00% 2.90% 3.10% 3.00% 7.90% 3.20% 11.00% 3.80% 9.60% 4.30% 9.30% 5.80% 8.00% 6.10% 11.30% 6.50% 10.80% 6.90% 9.80% 7.80%

489 403 494 520 518 542 542 514 514 529 529 524 524 543 543 543 543 543 543 543 543 543 543 543

22 22 31 29 22 19 28 42 37 29 15 37 21 40 16 43 10 49 14 45 12 59 23 63

4.50% 5.50% 6.30% 5.60% 4.20% 3.50% 5.20% 8.20% 9.20% 5.50% 7.60% 7.10% 8.60% 7.40% 11.40% 7.90% 7.10% 9.00% 12.30% 8.30% 8.30% 10.90% 11.20% 11.6%

Note: The highlighted rows refer to women MPs from the Congress Party Source: Indian Election Commission for 1951–2009; http://myneta.info/ls2014/index.php? action=summary&subAction=women_candidate&sort=candidate for 2014.

not even make it to the first 100. Its current ranking is 117, below Syria, Jordan, Niger, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).10 Within South Asia broadly defined, despite being the best-established democracy, India ranks fifth out of nine countries in terms of women’s representation at the national level (see Table 5.2).11 At the low end are Sri Lanka and Myanmar, where women occupy just 5.8% and 5.6% respectively of seats in the lower house of parliament. At the high end is Nepal, where they fill 29.9%

10 11

“Women in National Parliaments: World Classification.” Inter-Parliamentary Union (2013). The definition of South Asia has been expanded here to include the following: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

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Table 5.2 Representation of women in lower/single house of national parliaments in South Asia in most recent elections Country (election year)

Total no. of seats

# of women who won

% of the total

Nepal (2013) Afghanistan (2010) Pakistan (2008) Bangladesh (2013) India (2014) Bhutan (2013) Maldives (2014) Sri Lanka (2010) Myanmar (2010)

575 249 340 323 542 47 85 225 429

172 69 76 67 62 4 5 13 24

29.9 27.7 22.4 20.7 11.4 8.5 5.9 5.8 5.6

Source: “PARLINE database on national parliaments.” Inter-Parliamentary Union. Data downloaded on August 21 2014. http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/parlinesearch.asp

seats in its unicameral constituent assembly. Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh all have larger proportions of women in their national legislatures as a result of reservations. Dynasticism among female MPs is associated with certain forms of privilege. As Table 5.3 shows, women MPs tend to be wealthier than male MPs and the disproportionately larger number of women than men from dynastic families contributes to this pattern.12 Dynastic women MPs were also wealthier than non-dynastic women MPs, increasingly so from 2004–9. (We lack data for 2014). Because the wealth data is not disaggregated, it is difficult to tell whether dynastic women tend to be wealthier overall, or if a few women are sufficiently wealthy to explain this. However, dynasticism among women is associated with greater representation of lower caste and Muslim women. Among upper-caste women MPs, nondynastic women tend to be in the majority (except in 2014 when dynastic women gained a small majority), whereas among lower-caste and Muslim women, dynastic women tend to be in the majority (with another slight shift in 2014 where there was a greater percentage of non-dynastic SC women). 12

Sixty-eight percent of women MPs (40 out of 59) compared to 57% of men (275 out of 484) are crorepatis (i.e. their wealth exceeds 10 million rupees). Elections have become increasingly expensive, while candidates’ assets have steadily grown. The number of crorepati MPs doubled, from 156 in 2004 to 315 in 2009. The chances of winning an election in 2009 progressively improved with the value of the candidate’s assets (0.43% with assets under Rs.10 lakhs to 32.65% with assets over Rs. 5 crores). In 2009, 63% (275) of Congress candidates compared to 42% (180) of BJP candidates were crorepatis. Report by National Election Watch and Association for Democratic Reform, Women MPs of the Lok Sabha 2009.

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Table 5.3 Profile of male and female MPs (2004–14) Year

Age (in years) Graduates in (%) Wealth (in Crores) Forward Caste (%) Backward Caste (%) Scheduled Caste (%) Scheduled Tribe (%) Muslim (%) Other (%) Total

2004

2004

2009

2009

2014

2014

Male

Female

Male

Female

Male

Female

53.21 78% 1.75 37.15 28.92 14.46 10.84 6.63 2.01 100% (498)

46.2 84% 3.16 48.89 20.00 24.44 2.22 4.44 0.00 100% (45)

56.2 80% 4.71 42.89 23.71 15.67 10.31 5.57 1.86 100% (485)

49.5 79% 9.72 48.28 13.79 20.69 8.62 6.90 1.72 100% (58)

43.96 25.83 15.21 10 3.96 1.04 100% (480)

38.71 27.42 19.35 9.68 4.84 0.00 100% (62)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

Table 5.4 Profile of dynastic and non-dynastic female MPs (2004–14) Year

2004

2004

2009

2009

2014

2014

Dynastic Non-dynastic Dynastic Non-dynastic Dynastic Non-dynastic Age (in years) Graduates in (%) Avg. Wealth (in Crores) Forward Caste (%) Backward Caste (%) Scheduled Caste (%) Scheduled Tribe (%) Muslim (%) Other (%) Total

45.7 85%

46.9 84%

48.9 80%

50.8 78%

3.73

2.34

11.54

5.69

42.31

57.89

42.50

61.11

40.74

37.14

23.08

15.79

10.00

22.22

33.33

22.86

26.92

21.05

25.00

11.11

3.70

31.43

0.00

5.26

12.50

0.00

11.11

8.57

7.69 0.00 100% (26)

0.00 0.00 100% (19)

10.00 0.00 100% (40)

0.00 5.56 100% (18)

11.11 0.00 100% (27)

0.00 0.00 100% (35)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

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This suggests that political dynasty can help to counter-balance the negative effects of low social status on the electoral prospects of subaltern women. 2

The pervasive use of dynastic metaphors

Women candidates for parliamentary elections are often depicted – and depict themselves – as mothers, daughters, and wives. Consider the 1999 parliamentary election campaign, in which two of the most powerful women in India, Sushma Swaraj from the BJP and Sonia Gandhi from Congress, competed for the Bellary constituency in Karnataka. The election was an important test for both the candidates and the parties they represented. Congress described Sonia Gandhi as the loyal daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi and legitimate heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. The BJP described Sushma Swaraj (who lacked dynastic family ties) as the figurative daughter of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) while questioning Sonia Gandhi’s membership in the family/nation.13 While campaigning in Bellary, Sonia Gandhi repeatedly described herself as a widow and daughter-in-law who had decided to run for political office to preserve the legacy of her husband’s family. In a February 1998 speech, Sonia Gandhi stated, “India embraced me and I embraced India. I’m not only the daughter of Bharat Mata [Mother India] but it is also the land of my suhaag [marriage].”14 Congress venerated Sonia Gandhi as a bahu (daughter-in-law) for becoming an integral part of the family into which she had married, in contrast to biological daughters who must leave their families at the time of marriage. One of Sonia Gandhi’s election posters in Bellary read “Then Indira, Now Sonia.” Her personal comportment partly reflected traditional expectations of widows, and she cultivated mannerisms of her former mother-in-law. Priyanka and Rahul, Sonia’s children, participated in her election campaign, further adding to the family appeal. Given Sonia Gandhi’s dynastic ties and the historic strengths of Congress in Bellary district, her electoral victory was not surprising. Sonia Gandhi also suggested that her family legacy shaped her political commitments. In a speech in Bellary on September 3, 1999, she said My family followed a politics that was generous towards the needs of the poor and was aimed at the welfare of the country and in accordance with the Indian tradition. That’s 13

14

The very kinship terms that both candidates employed to characterize themselves and each other were Hindi and north Indian and had little relevance to Kannada and Karnataka. Note that both the beti (daughter) and bahu (daughter-in-law) categories used in the election belong to Hindi kinship terminology. Sinha (1999).

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the reason why the people out there feared the members of my family. And that’s precisely why the entire [BJP] cabinet arrived in Bellary to defeat a lone woman. But I have no fear. I am sure that you all will give a proper answer to these people. I have complete faith in all of you . . . You have always supported the Congress: Mother Indira, my husband Rajiv and even after that, during the elections in 1996 and 1998.15

Sushma Swaraj is the most powerful woman in the BJP and one of the most politically influential women in Indian politics. She does not come from a politically prominent family, and unlike BJP male leaders of her generation and stature, such as Pramod Mahajan, Arun Jaitley, and Venkaiah Naidu, she was neither a member of the RSS nor of its women’s wing, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti. Her political career also preceded that of her husband Swaraj Kaushal, former Governor of Mizoram. She first became politically active in the JP Narayan-led movement against the Emergency (1975–7).16 In 1999, she ran an impressive election campaign and lost to Sonia Gandhi only by a small margin. That Sushma Swaraj lacked biological ties to a politically prominent family did not prevent her from claiming membership in a figurative family or from challenging Sonia Gandhi’s attempt to capitalize on her status as a daughter in law. Swaraj portrayed Sonia Gandhi as a videshi bahu (foreign born daughterin-law) and herself as a swadeshi beti (a native daughter). In one of her election speeches she asked people to “honour the Indian woman and reject the foreign daughter-in-law,” invoking the legacies of the anti-colonial swadeshi movement as well as the familial ties among Indians in face of a foreign threat. BJP posters in Bellur read “Be Indian, Live Indian, Vote Indian” and “Reward swadeshi. Reject videshi.” If Sonia Gandhi has highlighted her status as a widow, Sushma Swaraj has cultivated the aura of an ideal Hindu wife, donning a large sindoor (cosmetic powder women wear to show they are married) and mangal sutra (auspicious necklace that married women wear). She participates in Karva Chauth, an annual North Indian festival in which married women don their bridal attires, fast and pray for their husbands’ success and good health. Swaraj famously threatened to resign from Parliament and assume the status of a widow by shaving her head, wearing white, sleeping on the floor and eating groundnuts if Italian-born Sonia Gandhi became prime minister in 2004. “It would have been

15 16

Skoda (2004). She was only twenty-five years old when elected to the Haryana Legislative Assembly as a member of the Praja Socialist Party in 1977, and later became Cabinet Minister of Labor and Employment (1977–9) under the Janata government. She joined the BJP in 1982 and from October to December of 1998 briefly served as Delhi’s first woman chief minister. In 2000 she became a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament. She became Cabinet Minister of Information and Broadcasting and then Minister of Health and Family Welfare, and also served as Minister of Parliamentary Affairs. She was re-elected to the Rajya Sabha in April 2006 and to the Lok Sabha in 2009.

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an insult of martyrs who sacrificed their lives in the freedom struggle had a foreigner become the PM,” Swaraj warned.17 In the end, and somewhat unexpectedly, it was not Swaraj but Sonia Gandhi who, as her daughter Priyanka stated, engaged in an “age-old tradition of renunciation.” Sonia Gandhi’s decision to forgo becoming prime minister in face of the BJP’s bitter opposition to an Italian-born woman assuming this office increased her public stature and identified her with deeply held Hindu spiritual commitments to renunciation. By doing so while retaining leadership of Congress, Sonia Gandhi effectively paved the way for her daughter and son to inherit the Nehru-Gandhi legacy.18 3

Explaining low representation and high dynasticism

Studies have identified the emergence of dynastic families with certain attributes of parties and elections.19 One such feature is the correlation between dynastic families and weakly organized political parties. Historically, this was the case for the Whigs and Tories of England. Both of these elite parties were only parties in a very loose sense of the word. Factional interests and loyalty to families united party members far more than shared ideology. Thus, families such as the Cecils, Hydes, Churchills, Pitts and Grenvilles dominated the Tories while the Spencers, Pelhams, and Walpoles dominated the Whigs. In contemporary Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) comprises numerous coteries of party elders, each of whom leads a faction and has created his own dynasty. In several countries, the longer a legislator’s tenure in office, the more likely he or she is to have a relative in office in the future. In the case of Argentina, Martín Rossi argues, “The particular channel behind self-perpetuation is family name recognition.” “Brand name recognition” is related to a reputation for competence.20 This is one widely held explanation for Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s ability to succeed her husband Nestor Kirchner to the presidency in 2007. The couple was deemed responsible for the country’s quick recovery from the worst economic crisis in Argentina’s history in 2003.21 A similar 17 18

19

20

Vishnu (2010). Both Sushma Swaraj and Sonia Gandhi went on to excel in the parliamentary elections; they were the two women who received the largest proportion of votes in 2009. Gandhi won the election for the Rae Bareli constituency in UP with 72.2% of the vote and Swaraj won the election from Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh with 78.8% of the vote. The success of both candidates in this election probably had less to do with dynastic/non dynastic ties than with the incumbent advantage of their respective parties and the weak opposition they encountered. Carol Wolkowitz argues that political parties which have centralized decision-making structures can play crucial roles in overcoming male family members’ opposition to their female relatives running for political office. Wolkowitz (1987). 21 Rossi (2009). Wrobel (2007).

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argument about family name recognition might be made about earlier periods in Argentina’s history, in particular the success of Eva Peron and Isabel Peron, following the legacy of Juan Peron. Similarly, in the United States (US), scholars have identified an increased likelihood of political dynasties the longer a member of Congress stays in office.22 Brian Feinstein observes that there is “a competitive edge that second-generation politicians enjoy because of their association with office holding relatives.”23 That is, if a family member who had previously held office has a good reputation – because of perceived competence or associated positive traits – then relatives who seek office could likely succeed by convincing voters that they share these family traits. Incumbency advantage can benefit family members whose relatives have preceded them in office. Widows who run for Congress in the United States especially benefit from the characteristics and records of husbands who previously held office, Eileen McDonagh suggests.24 The practice of widow’s succession, whereby a wife “inherits” her husband’s congressional seat after he dies played an important role in breaking gender barriers in Congress.25 Although this practice has become less common in recent years, a number of dynastic women contested the 2014 midterm elections in the United States. Those who ran for Senate included Michelle Nunn (daughter of long-time senator Sam Nunn) in Georgia, Alison Lundergan Grimes (daughter of former state party chairman Jerry Lundergan) in Kentucky, Mary Landrieu (daughter of former New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu) in Louisiana, Kay Hagan (niece of Lawton Chiles, a former governor and senator in Florida) in North Carolina, and Shelley Moore Capito (daughter of former Governor Arch Moore) in West Virginia. Other than Capito, who is a Republican, the rest of the women are Democrats.26 The Japanese political system has also become dynastic, Fukai and Fukui argue, because of incumbency advantage.27 However, given the persistence of gender discrimination, this advantage usually accrues to men. As Martin Fackler writes of the 2009 general election, especially prominent politicians (like former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi) usually passed their offices on to their sons.28 Women especially rely on family connections when they otherwise lack access to resources. Kimberly Casey argues,

22 24 27

Dal Bó, Dal Bó and Snyder, loc. cit., p. 138 25 McDonagh (2009). Ingraham (2014). 28 Fukai and Fukui (1992). Fackler (2009).

23 26

Feinstein (2010). Delamaide (2014).

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Kinship association continues to boost women into national electoral politics. This is due to women’s dependence upon familial capital to augment the opportunity structure, particularly when there is late entry into politics.29

Women politicians benefit from brand name recognition by party leaders and the electorate because they are not adequately respected for their skills and attainments. The combination of low levels of representation and high levels of dynasticism among Indian women parliamentarians can be explained by three factors: (1) The deterrent effect of the increasing violence and criminalization of politics, from which dynastic women may be better protected; (2) a bias against women in the organizational structures of political parties; and (3) the absence of reservations in both national and state legislatures. On the first count, women with political ambitions are increasingly likely to be subject to slander and abuse as election campaigns have become more violent, corrupt and dangerous. Based on the affidavits of 7,810 out of 8,070 candidates who contested the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the National Election Watch (NEW) found that a large and growing number of candidates faced criminal charges.30 That the majority of criminal charges included murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, robbery and extortion indicates the dangers women confront in contesting elections.31 However, women from political dynasties may be subject to less slander and abuse than most women who enter politics. Manjula Naidu, state president of the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC), argued that women politicians from political dynasties faced less harassment than other women politicians in Karnataka, one of three Indian states in which the United Nations (UN) reported that harassment of women politicians was most extensive.32 Second, political parties have under-represented women in their own decision-making bodies, thereby impeding women’s ability to garner resources 29 30

31

32

Casey (2009). Since the landmark judgment of the Supreme Court in 2003, the Association for Democratic Reform (ADR) along with the National Election Watch, has conducted Election Watches for the 2004 and 2009 Lok Sabha Elections, Rajya Sabha Elections and almost all State Assembly Elections post-2003 in the country. The ADR discloses the criminal, financial and educational background of candidates who are contesting the elections Candidates with pending criminal charges constituted 15% of all candidates (1,158 out of 7,810). Of these, 26.7% were nominated by Congress (117/438) and 27.1% (116/ 428) by the BJP. There were pending criminal cases against 30% of new MPs (162/ 543), a 6% increase from the 2004 general elections, when there were pending criminal cases against 24% of MPs. This does not mean that criminal conduct is confined to men. There are criminal charges against 10 out of 59 women MPs. However, the proportion of women MPs with criminal charges against them is 17% compared to 31% for men. When compared to male MPs who face serious criminal charges, 3% of women MPs (2/59) and 15% of male MPs (74/484) face serious criminal charges. Kalyanam (2014).

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Table 5.5 Women in Congress decision-making structures (2014)

Body

Number of female members

Number of members overall

Percentage female

Central Election Committee CWC (Members) AICC (Office Bearers) State Leadership (PCC Presidents)

4 5 6 0

14 40 57 36

28.57% 12.50% 10.52% 0.00%

Sources: Election Committee, Indian National Congress, http://inc.in/organization/4/ElectionCommittee; Congress Working Committee, Indian National Congress, http://inc.in/organization/2/ CWC; AICC Office Bearers, Indian National Congress, http://inc.in/organization/5/AICC-OfficeBearers; Congress in States, Indian National Congress, http://inc.in/organization/13/Congress-inStates

and fulfil their constituencies’ demands. In the Congress Party, as Table 5.5 shows, there are only five women (including Sonia Gandhi) out of forty members in its highest decision-making body, the Working Committee, and only four out of fourteen women on its Central Election Committee (CEC). Within the party’s national leadership body, the All India Congress Committee (AICC), only six out of fifty-seven members (10%) are women. Congress MPs testify that even when the CEC wants to appoint more women candidates, the state Pradesh committees prevent them from doing so.33 Women are better represented in the BJP than in the Congress party. In absolute numbers, there are more than double the number of women leaders in the BJP (thirty-four) than in Congress (fifteen). Of the fifty-four party officebearers (roughly equivalent to the members of the Congress Working Committee), 17% (nine) are women. Within the larger National Executive, which parallels the AICC, 30% (twenty-two out of seventy-four) are women – very close to the 33% female representation prescribed by both the InterParliamentary Union and the UN. Conversely, however, the BJP does slightly worse in female representation on its CEC, with only two female members out of fifteen (13%). Representation of women in party leadership bodies declines in both the BJP and Congress at the sub-national level. In the case of Congress, leadership at the sub-national level rests jointly with both the PCC president and the legislative party leader (simultaneously the chief minister, as is sometimes the case). None of the PCCs have female presidents. Sushma Swaraj criticized

33

Rai (2012).

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Table 5.6 Women in BJP decision-making structures (2014)

Body National Executive Office-bearers Central Election Committee State Leadership (Presidents)

Number of female members

Number of members overall

Percentage female

22 9 2

74 54 15

29.73% 16.67% 13.33%

1

37

2.70%

Sources: “National Executive,” Bharatiya Janata Party, www.bjp.org/organisation/nationalexecutive; “National Office Bearers,”Bharatiya Janata Party, www.bjp.org/organisation/officebearers; “Central Election Committee,” Bharatiya Janata Party, www.bjp.org/organisation/ central-election-committee; “State Units,” Bharatiya Janata Party, www.bjp.org/organisation/ state-units

then BJP president Rajnath Singh for the fact that there is not a single woman among the BJP general secretaries.34 It is not simply the number of women MPs but also the number of female candidates that is extremely low. As Table 5.1 demonstrates, the number of women candidates that political parties have nominated to run for office did not increase much even during the 1980s and 1990s when the women’s movement was extremely active and a true multi-party system was emerging. The percentage of candidates from all parties who were women increased from 4.5% in 1984 to just 7.6% in 1999. The proportion of female candidates who were actually elected was hardly better – 8.2% in 1984, barely increasing to 8.9% in 1999. Of the 8,070 candidates in the 2009 general election, only 556, or 7%, were women. Out of these, only 59, or 11%, were elected to Parliament. The data highlight the extent to which women’s under-representation in political office is a product of party biases because women are much likelier than men to be elected. In every parliamentary election, women are elected to office in disproportionately large numbers. In the 2009 general election, the success rate was 11% for women candidates but 6% for male candidates. The data demolishes apprehensions about “winnability” that political parties raise when considering whether to allot tickets to women. The biases of political parties are especially striking against the backdrop of women’s growing electoral turnout and participation in election campaigns. Although rates of electoral turnout are lower for women than for men, and there was a slight decrease in women’s voting in the 2004 general election,

34

The Indian Express (2013).

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their electoral participation has increased steadily from 46.6% in 1962 to around 55.8% in 2009. The difference in voter turnout between men and women narrowed during this period, declining from a high of 16.7% in 1962 to 4.4% in 2009. Third, the lower house of parliament has yet to approve the Women’s Reservation Bill, which would provide a quota of 33% of seats in national and state legislatures for women. The consequences can be seen when comparing India and its regional neighbors. Significantly larger numbers of women serve in national legislatures in Pakistan (22%), Bangladesh (19%), Nepal (33%), and Afghanistan (28%) than in India (11%). Societal hostility and party prejudice towards women’s candidacy is probably no greater in India than in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Furthermore, India has a longer, more deeply rooted tradition of democracy than the countries with which it compares so unfavorably with respect to women’s political representation. There are two explanations for the larger representation of dynastic women and the smaller number of women as a whole in national legislatures in India than in other South Asian countries. First, the kinds of political dynasties that emerged in India as a result of the nationalist movement are largely absent in other South Asian countries. Neither Afghanistan nor Nepal had anti-colonial movements since they were never formally colonized. The great aristocratic families who held sway in Afghanistan were largely decimated in the course of endless conflicts, beginning with the Soviet invasion and continuing through Taliban rule and US intervention. Today, it is more often warlords of relatively recent provenance who dominate the national political scene. Although Pakistan and Bangladesh had national independence movements, their resulting dynasties declined thereafter. In Pakistan, there was no better symbol of this than the fading from the scene of the first family of independence, the Jinnahs. In both countries, military men pushed aside the old political families and came to power by force. Second, and perhaps more crucially, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, unlike India, have constitutional provisions supporting national legislative reservations for women. Although, with the exception of Nepal, they have fallen short of ensuring a critical mass, each of these countries has increased women’s representation in their national legislatures. These quotas generated relatively little controversy when first introduced in all four countries. The governments of Pakistan35 and Bangladesh36 both introduced quotas 35 36

Pakistan has had quotas in each version of its constitution (1956, 1962, 1970, 1973, and 1985), and although they lapsed in 1988, they were subsequently reinstated. Reyes (2002). In Bangladesh, too, reservations lapsed but were reinstated, most recently in 2004. On several different occasions – in 1987, 1995, and 2001 – women’s organizations played a prominent

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of their own accord following national independence in 1952 and 1971 respectively. For Nepal and Afghanistan, reservations came into existence more recently. In Nepal’s case the victorious Maoists included reservations in the interim constitution in 2007. In Afghanistan, quotas first appeared in the 2004 constitution, largely under pressure from the US, the UN, and other international actors. These impressive statistics aside, the extent to which quotas have increased women’s power is debatable.37 The Indian Constitution does not mandate reservations for women, and indeed, for many years the women’s movement did not support such reservations. But in 1996, a group of women’s organizations jointly formed the National Alliance of Women, which lobbied political parties to nominate more women candidates for parliamentary elections and demanded 33% reservation of seats in the state and national legislatures. The major national political parties responded by publicly supporting reservations in principle, but the 81st Amendment Bill was defeated in Parliament on four separate occasions – 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000. As a compromise measure, then-Home Minister L.K. Advani supported the chief election commissioner’s proposal and required all political parties to reserve 33% of seats on party lists for women candidates. The Rajya Sabha finally approved the bill under the direction of the Congressled UPA government in 2009. It is still awaiting Lok Sabha approval. The Bill has been extremely controversial among political parties and among feminists. Proponents argue that women’s representation in Parliament is unlikely to significantly increase without reservations because the record of political parties in nominating women candidates is so poor. Women cannot change the practices of their parties because they play a relatively small role in their decision-making bodies. Proponents also argue that a critical mass of female MPs would alter the tenor and outcome of parliamentary debates and policies. Opponents of the bill fear that such quotas could form a ceiling rather than a minimum and that male politicians would field pliable wives and daughters as proxies. An even more significant concern is that reservations

37

role, demanding that lapsed quotas should be reinstated, expanded, and filled by direct elections. The government has conceded to the first two demands, but not to the one for direct elections. Chowdhury (2002). Political conditions in Afghanistan have been highly inimical to the actual exercise of power by the female members of the National Assembly. Accounts from several MPs of being harassed or threatened corroborate this assessment. Bangladeshi feminists claim that the existing system of reservations has actually undermined women’s credibility as representatives. Those who have occupied reserved seats have found themselves entirely dependent for their nomination and election on the ruling party. Also, because voters do not directly elect them to represent a particular constituency these women lack both a popular mandate and a power base. Prominent and influential female politicians such as Khaleda Zia, Sheikh Hasina, and Matia Chowdhury (Minister for Agriculture under the Awami League government) all won general seats, which conferred power on them and enabled them to enter Parliament. See, for example, Rai et al. (2006).

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treat women as a homogeneous group and ignore the obstacles that low caste women face in running for office.38 The women’s movement largely supports the bill, despite some fears that the “biwi-beti brigade” of educated, upper class, upper caste women would fill a disproportionately large number of seats should the bill become law. By contrast, divisions among feminists and political parties were strikingly absent around the passage of the 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution in 1992, which reserved 33% of seats for women at all three tiers of the panchayats. Studies have found that women who are elected to these reserved seats are quite representative. According to a 2000 study of panchayats in Madhya Pradesh, UP, and Rajasthan, most elected women representatives did not come from dynastic families. Only 3.7% had natal ties and 6.2% had affinal (related by marriage) ties to family members who had previously served on the panchayats. The same study found that 51.9% of female, compared to just 18.7% of male panchayat members, were illiterate.39 Women from poorer backgrounds are relatively well represented on the panchayats, with 37.2% of women representatives in the panchayats having had no careers other than housework before being elected, and 38.3% being cultivators. By comparison, 69.3% of male representatives were cultivators, while another 11.4% were in business.40 The percentages of male and female representatives from households worth 20,000 rupees or more are 40.3% for men and 33.2% for women.41 With respect to caste backgrounds, 29.9% of women representatives aged 25 to 34 are SC, 34.7% are Scheduled Tribe (ST) and 26.2% are Other Backward Classes (OBCs).42 The explanations for parties’ support for reservations for women in the panchayats and the representative quality of female members are closely related. First, elections to the panchayats seek to rectify the historic under-representation of women and the lower castes. Of those seats reserved for SCs and STs, onethird are reserved for women. These seats in turn count toward the overall onethird of seats in the panchayats that are reserved for women. In 2011, the cabinet sought to make panchayats even more representative by proposing to increase reservations for women from 33% to 50%, in all seats filled through direct election, including offices reserved for SCs and STs. However, it is also possible that reservations on the panchayats have been uncontroversial because panchayats’ power and influence are limited. Reservations in state and national legislatures, unlike the panchayats, have important

38 42

39 40 41 Menon (2004). Buch (2000). Ibid. Ibid., p. 14. For those aged 35 to 44, the figures are 29.9%, 40.5%, and 35.3% respectively. For those aged 45 to 59, they are 29.9%, 13.2%, and 21.8%, respectively. For those aged 60 and above, they are 8.1%, 2.1%, and 9.9%, respectively. For those less than 25 years old, they are 2.2%, 9.5%, and 6.8%, respectively. Ibid., p. 12.

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implications for parties’ abilities to seek office and influence the character and passage of legislation. Furthermore, in many states panchayat elections are not contested along party lines. The state panchayat laws do not involve political parties in elections to village panchayats, except in the three states of Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal (until 2011 when Mamata Banerjee announced her intention to remove political symbols from the panchayat elections.)43 4

Differences between political parties

Among political parties, Congress and the BJP account for the largest number of women MPs. In 2009, out of fifty-eight women MPs, thirteen were from the BJP and twenty-three from Congress; 75% of the twenty-three female Congress MPs and 50% of female BJP MPs were dynastic.44 (See Table 5.7). In 2014 of the thirty BJP women MPs who were elected, twenty-one were dynastic and nine were non dynastic. All four Congress women MPs who were elected that year were dynastic. Congress had a stronger record than the BJP historically of nominating women to run for political office. There are several explanations for this including the fact that Congress is at an advantage over the BJP in its ability to recruit women from dynastic backgrounds. However, in the past two general elections, the BJP has compensated for its previous policies by recruiting women who have been active in local and state politics and in social movement activity. Compared to the BJP, Congress has fielded a larger proportion of women candidates in almost every general election until 2009. Congress may have been more willing to run female candidates in contests it was not confident of winning out of a commitment to promoting women’s political representation. It is also possible that Congress has nominated more women candidates than the BJP because it enjoys greater women’s electoral support. Statistical analysis of the 2004 and 2009 elections suggest that gender remains statistically

43

44

Sarkar (2011). Elections to the panchayats are also held on party lines in Assam and in Jammu and Kashmir. Some states employ a hybrid approach. Panchayat elections in Bihar in 2011, for instance, were on non-party lines but Congress put up its own candidates. In contrast, parties are active in panchayat elections in Gujarat and claim representatives as their own although they do not feature party symbols. In Andhra Pradesh, the 2013 panchayat elections will be conducted on a non-party basis for the 21,840 panchayats and on a party basis for 1,097 mandals and 22 zilla parishads. Assam Tribune (2013). Masoodi (2012). Prakash (2011). Jha (2013). Hindu [Hyderabad] (2013). Although all parties have a higher proportion of female than male dynastic MPs, for most parties, with the exception of Congress and the BJP, the number of women MPs is too small to make meaningful comparisons.

Table 5.7 Distribution of women MPs by political party (2004–14) 2004

2009

2014

Party

Non-dynastic

Dynastic

Total

Non-dynastic

Dynastic

Total

Non-dynastic

Dynastic

Total

AD AIADMK AITC BJD BJP BSP CPI CPI (M) DMK INC JD(U) JKPDP LJNSP NCP RJD RLD SAD SHS SP TRS YSRCP Indep. Total

0 1 0 4 1 0 2 2 5 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 19

0 0 1 6 0 0 3 1 7 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 2 0 0 26

0 1 1 10 1 0 5 3 12 0 1 1 2 1 1 1 2 3 0 0 45

0 2 0 7 0 0 0 1 5 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 18

0 2 0 6 4 0 1 0 18 1 0 0 2 0 1 2 1 2 0 0 40

0 4 0 13 4 0 1 1 23 2 0 0 2 0 1 2 1 2 1 1 58

0 2 8 1 21 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 35

1 2 3 1 9 0 0 0 0 4 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 27

1 4 11 2 30 0 0 1 0 4 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 2 0 62

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

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significant in explaining voting behavior after controlling for class, caste and education.45 However, the BJP has devoted increased effort to recruiting women candidates in the last two elections. The percentage of BJP candidates who were women in the general elections increased from 7.4% in 1999 to 8.2% in 2004 to 10.2% in 2009. In 2009, the BJP actually nominated a slightly larger proportion of women than Congress – 10.2% compared to 9.8%, although a far smaller proportion were elected – 29.5% for the BJP compared to 53.5% for Congress. Several factors explain the larger proportion of dynastic women MPs in Congress than in the BJP. First, other than the selection of its highest ranking leaders, the BJP’s procedures for recruiting women candidates are more institutionalized than those of the Congress party. As a result, the BJP is more likely than Congress to nominate women who have been active in state and local politics to run for Parliament. Second, the women’s wing of the BJP has been more active than that of the Congress party in recruiting women to run for political office. Third, Congress has stronger ties to dynastic families than the BJP because of its leadership of the nationalist movement. Pradeep Chhibber argues that two dimensions of weak party organization – the lack of functional independence of affiliated party organizations and the concentration of party finances in the leadership – have resulted in hereditary party leadership in India.46 Party leaders are more likely to recognize and support dynastic than non-dynastic women in poorly organized parties. The BJP’s procedures for nominating candidates for Parliamentary elections are better institutionalized than those of the Congress party. The BJP organizes elections for party leaders at its base but not at the apex of the party.47 Since its formation in 1980, the BJP has held elections for its district, mandal and local committees, each headed by an elected president and office bearers nominated by the president. One of the main functions of the State Election Committee is to propose to the CEC party candidates for state and parliamentary legislative seats. This committee structure enables state committees to bring to the attention of the central committee qualified candidates who have been active in state and even local politics. By comparison, the Congress Party’s procedure for identifying suitable electoral candidates is much less democratic. Its CEC, which is made up of its Parliamentary Board and AICC members, selects candidates for state and national legislatures without considering recommendations from state and

45 46 47

Deshpande (2009). Pradeep Chhibber. “Dynastic parties: Organization, finance and impact.” Party Politics. (2011), p. 2. Chandra (2004).

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local bodies. Thus, women who have been active in state and local politics may well escape the attention of the central committee. There are some significant differences between the women’s organizations that are affiliated with the BJP and Congress. The Mahila Congress has been less active than the BJP’s Mahila Morcha in mobilizing women to participate in election campaigns and recruiting women candidates. Furthermore, the president of the Mahila Morcha is more dynamic than the president of the Mahila Congress. Anita Verma, who became Mahila Congress president in 2011 is seen as weak and ineffective.48 By contrast, Smriti Irani, who became Mahila Morcha president in June 2010, is a strong and charismatic leader. Given her fame and renown, BJP president Gadkari hoped that the Mahila Morcha would increase women’s support for the party by 10%. He described Irani’s leadership as a one-day match in which each ball should be hit and every day should count.49 Irani has taken a strong stand on violence against women, advocating stronger laws and in some cases capital punishment for rape. She has supported increased women’s political participation and employment opportunities. Second, the Congress party’s leadership of the Nationalist movement provided women with entry into Parliament directly, as a result of their own participation, and indirectly, through their ties to Nationalist families. The majority of women MPs are concentrated in the north of the country. Many of them can be found in a chain of states that include Bihar, Punjab, Haryana, and, most significantly, UP – the so-called Hindi Heartland and Congress’ main powerbase since independence. Several women, including Subhadra Joshi (1919–2003), Vijay Lakshmi Pandit (1900–90), Tarkeshwari Sinha (1926–2007), and Sucheta Kripalani (1908–74) became MPs as a result of their nationalist activities. All of these women except Vijay Lakshmi Pandit became active in politics during the Quit India movement, a mass civil disobedience campaign that Congress launched in 1942. Vijay Lakshmi Pandit, daughter of the prominent Indian nationalist Motilal Nehru and the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, had the strongest dynastic ties of this group of women. The first Indian woman to hold a cabinet post, she served as a minister in the United Provinces Legislature (1937–9) and Constituent Assembly (1946–7). After Independence she entered the diplomatic service and served as ambassador to several countries and headed the Indian delegation to the UN. In 1953, she became the first woman president of the UN General Assembly. She served as governor of Maharashtra (1962–4) and as MP (1964–8) from Phulpur, her brother’s former constituency.

48

Chopra (2013).

49

The Deccan Herald (2010).

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The three other women also went on to have illustrious careers. Subhadra Joshi served as a parliamentarian for four terms from 1952–77. Her most important achievement was to get the code for Criminal Procedure amended to make any organized propaganda leading to communal tensions or enmity a cognizable offence. Tarkeshwari Sinha was also elected to parliament four times from 1952 on. She was the first female Deputy Finance Minister in the union cabinet from 1958–64. Sucheta Kriplani was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1952 and 1957. She was one of the few women who were elected to the Constituent Assembly and was part of the subcommittee that drafted the Indian Constitution. In 1963, she became the Chief Minister of UP, the first woman to hold that position in any Indian state. In 1967, she was elected to the 4th Lok Sabha from Gonda constituency in UP. A larger number of women became MPs as a result of their families’ participation in the Nationalist movement. A few examples from among the current Congress women MPs are illustrative. Shruti Choudhry from Haryana is the granddaughter of a prominent nationalist, Bansi Lal who was Union Minister, served in the Rajya Sabha and became Chief Minister of Haryana. Meira Kumar from Bihar, Speaker of the House, and former Union Cabinet Minister (2004–9) is the daughter of Nationalist leader Jagjivan Ram who served as Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister. Jyoti Mirdha from Rajasthan is the granddaughter of Nationalist leader Nathuram Mirdha who was MLA in the Rajasthan State Assembly. Preneet Kaur, Union Minister, was first elected to Parliament in 1999 and won re-election for two additional terms. She is the daughter in law of Yadavindra Singh, the Maharaja of Patiala, who convinced other rulers of Princely States to join the newly formed Indian union. The most powerful dynastic family in India is of course the Nehru-Gandhi family. The current Lok Sabha includes two of its members, Sonia and Maneka Gandhi, both grand daughters-in-law of Jawaharlal Nehru and great-grand daughters-in-law of Motilal Nehru.50 The sons of Sonia Gandhi, Rahul, and Maneka Gandhi, Varun, currently serve in the Lok Sabha. Rahul was elected in Amethi, the constituency where his mother was elected for the 13th Lok Sabha, and Varun was elected in Pilibhit, the constituency where Maneka Gandhi was elected for four consecutive elections, from the 11th through the 14th Lok Sabha. Rahul Gandhi is party vice-president

50

Sonia Gandhi, representing Rae Bareli in UP, was first elected to Parliament in 1998 followed by a second term in 2004. In 2006, after resigning from her seat, she was reelected in a byelection and was reelected in 2009 for a third term in the Lok Sabha. Maneka Gandhi, representing Aonla in UP, was first elected to the Lok Sabha in 1989. She subsequently served as Union Minister of State.

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and was the party’s prime ministerial candidate in 2014, in continuation of the dynasty.51 The BJP has one important dynastic family, and it originates with a woman. Vijayraje Scindia (1919–2001), a member of the Gwalior princely family through marriage, was active in the Congress Party from 1957 to 1966, when she joined the Jan Sangh. She was elected MP in 1971 and became a BJP member in 1980. Scindia served seven terms as MP and was the vice president of the party. Her ambition and class background enabled her to achieve remarkable power in the Jan Sangh and RSS. Three of Scindia’s children ran for political office. Interestingly, Scindia’s daughters, Yashodara and Vasundhara Raje, followed their mother’s path and joined the BJP, while her son Madhav Rao Scindia broke with the family tradition and joined the Congress Party. Vasundhara Raje is a five-time MP and Chief Minister of Rajasthan, and Yashodara Raje has served twice as a BJP MLA in Madhya Pradesh and is currently an MP. However, the Scindias’ role in the BJP is not nearly as significant as the Nehru-Gandhi role in the Congress party. The BJP lacks nationalist credentials. It was formed in 1980, and its predecessor, the Jan Sangh, was formed after independence in 1953. The BJP is not dominated by any one family. It has a number of powerful, high ranking leaders, including Atal Behari Vajpayee, LK Advani, Bangaru Laxman, Kusabhau Thakre, J Krishnamurthi, Rajnath Singh and Murli Manohar Joshi, who were not preceded by family members but joined the BJP after having been active in the Jan Sangh. Other party leaders, like Nitin Gadkari, Narendra Modi, and Venkaih Naidu, were activists in the RSS student organization, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. The BJP has one important counter-weight to political dynasties, the RSS, which has been a training ground for its major leaders. Thirteen of the sixteen top officers of the BJP have RSS backgrounds.52 Many high ranking government officials in the BJP led NDA government (1999–2004) – LK Advani, Minister of Home Affairs, Murli Manohar Joshi, Minister of Human Resource Development and ML Khurana, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs – were from the RSS. The RSS insisted that trusted pracharaks like Sunder Singh Bhandari and Bhai Mahavir become governors and that LK Advani become deputy prime minister.53 The RSS has also ensured that the BJP’s party organization has maintained autonomy and supremacy over its government or legislative wing.54 The RSS directly participates in the party’s decision-making by consulting with the BJP’s CEC on party candidates and election campaigns. 51 52 53

India Today (2013). They include Atal Behari Vajpayee, Lal Krishan Advani, Sundar Singh Bhandari, Krishan Lal Sharma, Kusabhau Thakre, Narendra Modi, Kerdarnath Sahini, and Pramod Mahajan. 54 Kanungo (2006). The Hindu (2006).

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It also wields direct authority over the party by having its members serve as BJP district, state and national organizational secretaries.55 BJP women are at a relative disadvantage because they are not permitted to join the RSS. Instead they have gained power and visibility through the Rashtra Sevika Samiti and through family ties to male RSS members. Karuna Shukla, who has twice served as BJP MP and party vice president, is Atal Behari Vajpayee’s niece and comes from an old RSS family. Mridula Sinha, a rashtra sevika, became a member of the BJP’s National Executive in 2010. Mohini Garg, who comes from an RSS family, served as all India general secretary of the BJP Mahila Morcha, was elected to the BJP national council in 1998 and joined the New Delhi Municipal Council Board in 2003. Vasundhara Raje, daughter of Vijayraje Scindia, was described earlier. Other prominent BJP women leaders include Bijoya Chakravarty, MP from Guwahati, Karuna Shukla who worked for the RSS Saraswati Shishu Mandirs and the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, and Nirmala Sitharaman, who worked for the RSS in Andhra Pradesh. The BJP has cultivated the aura of family to compensate for its relative dearth of dynastic families and to align the party with Hindu and Indian nationalism. Former BJP prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee wished that Indian politics would live up to the age-old ideal of vasudeva kutumbikam (“all the universe is a family”). The troika of affiliated organizations, the RSS, Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the BJP, call themselves the “Sangh Parivar,” or family of Hindu nationalist organizations. Especially in its early years, the BJP claimed that women were safer in the Sangh Parivar than in other political parties. The BJP has recruited women into the party by mobilizing them to participate in social movements that it has organized independently and jointly with the VHP. The BJP’s Mahila Morcha, along with women’s organizations that are affiliated with the VHP and RSS, organized thousands of women to participate in the campaign around Ayodhya. Many of these women subsequently campaigned for the BJP; a small number became political leaders. They included some very militant low caste, relatively poor women sadhvis like Uma Bharati and Rithambara, both of whom lacked dynastic ties.56 Bharati and Rithambara were vital to the BJP’s attempt to eschew its elitist character. Their dismissal of reason in favor of raw emotion provided a 55

56

This circumvents the BJP’s provision for election to party posts. Organizational secretaries are not elected by lower level party bodies and need not be members of the BJP’s executive committee. They have as much if not more authority than party presidents at that level (district, state, or national). Given the power of the RSS and senior members of the BJP, posts for national and state president are rarely contested. Ibid., p. 274. The literature on women and Hindu nationalism includes: Bacchetta (2004); Banerjee (2003); Basu (1999) and (1993); Jeffery and Basu (1998); Menon (2010); Sarkar (2001); and Sarkar and Butalia (1995).

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powerful affirmation of the BJP’s attack on what it described as the Congress Party’s pseudo-secularism, rationalism and westernization. Female activists symbolized the BJP’s claims to deep rooted moral commitments. Bharati’s political trajectory reveals the possibilities as well as the limits to women’s power through movement linkages. “The BJP is a natural choice for people like us who do not have name or fame but are drawn to the party by our commitment to the cause,” Uma Bharati stated.57 She lost when she ran for parliament in 1984 but won in 1989 on the heels of the Ayodhya movement. She was continuously re-elected to parliament in the next five elections. The NDA government appointed her minister of state with four different portfolios. She led the BJP to victory in the state elections in Madhya Pradesh in 2002 and became chief minister the following year. In 2014 Narendra Modi appointed her as a Cabinet Minister in his government. However Uma Bharati is an anomaly. Relatively few women have become BJP MPs as a result of their activism. 5

Implications of dynastic politics for women’s exercise of power and for Indian democracy

Having examined the factors behind the low representation of women MPs and their high levels of dynasticism, I now turn to its consequences, namely how dynastic and non-dynastic women have performed in national legislative bodies. Have dynastic ties emboldened women MPs to be more active in legislative processes or, on the contrary, held them back, thinking that party leaders value them more for their family backgrounds than for their political views? To what extent are these women under-qualified and how is this reflected in their performance in office? If dynastic women MPs turn out to be less active and less effective legislators, this might be seen as a double blow to democratic principles. Studies of the impact of reservations on women’s performance in the panchayats have important implications for considering the legislative performance of dynastic women MPs. Like dynastic women, female panchayat members are at an advantage in seeking political office. One important finding is that women gain skills and confidence by participating in democratic deliberations.58 The resources and abilities that female panchayat members acquire have enabled them to prioritize basic needs and amenities such as food, safety, schools, drinking water, road conditions, and healthcare centers. Chattopadhyay and Duflo found that women who were elected as chairpersons of panchayats through quotas invested in public goods “more closely linked to women’s concerns: drinking water and roads in West Bengal and drinking

57

Interview with Uma Bharati, New Delhi, December 17, 1991.

58

Rai (2007).

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water in Rajasthan.”59 Another study found that, across India, the presence of female gram panchayat chairpersons reduced the gender gap in school attendance by 13% for children aged 2 to 8.60 In addition, children aged between 1 and 5 residing in villages reserved for female leaders had a 2% higher probability of completing all required immunizations.61 Moreover, the share of women speaking in gram sabha meetings is 13% higher in gram panchayats whose leadership has been reserved for women.62 Female panchayat leaders have successfully increased both female participation and responsiveness to female concerns in village meetings, thus changing the nature of policy activism across Indian villages.63 These studies suggest that women are likely to influence policy outcomes once they form a critical mass. Informal reservations (through dynasties) and formal reservations could well have a similar impact on state and national legislatures. At the national level, if Sonia Gandhi and Sushma Swaraj perpetuated the belief that women are defined by their familial ties when they contested elections, their conduct in office has challenged these assumptions. Although Sonia Gandhi often invokes her husband’s commitments to substantiate her own, she has often done so to increase women’s political representation and to support the women’s reservation bill. Although Sushma Swaraj has not directly confronted the RSS, she has staked out distinctive and independent positions on certain issues. She was, for instance, outspoken in condemning the Shri Ram Sena’s attack on women in a Mangalore club in 2009 and has demanded more severe punishment of rapists. With respect to the positions that women MPs take on gender inequality, there are no discernible differences between those who have and lack dynastic ties. Female MPs’ reactions to the 2012 gang rape in Delhi are a case in point. Neither dynastic ties nor party affiliation determined the response of women MPs. Non-dynastic BJP MP Sushma Swaraj demanded the death penalty for those who had committed the crime and the creation of a fast-track court to try them. The BJP’s dynastic Maneka Gandhi demanded stringent laws and actions against rapists, presumably in part to embarrass and discredit Congress.64 Congress leader Sonia Gandhi sent an angry letter to Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit demanding more safety for women.65 At the same time, however, and under Sonia Gandhi’s leadership, the Congress party distanced itself from more extreme proposals such as chemical castrations or 30-year imprisonment for rapists.66 But, even within Congress ranks, a number of women MPs defended more severe punishment. The dynastic Congress MP, Krishna Tirath, echoed 59 62 66

60 Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004). Lori Beaman et al. (2007). 63 64 Ibid., p. 17. Beaman et al. (2011). Dainik Jagran (2012). Hindustan Times (2012).

61

Ibid., p. 15. Sharma (2012).

65

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Sushma Swaraj’s call and demanded the death penalty.67 The non-dynastic Congress MP Girija Vyas joined Swaraj by calling for rape cases to be fasttracked in special courts.68 The bill concerning rape received cross-party support. Three women, all dynastic but from different parties, spoke during the debate leading up to its adoption. Nationalist Congress Party MP Supriya Sule welcomed the bill but favored tougher provisions, particularly on stalking.69 Harsimrat Badal, from the Shiromani Akali Dal, remarked that there were no references to acts committed against the handicapped, mentally disabled and other similarly afflicted persons in its definition of rape but nonetheless supported the bill.70 Congress MP Priya Sunil Dutt also supported the Bill but recommended including child and domestic abuse as infractions.71 Even male MPs largely agreed on the need for more stringent action and supported the Bill, both during the debate and in the vote that followed. One notable exception was Sharad Yadav of Janata Dal (United), “who voted against the Bill, arguing that criminalizing stalking and voyeurism could result in more false cases being filed against men.”72 Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and other senior government ministers were absent during the debate.73 In the end, party and family background had little effect on the positions that women MPs took on issues that impacted women. Both dynastic and non-dynastic MPs – from the BJP, Congress and assorted regional parties – reacted similarly, supporting tough measures against the perpetrators of these crimes. 6

Conclusion

We might mistakenly conclude from the low levels of women’s representation in Parliament coupled with high levels of women’s dynastic representation that relatively few women seek national office. My findings suggest otherwise. As we have seen, women are elected in larger numbers than men. Their voting records and participation in election campaigns have grown. They have always been active in social movements. One of the major explanations for low representation and high dynasticism concerns the conduct and structures of political parties. Women benefit from dynasticism in part because there are greater barriers to their participating in party politics than in social movements and community organizations, especially at the local level. The anti-colonial nationalist movement provided women with an important route to enter politics both because women were active in the movement and belonged to politically 67 68 71

Tirath represents New Delhi, a fact that may have led to her strong reaction, See ZeeNews. com (2013). 69 70 Kumar (2012). India. Lok Sabha (2013). Ibid., p. 124. 72 73 Ibid., pp. 131, 133. BBC News (2013). Ibid.

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prominent families. Women have been active in a range of social movements in the post-Independence period – including ethnic, environmental, anticorruption and religious nationalist movements. In the absence of dynastic ties, Sushma Swaraj entered party politics through the JP movement and Uma Bharati, like several other BJP women, through the Ayodhya movement. However, only a small portion of women activists have attracted the attention of party leaders and thereby become candidates for national office. Despite the fact that India has a strong and vibrant women’s movement, fewer women have entered political office as a result of their participation in the women’s movement than other social movements. This might be explained by the skepticism feminists in India and elsewhere feel about the possibilities for women to achieve power and effect change through the party system. Feminists have been more apt to work with state agencies than with political parties. It might also be explained by feminists’ commitment to addressing the multiple inequalities that women experience along caste, class, and religious lines and thus their reluctance to support the candidacy of women who are relatively privileged along some dimensions. Moreover, parties may be disinclined to support feminist candidates. If dynasties have helped get women elected, they have not determined the policies that women MPs have pursued in office. Women’s dynastic ties have neither determined nor constrained the substantive positions they have taken on the recent legislation on rape. More broadly, the strength and vitality of democratic processes seem to be more important than family ties of women candidates in determining the efficacy of women who are elected as a result of reservations. Women who have come to power as a result of reservations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal have been disempowered by civil wars, political instability and state repression. In countries with longer democratic traditions and greater stability, women who have been elected through quotas have proven to be just as capable as their male and non-quota female counterparts.74 Contrary to liberal principles, individuals have not replaced families as political actors in India’s democracy. Although dynastic backgrounds further reinforce women’s identification with the family, even women who lack dynastic ties often describe themselves and are depicted as members of

74

France was the first country in the world to introduce a compulsory 50% gender parity provision. Political parties are required to ensure the equal representation of men and women on their lists of candidates for most elections. Murray (2010) found female members of the French National Assembly who had been elected to quota seats due to a parity law introduced in 2000 to be as effective as their male and non-quota female counterparts in the numbers of bills they sponsored, and contributions they made to plenary sessions and committees.

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putative families. Whether allusions to women’s ties to the family are disabling to women candidates depends on how and by whom women’s familial roles are represented. Women have asserted their commitments to the family and their roles as mothers in many progressive movements, opposing corruption, state repression and environmental destruction, to name a few. The boundaries between women’s domestic and public identities are likely to remain porous as long as women’s roles in the family and the family’s role in society remain important. This study of dynasticism among women MPs has some important implications for the debate around reservations. One criticism of local level reservations is that it results in the election of “sarpanch patis,” female panchayat chairpersons who are pawns of their husbands. However, there is evidence that over time, women sarpanches have become more confident and autonomous from their male relatives. A survey of twenty-four states found that women were being elected sarpanches in larger numbers, even when they were contesting open rather than reserved seats, and had become less dependent on their husbands in executing their responsibilities.75 The most serious weakness of the current women’s reservation bill is that it does not call for the representation of women from lower caste and minority backgrounds. Critics of the women’s reservation bill fruitfully identify the dangers of treating women as a homogeneous group and thereby ignoring class and caste divisions among them. But the worry that reservations would further skew Parliamentary representation must be qualified. First, political parties have biased the debate around reservations to the disadvantage of groups that are under-represented in legislative bodies. Although OBC parties and leaders are sufficiently numerous and strong to address the need for caste representation within women’s reservation, there is a dearth of individuals and groups who have supported reservations for Muslim women in the women’s reservation bill. Nor has any political party demanded reservations that would rectify the skewed class composition of Parliament. Second, critics of reservations imply that reservations would lead to the over-representation of upper caste women at the expense of upper caste men. However, given the fact that lower caste women are already under-represented in Parliament, it is likely that upper caste men would be displaced by women’s election to reserved seats. Thus legislative reservations for women would address one important basis of exclusion in Indian democracy but cannot address multiple forms of stratification in Indian society. Although unequal class and caste representation of Parliament undermines democratic principles of representation, affixing this

75

The study evaluating the impact of 10.5 lakh women in panchayati raj was conducted by A C Neilsen ORG MARG.

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question to the issue of women’s reservations does an injustice both to women and to other under-represented groups. It is impossible to properly assess the implications of dynasticism for Indian democracy without considering the under-representation of all women from state and national legislative bodies. To ensure higher levels of women’s representation in parliament, especially in the absence of dynasticism, would necessitate a major restructuring of parties and elections. It might include changing the first-past-the-post system, which disadvantages subordinate groups, by single member constituencies for the lower house. It would include challenging and rectifying party biases against women candidates and ensuring that parties implement internal quotas – that they support in principle – for women candidates. It would entail the reorganization of parties so that they recognized and rewarded candidates at the local level, such as the women who have been elected to the panchayats. It would involve reducing the vast expenditures on election campaigns and eliminating the correlation between candidates’ wealth and political success. It would include steps to make electoral competition less violent and corrupt. And it would involve reservations to national and state legislatures. If women’s dynastic representation undermines democratic principles, so too do the hierarchy, stratification and exclusion that characterize the attainment of national legislative office. *I am grateful to Mark Kesselman, Shirin Rai, Martha Ackelsburg, Cynthia Enloe, Mary Katzenstein, Eileen McDonagh, and Molly Shanley for comments and suggestions. For research assistance I am grateful to Sairam Nagulapalli and especially to Arthur Chang, whose hard work and ideas contributed greatly to this chapter. Kanchan Chandra’s guidance has been invaluable. REFERENCES A C Neilsen ORG MARG. “Panchayat women no longer need sarpanch patis” InfoChange Women infochangeindia.org/women/news/panchayat-women-nolonger-need-sarpanch-patis.html. Bacchetta, Paola. Gender in the Hindu Nation: RSS Women as Ideologues. (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004). Banerjee, Sikata. “Gender and Nationalism: The Masculanization of Hinduism and Female Political Participation in India,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 26(2): 167–79. 2003. Basu, Amrita. “Feminism Inverted: The Gendered Imagery and Real Women of Hindu Nationalism,” The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 25 (4), 1993. “Rethinking Communalism and Fundamentalism: Women’s Activism and Religious Politics in India,” Special Issue on Women and 20th Century Religion, Journal of Women’s History, 10 (4), Winter 1999. Beaman, Lori, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande and Peti Topalov. “Women Politicians, Gender Bias and Policy-Making in Rural India” Background paper for 2007 State of the World’s Children Report, UNICEF (2007), pp. 15–17.

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2011 “Political Reservation and Substantive Representation: Evidence from Indian Village Councils,” India Policy Forum, Brookings and NCAER Vol. 7. Buch, Nirmala. “Women’s Experience in New Panchayats: The Emerging Leadership of Rural Women,” Occasional Paper No. 35, 2000. Casey, Kimberly. “The Continued Dependence upon Kinship Ties among Nationallevel Female Candidates 1978–2006.” APSA Meeting, 2009, Unpublished conference paper. “Centre seeks all-party opinion on changing rape law.” Hindustan Times, December 31, 2012, www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/DelhiGangrape/Centre-seeks-allparty-opinion-on-changing-rape-law/Article1-983165.aspx. Chandra, Kanchan. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Chandra, Kanchan, Anjali Bohlken and Simon Chauchard 2014. “Dataset on Dynasticism in the Indian Parliament.” Chaterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post Colonial Histories. (Princeton University Press, 1993). Chattopadhyay, Raghabendra and Esther Duflo. “Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India,” Econometrica, 72 (5), 2004. Chhibber, Pradeep. “Dynastic parties: Organization, finance and impact.” Party Politics. 2011. Chopra, Nora. “Mahila Congress was not invited.” Sunday Guardian February 2, 2013. Chowdhury, Najma. “The Implementations of Quotas: Bangladesh Experience – Dependence and Marginality in Politics.” Paper presented at the International IDEA Workshop, The Implementation of Quotas: Asian Experiences, Jakarta, Indonesia, September 25, 2002. “Cong all set to sweep Panchayat polls.” Assam Tribune [Guwahati] February 15, 2013. Web. March 30, 2013, www.assamtribune.com/scripts/detailsnew.asp? id=feb1613/state05. Dal Bó, Ernesto, Pedro Dal Bó and Jason Snyder. “Political Dynasties”. The Review of Economic Studies, 76, 2009. Delamaide, Darrell. “Political dynasties at work in this year’s Senate races,” www .marketwatch.com/story/political-dynasties-at-work-in-this-years-senate-races2014-07-30. Deshpande, Rajeshwari. “How Did Women Vote in the Lok Sabha Elections 2009?” Economic & Political Weekly, XLIV (39) September 26, 2009. Fackler, Martin. “Japan’s Political Dynasties Come Under Fire but Prove Resilient.” New York Times [New York] March 15, 2009, Print. Feinstein, Brian D. “The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections.” Legislative Studies Quarterly, 34 (4), 2010. Fukai, Shigeko N. and Haruhiro Fukui. “Elite Recruitment and Political Leadership.” PS: Political Science and Politics. 1992. Sinha, Gayatri. (ed). Woman/Goddess: An Exhibition of Photographs. (New Delhi: Multiple Action Research Group, 1999), p. 65. Guha, Ramachandra. “Power Politics,” India Together, May 2012, www.indiatogether .org/women/authority/authority.htm. India. Lok Sabha. Lok Sabha Debates. 2013, http://164.100.47.132/newdebate/15/13/ 19032013/Fullday.pdf.

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“Indian bill on tough rape laws passed by parliament.” BBC News. March 19, 2013, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-21826247. Ingraham, Christopher. “How Power Begets Power in Congress,” www .washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/29/family-dynasties-howpower-begets-power-in-congress/. Jeffery, Patricia and Amrita Basu eds. Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia. (New York: Routledge, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998). Jha, Paras K. ” Gujarat: Panchayat and assembly polls show interesting contrast.” Daily News and Analysis [Ahmedabad] February 11, 2013. Web March 30, 2013. Kalyanam, Sharadha. “Women Not Safe in Politics Too,” Indian Express, May 8, 2014, www.newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka/Women-Not-Safe-in-Politics-Too/ 2014/05/08/article2212471.ece Last Updated: May 8, 2014. Kanungo, Pralay. “Myth of the Monolith: The RSS Wrestles to Discipline its Political Progeny,” Social Scientist, 34, 2006: 51–70. Karri, Sriram. “Indian politics is a family affair,” The Guardian. June 13, 2009. “Krishna Tirath wants death sentence for rape.” January 4, 2013, http://zeenews.india .com/news/nation/krishna-tirath-wants-death-sentence-for-rape_820705.html. Kumar, Vinay. “A nation outraged.” Hindu [New Delhi] December 18, 2012, www .thehindu.com/todays-paper/a-nation-outraged/article4215441.ece. Masoodi, Nazir. “Record turnout in Jammu and Kashmir panchayat polls.” NDTV.com, December 4, 2012. Web March 30, 2013, www.ndtv.com/article/india/recordturnout-in-jammu-and-kashmir-panchayat-polls-300625. McDonagh, Eileen. The Motherless State: Women’s Political Leadership and American Democracy. (University of Chicago Press, 2009). “Maneka Gandhi questions government’s move to shift gang rape victim to Singapore.” Dainik Jagran. December 29, 2012, http://post.jagran.com/maneka-gandhiquestions-governments-move-to-shift-gang-rape-victim-to-singapore-1356782726. Mendoza, Ronald U., Edsel L. Beja, Jr., Victor S. Venia and David Barua Yap II. “An Empirical Analysis of Political Dynasties in the 15th Philippine Congress.” Asian Institute of Management Policy Center Working Paper 12–001. 2011. Menon, Kalyani. Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Menon, Nivedita. Recovering Subversion. Feminist Politics Beyond the Law. (University of Illinois Press, 2004). Murray, Rainbow. “Second Among Unequals? A Study of Whether France’s ‘Quota Women’ are Up to the Job.” Politics & Gender, 6 (1), 2010. “Panchayat polls in April-May: Jana.” Hindu [Hyderabad] February 19, 2013. Web March 30, 2013, www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/panchayatpolls-in-aprilmay-jana/article4429096.ece. Prakash, Gyan. “Panchayat polls: Cong to put up own candidates.” Times of India [Patna] March 27, 2011, Web March 30, 2013, http://articles.timesofindia .indiatimes.com/2011-03-27/patna/29194343_1_panchayat-polls-panchayatelections-panchayat-system. “Rahul Gandhi Taking Over Sonia Gandhi’s Role ahead of 2014 Lok Sabha Polls.” India Today. March 11, 2013, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/rahul-gandhitaking-over-sonia-gandhi-role/1/257410.html.

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Rai, Shirin. “Deliberative Democracy and the Politics of Redistribution: The Case of Indian Panchayats,” Hypatia, 22 (4), 2007: 64–80. “The Politics of Access: Narratives of Women MPs in the Indian Parliament,” Political Studies, 60 (1), 2012: 195–212. Rai, Shirin et al., “South Asia: Gender Quotas and the Politics of Empowerment: A Comparative Study,” in Drude Dahlerup ed., Women. Quotas and Politics. (Routledge, 2006). Report by National Election Watch and Association for Democratic Reform, Women MPs of the Lok Sabha, 2009. Reyes, Socorro L. “Quotas in Pakistan: A Case Study.” Paper presented at the International IDEA Workshop, The Implementation of Quotas: Asian Experiences, Jakarta, Indonesia, September 25, 2002. Rossi, Martín. The Causes of Political Dynasties in Democratic Countries. Diss. Universidad de San Andrés, 2009. Rudolph, Lloyd I., Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. (The University of Chicago Press, 1984). Sarkar, Pranesh. “Plan to take politics out of panchayats.” Telegraph [Calcutta] December 2, 2011. Web March 30, 2013, www.telegraphindia.com/1111203/jsp/ frontpage/story_14833373.jsp. Sarkar, Tanika and Butalia, Urvashi (eds). Women and the Hindu Right. (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995). Sarkar, Tanika. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Sharma, Neeta. “Delhi gang-rape: After Sonia Gandhi’s angry letter, Home Minister meets cops.” NDTV.com. December 19, 2012, www.ndtv.com/article/india/delhigang-rape-after-sonia-gandhi-s-angry-letter-home-minister-meets-cops-307176. Singh, Jyotsna. “Women on the Rise in Indian Elections,” BBC News, November 20, 2003. Skoda, Uwe. “The politics-kinship nexus in India: Sonia Gandhi versus Sushma Swaraj in the 1999 general elections,” Contemporary South Asia, 13 (3), September 2004: 273–85. “Smriti Irani takes over as BJP Mahila Morcha president,” The Deccan Herald, June 24, 2010, www.deccanherald.com/content/77260/smriti-irani-takes-over-bjp.html. The Indian Express, April 26, 2013. Vishnu, Uma. Ideas Exchange: Opinion Makers, Critical Issues, Interesting Times, (Penguin/Viking, 2010). Wolkowitz, Carol. “Controlling Women’s Access to Political Power” in Haleh Afshar ed., Women, State and Ideology: Studies from Africa and Asia. (State University of New York Press, 1987). “Women in National Parliaments: World Classification.” Inter-Parliamentary Union. www.ipu.org/wmn-e/world.htm. Data downloaded on August 21, 2014. “Women in National Parliaments: World Classification.” Inter-Parliamentary Union, February 1, 2013. Web March 25, 2013, www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm. “Women in political dynasties: The distaff of office.” Economist, July 7, 2011. Web April 8, 2013, www.economist.com/node/18926213. Wrobel, Paulo. “A Political Dynasty Is Born.” World Today, 2007.

6

Disadvantaged groups, reservation, and dynastic politics Simon Chauchard1

1

Introduction

Political dynasties now exist among all social and ethnic groups in India (Chandra, Chapter 1 of this volume). The Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), the two categories that have most benefited from affirmative action in politics since independence, are no exception. Many members of these groups have managed to create lasting political dynasties, and family ties seem to play a crucial role in the selection of political candidates from these two categories. Yet, for better or for worse, it is also the case that aspiring political dynasts from these categories face more hurdles, and that the dynasties they create often remain more fragile than other dynasties. The recent experience of Ashok Argal, a five-time Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP from Madhya Pradesh – once in the headlines for his alleged involvement in the cash-for-votes scandal – illustrates this dualism. Elected in 1996 at the precocious age of twenty-seven from his father’s former Lok Sabha constituency (Morena, then an SC-reserved constituency in the northern part of the state), Ashok Argal is a poster child for dynastic politics in India in more ways than one. At the time of his election to the 11th Lok Sabha in 1996, Argal had never contested a major political campaign and had only held very local responsibilities in the BJP. Yet, capitalizing on his family ties, he obtained a ticket from his father’s longtime political family (the late Chhaviram Argal had remained a loyalist of the Jana Sangh throughout his career2) and the voters of Morena subsequently chose him. Building on this early success, he was returned to Delhi from the same constituency three more times: in 1998, 1999, and 2004. What happened to Argal ahead of the 2009 and 2014 elections exposes, by contrast, some of the main hurdles that aspiring SC/ST political dynasties find on their way. In 2009, following the recommendations of the Delimitation

1 2

I am grateful to Kanchan Chandra for many insightful suggestions and edits on this chapter. Gupta, Suchandana. “Will remain a BJP worker, Ashok Argal says,” Times of India, March 10, 2014.

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Commission Act of 2002, Morena changed reservation status and became an open seat. Ashok Argal – labeled as an SC politician – was not granted the ticket for Morena. While this episode might have, in other circumstances, led to the end of the Argal dynasty in the Lok Sabha, the MP managed to save his own skin. Argal bid to be granted the BJP ticket for the Bhind constituency (another SC-reserved constituency about a hundred kilometers away, and to which the Argal family had no previous connection). For lack of a more obvious SC candidate, the BJP agreed to give him the ticket. Given the strength of the BJP in the area, this nomination ensured his fifth consecutive success as a BJP candidate in a Lok Sabha election. The move to Bhind however proved fatal in the run-up to the next election (i.e., in 2014). Now lacking the natural legitimacy granted by long-term local roots3, Argal lost the BJP ticket when the party decided – a mere two months before the elections – to field his former rival, a turncoat INC politician that had joined the BJP only a few days before. As a consequence of this decision, Ashok Argal – an incumbent BJP MP in a state that was yet again to massively support the BJP – could not contest in these elections4, and the Argal dynasty did not endure for as long as it could have, at least in national politics. In sum, two factors – a minor and a major one – appear to have played a role in the progressive (and relative) failure of Ashok Argal in his attempt to perpetuate the dynasty created by his late father. The minor one concerns delimitation efforts by the Election Commission, and their potential consequences on the ticket-distribution process: in some sense, it can be said that Argal lost his access to an MP seat the day the Election Commission dereserved his inherited constituency. Note, however, that this de-reservation could have remained inconsequential. The most important factor in Argal’s inability to maintain himself in office does not in fact relate to these institutional changes, but to the internal organization of the BJP, and to the influence of MPs like Argal on the party’s main decision-making bodies. Had Argal convinced the BJP to re-nominate him in the newly open seat in Morena in 2009, or succeeded in persuading the party that a five-time incumbent should prevail over a five-day turncoat in 2014, he might still be in office. The statistical data explored in this volume suggest that the case of Ashok Argal may be more than a random example: SC/ST politicians overall manage to create many dynasties; yet it is not as easy for them to do so, and it is 3 4

Bohlken and Chandra (2013) argue that it is the long-term presence of a family in a specific constituency that makes dynasties appealing to parties. Gupta, Suchandana. “Will remain a BJP worker, Ashok Argal says,” Times of India, March 10, 2014. A clarification is in order here: assuming the position of a loyalist “BJP worker,” Argal decided not to run. Many in his position would have decided to contest as an independent, or to obtain another ticket (though this would have likely proved futile given the BJP wave that was to come).

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subsequently not as easy for them to keep their dynasty going. As highlighted in several other chapters of this volume (Chapters 1,7, and 8), a large number of SC/ST MPs (respectively 16% and 13% in the 14th Lok Sabha, 24% and 20% in the 15th Lok Sabha, and 8% and 17% in the 16th Lok Sabha) belong to political dynasties (See Table 1.6 in Chapter 1). Yet there are, in proportional terms, markedly fewer SC/ST political dynasties than among other caste and religious groups: in all three parliaments, the percentage of dynastic MPs from these two categories is considerably lower than the percentage of dynastic MPs from the “Forward Castes,” Backward Castes and Muslims (See Table 1.6 in Chapter 1). Besides, there seems to be a qualitative difference between SC/ST dynasties and dynasties that exist among other social groups. Except for a few cases – later explored in this chapter – few nationally prominent political dynasties exist among these groups. These contrasting statistics require us to consider the correlation between dynasticism and affirmative action in politics. Since the election of the first Lok Sabha in 1952, an overwhelming majority of the SC/ST members of parliaments (MPs) have been drawn from reserved constituencies in which they alone can run.5 For this reason, this chapter focuses at least as much on the relationship between reservation and family ties than on the relationship between family ties and the SC/ST status of members of parliaments. Accordingly, this chapter explores two questions: why and how do dynastic politicians emerge from SC/ST reserved seats? Why are dynasts fewer and less prominent in these seats? The pages that follow mainly rely on the “Dataset on Dynasticism Among Indian MPs 2004–2014” (Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014) to address these questions. My response to the first question – why so many dynasties emerge from reserved seats – echoes the general argument advanced in Chapter 1 of this volume (Chandra). SC/ST politicians, I argue, strive to create political dynasties for the same reasons that lead all other politicians to do so in India: the returns attached to a political position are large and attractive in contemporary India. Since dynasties solve important organizational issues in weakly organized and centralized parties, the efforts of aspiring dynasts are often rewarded. In line with my account of Ashok Argal’s career above, my response to the second question – why SC/ST dynasties are fewer and less prominent – emphasizes the relative scarcity of top-level party leaders from 5

The statistics on this point are rather unambiguous: across the first thirteen Lok Sabhas, an average of around four candidates from these two Scheduled categories have managed to win a seat in general seats – that is, in seats open to candidates from all caste groups. In the 14th Lok Sabha, four SC candidates (out of eighty-three) and fourteen ST candidates (out of fifty-five) were elected in non-reserved seats. In the 15th Lok Sabha, four SC candidates (out of eightyeight) and nine ST candidates (out of fifty-five) were elected in non-reserved seats. In 2014, only one SC candidate and eight ST candidates were elected in non-reserved constituencies.

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these categories in the largest parties (especially so the INC and the BJP) and more surprisingly maybe, in some of the parties which directly claim to represent these categories. SC/ST politicians, I argue, do not have the same opportunities to create political dynasties because they tend to play a less dominant role in the executive of the main parties that return MPs from these categories to Delhi. How does one in turn explain that SC/ST politicians remain relatively marginalized in the main parties? While I argue that a variety of factors (socio-economic, institutional, and attitudinal) worked against the inclusion of politicians from these categories in the post-colonial period, I also hypothesize that the delayed accession of SC/ST politicians to top jobs may have something to do with reservation policies. This argument suggests an important – and uneasy – conclusion: reservations may have curbed the emergence of strong leaders – that is, leaders that are able to guarantee that their offspring get a party nomination – among members of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. These findings contribute to the growing literature on parties’ attitudes towards dynastic politics in India (Chhibber 2011, Chandra and Bohlken 2014, Manikandan and Wyatt 2014, other chapters in this volume). While these works have developed general arguments as to why parties might prefer political heirs (See Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 especially), this chapter emphasizes the fact that not all aspiring dynasts are equal in that regard. Parties may generally find dynasticism to be a convenient solution to their organizational dilemma, but this also depends on the influence of aspiring dynasts within the party. Relatively marginalized MPs may not have the clout to impose a son or daughter on a party. These findings also contribute to two related bodies of work on reservation policies and/or Dalit politics. They first echo the qualified pessimism of the body of work on the fate of MPs and MLAs elected in reserved seats (Dushkin 1972, Narayana 1974, Narayana 1978, Galanter 1979, and Galanter 1984, Mendelsohn and Vicziany 1998, Kumar 2004, Gopal Jayal 2005, McMillan 2005), by reminding us that politicians from reserved categories often remain marginalized within their own parties, including at the highest level of politics. Finally, by suggesting that sixty years of political reservations in the Lok Sabha fell short of developing a group of influential leaders from these categories within the main parties, these analyses also inform a more recent and quantitative literature interested in assessing the impact of these policies (Pande 2003, Bhavnani 2009, Dunning and Nilekani 2013, Chauchard n.d., Chauchard 2014, Jensenius 2013). The rest of the chapter is structured as follows: in the second section, I explore and explain why we observe so many SC/ST dynasties in recent Lok Sabhas. The third section lays forth my explanation for the relative dearth of SC/ST dynasties compared to dynasties from other categories. In the fourth section, I close by sketching out the implications of these findings for Indian democracy.

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14th Lok Sabha (2004)

Non-dynastic SC MP Dynastic SC MP

Figure 6.1 Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for SCs (2004) Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014

2

Dynasticism among SC/ST MPs: evidence and explanation

As can be seen from Figures 6.1–6.6, a rather large proportion of members of parliaments elected in SC/ST reserved seats are political heirs, and dynasties from these categories exist throughout India. The dataset on dynasticism among Indian MPs 2004–2014 (Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014) provides us with clear numerical estimates of the relative proportion of dynastic MPs from each of these categories in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabhas. The two right columns of Tables 6.1 to 6.3

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15th Lok Sabha (2009)

Non-dynastic SC MP Dynastic SC MP

Figure 6.2 Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for SCs (2009) Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014.

below present two kinds of estimates for each of these Lok Sabhas elected in 2004, 2009, and 2014: the proportion of MPs elected in seats reserved for each of these categories that were preceded in politics by a relative, and the proportion of MPs elected in seats reserved for each of these categories that held a political position concurrently with another member of their family.6

6

Note that there is a potential overlap between the two estimates: an MP may be preceded in politics by a relative and be in office at the same time than this (or another) relative.

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16th Lok Sabha (2014)

Non-dynastic SC MP Dynastic SC MP

Figure 6.3 Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for SCs (2014) Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014,

As seen in Tables 6.1 to 6.3, sizable groups of SC and ST MPs were preceded in politics by a relative. Though the estimates vary from one Lok Sabha to the next (peaking in 2009, before receding in 2014), these percentages imply that at least twelve MPs (as in the 16th Lok Sabha) were political heirs from these categories. Similarly, an astonishing number of SC/ST members of parliament hold a political position concurrently with another member of their family. Both of these estimates are relatively stable across Lok Sabhas, suggesting that dynasticism is not the product of the specific context of an election, but

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14th Lok Sabha (2004)

Non-dynastic ST MP Dynastic ST MP

Figure 6.4 Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for STs (2004) Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014,

rather a structural characteristic of the Indian political system. SC/ST representatives are not foreign to dynastic politics; much to the contrary, a non-negligible number of current SC/ST parliamentarians appear to have derived an electoral advantage from the political connections of their relatives. For SC/ST politicians as for others, family ties probably constitute an advantage in gaining a coveted party ticket, as well as to garner a plurality of the vote. At least two additional findings regarding the prevalence of dynastic politics in reserved seats emerge from these tables. The first one is that there is no obvious and stable difference in patterns of dynasticism across SC-reserved

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15th Lok Sabha (2009)

Non-dynastic ST MP Dynastic ST MP

Figure 6.5 Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for STs (2009) Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014,

and ST-reserved-seats. Concurrent ties appear to be more common in the ST group in 2004 and 2009, but there is no clear pattern over time for preceding ties. The second finding – taking advantage of the fact that a sizable group of ST MPs is elected in general seats7 – is that no clear difference emerges between MPs elected in reserved seats and MPs elected in general (open) seats

7

There were fourteen such MPs in 2004, nine in 2009 and eight in 2014. By contrast there were very few SC MPs elected in general seats those years (respectively three, four, and one).

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16th Lok Sabha (2014)

Non-dynastic ST MP Dynastic ST MP

Figure 6.6 Dynastic MPs in constituencies reserved for STs (2014) Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard 2014,

when it comes to dynasticism. ST MPs elected in general seats were alternatively more or less dynastic than those elected in reserved seats. Who are the dynastic MPs from these categories? The following subsections provide prominent examples from the last three Lok Sabhas. SC dynasties Beyond the aforementioned Ashok Argal, who inherited his constituency from his father (himself an MP in the 6th and 9th Lok Sabha), a number of striking examples illustrate the commonality of dynasties among SC politicians.

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Table 6.1 Percentage of dynastic MPs elected in general vs. reserved constituencies (14th LS)

Preceding dynasties Concurrent dynasties

% Dynastic MPs Elected in General constituencies

% Dynastic MPs elected in reserved constituencies (SC+ST)

%Dynastic MPs elected in SC Reserved constituencies

% Dynastic MPs elected in ST Reserved Constituencies

21.75

14.17

16.46

9.76†

20.33

10.00

7.59

14.63††

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014) †21.42% (three out of fourteen) of ST MPs elected in non-reserved constituencies had preceding ties. ††7.14% (one out of fourteen) of ST MPs elected in non-reserved constituencies had concurring ties.

Table 6.2 Percentage of dynastic MPs elected in general vs. reserved constituencies (15th LS)

Preceding Dynasties Concurrent Dynasties

% Dynastic MPs elected in general constituencies

% Dynastic MPs elected in reserved constituencies (SC+ST)

%Dynastic MPs elected in SC reserved constituencies

% Dynastic MPs elected in ST reserved constituencies

31.78

24.43

25.00

23.40†

22.81

11.45

9.52

14.89††

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014) †11.11% (one out of nine) of ST MPs elected in non-reserved constituencies had preceding ties. ††11.11% (one out of nine) of ST MPs elected in non-reserved constituencies had concurring ties.

Maneshwar Hazari, a two-time MP in the 15th Lok Sabha was, for instance, the product of a long lineage of Bihar politicians, and served in Delhi while his father was still serving as an MLA in Patna. Kamlesh Paswan, a four-time MP – reelected this year – from Bansgaon (Uttar Pradesh) is the son of Subhawati Paswan, who was the representative of the very same SC constituency during the 11th Lok Sabha. In addition to these relatively secondary characters, there are also more well-known instances of dynastic politics among SC parliamentarians. Selja Kumari, a 15th Lok Sabha MP from Haryana and later a Union Cabinet member in the second UPA government, is the daughter of Dalit leader Chaudhary Dalbir Singh, himself an MP and former Union minister.

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Table 6.3 Percentage of dynastic MPs elected in general vs. reserved constituencies (16th LS) % Dynastic MPs elected in general constituencies Preceding Dynasties* 25.48

% Dynastic MPs elected in reserved constituencies (SC+ST)

%Dynastic MPs elected in SC reserved constituencies

% Dynastic MPs elected in ST reserved constituencies

10.69

08.33

14.89†

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014) * Coding for concurrent Dynasties in the 16th Lok Sabha not yet completed at the time of publication. †25.00% (two out of eight) of ST MPs elected in non-reserved constituencies had preceding ties.

However, until her defeat this year, the most prominent political heiress amongst the group of SC parliamentarians was Meira Kumar, the speaker of the 15th Lok Sabha and a former Union minister until 2009. The daughter of the most important Congress Dalit leader in the post-colonial period – Jagjivan Ram – Meira Kumar has been one of the INC’s most prominent Dalit faces for almost thirty years. Meira Kumar’s personal history illustrates how a few members of a disadvantaged group were able to move from almost complete political exclusion to a form of dynasticism. The comparison between her career and her father’s career is, in that regard, striking. While Jagjivan Ram had been given the opportunity to complete an education, he fought poverty and caste discrimination throughout his early life, before his political acumen finally led him up the Congress pyramid8. His status as one of Indira Gandhi’s most powerful politician – and reportedly, as one of India’s richest politicians – clearly implies that his two children (including Meira Kumar) were dealt a different hand of cards. Meira Kumar thus grew up in an economically privileged environment. She studied in some of India’s finest schools educational institutions and entered the India Foreign Service in 1973 (on a SC quota). While her father did not hand down a political career to her, his own prominent career allowed her to obtain some of the necessary attributes (an education, a connection to a party, etc.) that allowed her to make her entry into politics later on. This entry happened twelve years into her Foreign Service career, when Rajiv Gandhi personally asked her to run on a Congress ticket. Meira Kumar was inducted into the party in the months leading to the 1984 elections, as the party needed a prominent Dalit figure in the SC-reserved constituency of Bijnor (Uttar Pradesh) in order to face two “self-made” Dalit political heavyweights, Ram Vilas Paswan and Mayawati. 8

“Readymade Icon,” Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 24, Dated Jun 20, 2009.

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Unable to find an SC candidate of a comparable stature within its own rank (Jagjivan Ram was in the last year of his life then, and running for the INC(J)), the Congress tried to revive its image by fielding the offspring of the most prominent Dalit leader the party had known in recent times. This strategy proved successful, and Meira Kumar won this election in spite of the fact that she played a role neither in the local institutions of the district nor in the local party committees. She has since been elected in various seats across Northern India, until she finally regained her father’s former constituency in Sasaram (Bihar) from the BJP9 (Hindustan times, June 9 2009). While tough political victories have turned her into one of the main Dalit faces of the party, her career nonetheless exemplifies some of the potential limitations faced by dynastic candidates who are not immersed in politics on the ground. Although the INC has made ample use of Meira Kumar to woo Dalit voters (finally allowing her to run unelected for the speakership of the Lok Sabha), it is significant that she has not reached the most important positions in either the party or the Cabinet. ST dynasties Although there are more than twice as few ST as SC members of parliament, recent Lok Sabhas have also counted a remarkable number of dynastic parliamentarians from this category. Agatha Sangma may have been the most prominent figure among this group of MPs during the UPA tenure: the youngest minister in the second UPA union cabinet, Sangma was the daughter of P.A. Sangma – a prominent politician from Meghalaya, and former speaker of the Lok Sabha – as well as the sister of Conrad Sangma, also a major politician in her home state of Megalaya. She was first elected in her constituency in a 2008 by-election, after her father decided to resign from his seat in order to join state politics (in a division of labor between union and staterelated positions that is relatively familiar among dynasts). Agatha Sangma was certainly not alone in this position. In fact, her case echoes the story of Hamdullah Sayeed, another young ST MP from a peripheral area (the Lakshadweep islands). Elected in 2009 at the age of twenty-six – which made him the youngest MP in the 15th Lok Sabha – Hamdullah Sayeed successfully convinced the Congress apparatus that he was the right candidate to bet on for the tiny (but secure) constituency of Lakshadweep after his father, P.M. Sayeed, a ten-time MP, three-time union minister, deputy speaker of the Lok Sabha and former Congress working committee member died in 2005. Other ST MPs that the dataset classifies as having family ties in politics are drawn

9

“Meira Kumar’s brief profile,” Hindustan Times, June 1, 2009.

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from most of the other states counting ST constituencies (especially Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat) and from all major parties represented in parliament. The Sorens probably constitute the most prominent ST dynasty in contemporary India. Both Shibu Soren’s wife and two of his sons have contested and won elections, with his younger son Hemant currently serving as Jharkand’s deputy chief minister and as one of the main leaders of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). While it took Shibu Soren – who just regained a seat in the 16th Lok Sabha this year – decades to rise to power and transform the JMM into the strong regional party that it now is, his relatives’ induction into politics was both quick and natural seeming, at least to all the actors involved.10 At the pinnacle of his power in the first half of the 2000s, Soren initiated a policy of systematic favoritism towards his family members.11 A historic and almost mythical figure within the JMM, Soren ensured that his family members (including, after his son Durga died, a daughter-in-law) received tickets for state and general elections. As in the case of Meira Kumar, family members were initially used to take on particularly strong opponents, as if to extend Soren’s own electoral power to constituencies in which he could not personally run. While Soren did not even see the need to justify such dynasticism, others openly rejected it. Both Rupi (Soren’s wife) and Hemant (Soren’s younger son) initially lost elections. Besides, this dynastic tendency cost the party some long-term supporters – some of whom left the JMM in protest.12 In spite of these hurdles, Soren’s dynastic strategy does seem to have largely succeeded. All family members are currently elected in relatively safe constituencies, and Hemant is presumed to succeed his father as party boss, and to continue serving as the state’s chief minister if and when the JMM wins the next state elections. What causes SC/ST dynasties? Why are SC/ST politicians so keen on creating political dynasties? My answer to this question is similar to the more general explanation provided in Chapter 1 (Chandra) and Chapter 4 (Ziegfeld) of this volume. Simply put, dynasticism often constitutes a win-win situation (that is, an equilibrium) that satisfies both political heirs and political parties. The motivations of political heirs are maybe the easiest to grasp. Like others, the sons and daughters of SC/ST politicians are most likely drawn to the world of politics because of the “increasing returns associated with state power in the 1990s onwards” (Chandra, Chapter 1). A higher status, political protection, and legal or illegal access to the state’s private resources are likely on the wish lists 10 11 12

“Soren all set to make party a family affair” Times of India, December 28, 2004. “Soren all set to make party a family affair” Times of India, December 28, 2004. “The rise and rise of Shibu Soren” India Today, December 25, 2009.

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of all political aspirants, regardless of their caste category or religion. As noted by Chandra (Chapter 1), the attractiveness of the state explains overall high rates of concurrent dynasticism: if the state has so much to offer, why not multiply points of access to its resources? If elected office is more attractive now than it has ever been before, I see no reason why SC/ST politicians should differ in that regard. The socio-economic gap between SC/STs and others has slowly but continuously diminished (Shukla et al. 2010) and we have no clear reason to expect that the political elite drawn from these caste categories should have different incentives or be guided by a greater moral sense. Why then might parties be interested in providing the sons and daughters of SC/ST politicians with tickets? Here again, my explanation is not specific to politicians from these groups. Of course, the perceived winnability of dynastic candidates likely plays a role. Comparative evidence (Feinstein 2010, Mendoza et al. 2012, Asako et al. 2015) suggests that dynastic ties confer an electoral advantage. This seems to be true in India as well: as shown in Bohlken and Chandra (2014), dynastic MPs tend to have a higher winning margin. While further works will have to test the existence and the size of this electoral advantage, I see no reason why this should differ amongst SC/ST political heirs. As in the case of political candidates from other categories, parties field the sons and daughters of SC/ST politicians because they assume that these candidates will benefit from an electoral advantage. Both Meira Kumar and Hemant Soren owe their careers, at least in part, to this logic. Their respective parties’ need to field major figures – or candidates associated to major figures-against dangerous challengers clearly played a role in their induction in politics. However, in line with other contributions to this volume (Chandra, Ziegfeld, Bohlken), I argue that the perceived winnability of dynastic candidates does not alone explain parties’ frequent reliance on dynasts. My main explanation is instead institutional and relates to the internal organization of parties. When parties lack a clear procedure for allocating tickets, decisions are centralized in the hands of a single leader or of a small group of factional leaders. In such weakly organized parties, dynasticism is likely to be favored for two overlapping reasons. It may first be argued that dynasticism provides a ready-made and visible chain of command. This allows a party apparatus to minimize diversity – and hence the potential for internal conflict – within its ranks. Assuming that two politicians from the same family are less prone to conflict than two politicians from different families, it is easy to see how dynasticism may stabilize a party. By giving tickets to sons and daughters of already established politicians, parties minimize the number of new leaders that they have to induct in prominent positions, minimize the amount of turnover within the party, and hence buy themselves some stability. The careers of both Meira Kumar and Hemant Soren can be read as the consequences of their respective parties’

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minimization of social diversity within their ranks. Meira Kumar after all owes her political career to the fact that the Congress counted no Dalit leader prominent enough to take on Mayawati and Ram Vilas Paswan in the general elections of 1984. In her case, dynasticism was a useful recourse for a party that had failed – deliberately or not – to groom a major leader from her category. Hemant Soren’s path to politics was radically different, but also owed to a similar imperative of control of the identity of party leaders. In his case, as in the cases of many Indian dynasties associated with a regional party, it is difficult not to read his induction in politics as a strategy to keep the JMM in the hands of a member of the Soren family. Second, building on the argument of Chhibber (2011), parties may favor dynastic candidates not because they perceive dynastic candidates might help stabilize the party, but also because there are no clear procedures that prevent influential leaders from obtaining a ticket for their sons or daughters in such weakly organized parties. In this case, our reading of the Meira Kumar and Hemant Soren cases might be slightly different: in a sense, both Kumar and Soren received a ticket because their respective parties could not resist the pressure from their respective fathers. This argument points to an important source of variation in levels of dynasticism, to which the next section of this article will return: politicians need to be influential to impose a son or daughter on a party. Across-group inequalities in that respect should thus translate into inequalities in patterns of dynasticism. Taken together, these arguments generate a series of testable implications. First, we should observe higher rates of dynasticism in weakly organized parties. Second, we should observe lower rates of dynasticism among categories that count fewer influential leaders within parties; a corollary to this second hypothesis is that there should be little difference in levels of dynasticism across organized and weakly organized parties for members of such groups: it should be generally low. While Chapters 1 (Chandra) and 4 (Ziegfeld) of this volume provide evidence for the first implication – they show that overall levels of dynasticism are lower in organized parties (such as the BJP or the left) than in other parties – the following section provides evidence for the second (see also Chapter 6 on this point). 3

A comparatively lower proportion of dynastic politicians

While political dynasties are prevalent amongst SC and ST parliamentarians, they remain significantly less prevalent than amongst members of groups that do not benefit from electoral reservation. This section presents the evidence on this point before returning to my explanation for this inequality.

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Inequalities in dynasticism: the evidence Returning to Tables 6.1 to 6.3, the evidence on this point is in plain sight. As can be seen from the tables, there are significantly fewer members of parliament with family ties amongst SC and ST members of parliament than among members of parliament elected in “general” constituencies. There are also significantly fewer members of parliament with family ties amongst SC and ST members of parliament than among members of other disadvantaged groups that do not benefit from reservation, such as Muslims or women (Chandra, Chapter 1 of this volume). This is true for all possible measures of family ties used in the dataset. SC/ST members of parliament are less likely to have been preceded in politics by a relative than members of parliament elected in general seats: while it is the case for a large number among them (24.42% when the two categories are considered jointly for the 15th Lok Sabha), the difference with members of parliament elected in general constituencies is large and significant. SC/ST members of parliament are even less likely to belong to a “concurrent dynasty.” This implies that relatively few of these politicians have been able to do what the Reddys or the Karunanidhis routinely do – that is, simultaneously occupy political positions at various levels of governments or in various institutions. Importantly, these differences are based on a large enough number of members of parliament to be meaningful. They also persist across three successive Lok Sabhas, and after a change of majority from the UPA to the NDA in 2014. While these numbers suggest a clear pattern, this inequality is also qualitative. Although there are overall fewer dynastic politicians among SC/ST members of parliament, those politicians in the SC/ST group that we classify as dynastic can also be said to be, on average, less prominent figures. As the examples presented above may have already suggested, those political heirs among SC/ST members of parliament do not count among the prominent families that head many of India’s political parties. While members of SC/ ST dynasties do, on occasion, get a seat in a cabinet or in a party central committee, there is today no political dynasty that plays a leading role anywhere in Indian politics, and whose members belong to either the SC or the ST category. In other words, there are no SC/ST equivalents to the Gandhis, the Karunanidhis, the Thackerays, or the Reddys.13 Given the overall prevalence of dynastic politics and the combined share of the Indian 13

If we accept “partnerships” as examples of dynastic politics, then Kanshi Ram and Mayawati may count as a major Dalit dynasty. This partnership would, however, constitute a highly unusual example of a political dynasty precisely because it was an unofficial connection. In the absence of an official bond, it can be argued that Mayawati’s path to politics did not exactly mirror that of a typical politician’s wife, and that voters likely viewed her differently. Kanshi Ram’s early interest in Mayawati’s leadership qualities (Bose 2008) may also suggest that the

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population that these two scheduled categories represent (roughly 25%), this absence is in and of itself remarkable. As argued in the previous section and in Chapter 4 (Ziegfeld), the internal politics of parties can make a big difference as to whether dynastic candidates are given tickets, and as to whether these political heirs are subsequently able to win elections. Accordingly, the lesser likelihood that SC/ST MPs belong to political dynasties may be further understood by disaggregating the data presented in Tables 6.1 to 6.3 by political party. This data is presented in Tables 6.4 to 6.6. The tables compare the absolute numbers and the proportion of dynastic MPs in general and reserved seats in the ten parties that won the largest representation in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Lok Sabha (in total number of seats). At least three important observations emerge from these tables. First, echoing data already presented in Chapters 1 and 3 of this volume, it is immediately apparent that all political parties welcome dynastic politicians. Second, the tables suggest that one party – the INC – is most directly responsible for this gap. As can be seen from all three Tables (6.4 to 6.6), the INC – the party that returned the largest number of SC/ST MPs to the Lok Sabha in 2004 and 2009 – returned proportionally much fewer “dynastic” MPs in those reserved seats than the general seats it won. While 41.40% of the INC members of parliaments that were elected in general constituencies in the 15th Lok Sabha were coded as being political heirs in the dataset, only less than 30% (29.41%) of those elected in reserved seats were.14 While the party only won forty-four seats in 2014, an astonishing proportion (close to 60%) of MPs elected in general seats were dynasts; by contrast only 15.38% of those elected in reserved seats were. Third, and finally, while this inequality in levels of dynasticism across reserved and general seats is particularly acute for the INC, it is not specific to it. There is a gap in levels of dynasticism between politicians elected in general seats and politicians elected in reserved seats in an overwhelming majority of these other parties, including in the victorious 2014 BJP. This implies that what may be termed the “under-dynasticism” of SC/ST politicians does not owe itself to the internal politics of a single party, but is a structural consequence of the advancement – or lack thereof – of certain groups in the Indian political system. This in turn suggests that attention should be devoted to the selection process for candidates fielded in reserved constituencies.

14

transmission of power between them was – at least partially – unrelated to their personal relationship. Assuming similar proportions of dynastic MPs, had the BJP prevailed over the INC in 2009 it is likely that the gap between SC/ST and general MPs observed in Table 6.1 may not have existed.

Table 6.4 Breakdown of dynastic MPs by party (10 biggest parties) – 14th Lok Sabha.

CPI (M) BSP BJP BJD CPI DMK INC RJD SP Shiv Sena

Total number of MPs

Total number of MPs in general seats

Total number of dynastic MPs in general seats

Proportion of MPs in general seats that are “dynastic”

Total number of MPs in reserved seats

Total number of dynastic MPs in reserved seats

Proportion of MPs in reserved seats that are “dynastic”

43 19 138 11 10 16 145 24 36 12

34 14 105 8 8 13 117 21 28 10

7 3 22 3 1 2 45 6 11 1

20.58% 21.42% 20.95% 37.50% 12.50% 15.38% 38.46% 28.57% 39.28% 10.00%

9 5 33 3 2 3 28 3 8 2

1 1 5 0 0 1 6 0 2 0

11.11% 20.00% 15.15% 00.00% 00.00% 33.33% 21.42% 00.00% 25.00% 0.00%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

Table 6.5 Breakdown of dynastic MPs by party (10 biggest parties) – 15th Lok Sabha.

Trinamool Congress BSP BJP BJD CPI (M) DMK INC Janata Dal SP Shiv Sena

Total number of MPs

Total number of MPs in general seats

Total number of dynastic MPs in general seats

Proportion of MPs in general seats that are “dynastic”

Total number of MPs in reserved seats

Total number of dynastic MPs in reserved seats

Proportion of MPs in reserved seats that are “dynastic”

18 21 115 13 17 19 208 20 22 11

15 19 89 8 9 17 157 16 12 9

3 7 17 4 2 5 65 2 3 1

20.00% 36.84% 19.10% 50.00% 22.22% 29.41% 41.40% 12.50% 25.00% 11.11%

3 2 26 5 8 2 51 4 10 2

0 0 6 1 1 1 15 1 3 0

0.00% 0.00% 23.07% 20.00% 12.50% 50.00% 29.41% 25.00% 30.00% 0.00%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

Table 6.6 Breakdown of dynastic MPs by party (10 biggest parties) – 16th Lok Sabha.

AITC TDP BJP BJD CPI (M) AIADMK INC YSR TRS Shiv Sena

Total number of MPs

Total number of MPs in general seats

Total number of dynastic MPs in general seats

Proportion of MPs in general seats that are “dynastic”

Total number of MPs in reserved seats

Total number of dynastic MPs in reserved seats

Proportion of MPs in reserved seats that are “dynastic”

34 16 282 20 9 37 44 9 11 18

22 13 215 13 7 30 32 7 7 15

6 5 34 7 1 5 19 4 2 3

27.27% 20.00% 15.81% 53.84% 14.28% 16.66% 59.37% 57.14% 28.57% 20.00%

12 3 67 7 2 7 12 2 4 3

0 0 8 1 0 1 2 0 0 0

0.00% 0.00% 11.94% 14.28% 0.00% 14.28% 15.38% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

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A central explanation: the role of party advancement Why are dynasties a significantly less important phenomenon among SC/ST members of parliament than among members of parliament elected in general seats? Qualitatively speaking, why are SC/ST dynastic politicians less prominent figures? As noted earlier in this chapter, my main response builds on a long series of works that have highlighted the unequal status of SC/ST politicians within the structures of the main parties (Dushkin 1972, Narayana 1974, Narayana 1978, Galanter 1979, Galanter 1984, Mendelsohn and Vicziany 1998, Kumar 2004, Gopal Jayal 2005, McMillan 2005, Manikandan and Wyatt 2014). The relatively small size of the pool of prominent senior politicians from these categories, I argue, limits the emergence of dynasties within these reserved categories. The logic of this argument is relatively simple. Creating a dynasty requires some clout over a party apparatus; if one assumes that the politicians that created the dynasties observed in the 2000s must have been prominent senior politicians active in the period 1960–2000, it follows that in order to observe the same proportion of dynasties in the 2000s among SC/STs as among other groups, a comparable pool of prominent senior SC/ST leaders would have had to exist in the period 1960–2000; yet the INC allowed extremely few SC/ST politicians of that generation to become prominent enough to possess that kind of clout. If we simply define “prominent” politicians as those that have served in an important position in the executive branch in the states or at the center, or in their party, we are likely to find that the pool of such senior SC/ST politicians is proportionally limited compared to other caste categories. This difference alone may explain the lesser prevalence of dynasties amongst representatives from these categories. Data on the inclusion of SC/ST leaders in leadership positions support this hypothesis. Due to reservation, members of the two Scheduled categories have reached levels of representation proportional to their population in Vidhan Sabhas across the country as well as in the Lok Sabha. But for most of the post-independence period and in most states, members of these categories have remained under-represented in cabinets and at the top level in parties’ apparatus, Recent studies of political representation in the country have now provided numerical estimates of this systematic under-representation. What Galanter (1984) had already shown more than thirty years ago remains by and large true: SC legislators remain less active than others, rarely compete for power within parliament (for instance in commissions) or within their party (Kumar 2004); even though every cabinet includes at least one SC and one ST member of parliament, they rarely include many more than this; in addition, the ministerial positions they are given tend to be less prestigious (Kumar 2004).

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Beyond statistics, it is also clear that the differential in party advancement is also qualitative. Many of the SC/ST leaders that were inducted into governments and/or in visible positions were inducted as a simple matter of tokenism, and in positions that provided them with less clout over the party apparatus. This is the way the decision to make Meira Kumar the speaker of the house in 2009, for instance, may be read. This is also the way in which the INC’s policy of offering the party’s leadership in the house – currently in the hands of Mallikarjun Kharge, and before that in the hands of Sushil Kumar Shinde – to members of the Scheduled Castes may be perceived. While these positions are highly visible and symbolic, they do not necessarily confer much influence to the politicians that occupy them. Gopal Jayal (2006) has documented the chronic under-representation at the top levels of responsibilities at the center. Regarding union cabinets, the author notes that “the SCs and STs combined account for an average of 10% of Cabinets in the 1990s, and it is only in the current [i.e. 2004] Manmohan Singh cabinet that their representation – at 13.79% – begins to somewhat approximate their proportion in the population.” Regarding participation in national political parties’ executives, she presents data about the number and proportion of SC and ST members of both the Congress working committee (CWC) and the Bharatya Janata Party national executive (BJPNE) from 1972 to 2002. I summarize and reproduce this data in Table 6.7. As can be seen from the table, extremely few politicians from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes appear to have reached top levels of responsibilities within their own party. What is worse, the descriptive Table 6.7 Number and percentage (in parentheses) of SC/ST members of the INC (CWC) and BJP executives from 1972 to 2002

1972 1976 1979 1983 1986 1987 1989 1991 1992 1993 1995 1996 1998 2002

SCs in CWC

STs in CWC

SCs in BJPNE

STs in BJPNE

3 (14.28) 3 (10.00) 8 (12.30) 2 (10.52) – 1 (5.26) – – 1 (5.26) – – 2 (10.00) 2 (9.09) 1 (2.70)

1 (4.76) 2 (6.66) 1 (1.54) 0 – 0 – – 1 (5.26) – – 2 (10.00) 1 (4.54) 3 (8.12)

2 (6.25) 1 (2.04) – 2 (4.08) 2 (3.63) – 1 (3.70) 3 (4.90) – 7 (4.70) 5 (4.80) – 3 (4.30) 4 (4.12)

0 1 (2.04) – 0 0 – – 1 (1.60) – 3 (2.00) 2 (1.90) – 4 (5.80) 7 (7.21)

Source: based on primary data presented in Gopal Jayal (2006).

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Table 6.8 Percentage of SC/ST members in the executive of the Madhya Pradesh INC

% SC members of the Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee % ST members of the Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee % SC Presidents of Congress District Committees in Madhya Pradesh % ST Presidents of Congress District Committees in Madhya Pradesh

1993–94

1996–97

1999

2004

13.79

8.7

–

6.2

6.9

9.24

–

6.9

0

2.6

3.3

5.2

5.8

8.9

10

10.3

Source: Jaffrelot (2008), data collected by the author.

representation of these groups within these committees does not appear to have improved over time. Given the influence of these committees on the processes of ticket allocation, it may not be surprising that comparatively fewer SC/ST politicians are able to place their sons and daughters in positions of power. This under-representation at the national level is also a reality at the state level. As shown in Jaffrelot and Kumar (2008), SCs and STs have been, and remain, chronically under-represented in virtually every state government and in most of the state-level executive committees of the two main national parties. Data collected by Jaffrelot (2008) on the composition of party executives in Madhya Pradesh (a state whose population is constituted of roughly 15% SCs and 20% STs), perfectly illustrates these trends. As shown in Table 6.8 – which reproduces this data – both SCs and STs have been continuously underrepresented in the executive of the party (the data on the BJP, also collected by Jaffrelot, are just as damning). Besides, a ridiculously small number of them have managed to become presidents of one of the party’s district committees. In Madhya Pradesh, as in other states (Jaffrelot and Kumar 2008), SC/STs have rarely gained influence within their party, and little has appeared to change over time. Such data shed new light on the case of Ashok Argal, the BJP MP with whom I opened this chapter. Although he was a five-time incumbent before being denied a ticket, Argal may not have had many allies in the committee that distributed those tickets before the last election. This relative dearth of major SC/ST leaders – and hence of major SC/ST dynasties – is likely to persist. I see at least three indications why this should be the case. The first one is that only a small proportion of the MPs that have been elected in reserved seats over the past ten years are considered prominent politicians within their home state. None of the sixty-seven BJP MPs elected in SC/ST reserved seats in 2014 have so far been induced in the core decisionmaking bodies of the party following the post-election Shah–Modi revamping

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of the party. Even among the senior SC/ST politicians among that group, few appear to play a major role in the internal politics of their party. As a result, it is unclear whether the BJP will be anytime in the near future able to produce a leader from these categories that will be less internally contested than the late Bangaru Laxman was when he unexpectedly became president of the party in 2000, following a desperate effort by Vajpayee to woo more Dalit voters.15 It is therefore unlikely that they would be in a favorable position to create a dynasty in the future. Second, the comparatively small numbers of SC/ST politicians that seek office simultaneously with their offspring (as measured by the number of “concurrent dynasties” in Tables 6.1 to 6.3) suggest that we should see marginally fewer dynasts from those groups in the future. Third, the almost complete absence of SC and ST leaders (let alone prominent leaders from these groups) from some of the main ruling committees of the BJP or the INC does not suggest that these parties will churn out prominent leaders from these groups in the future. While this is true of the BJP, this is as true of the INC, in which Sushil Kumar Shinde probably emerges as the sole SC leader wielding some influence at the national level. For of all of these reasons, we may expect the lag in dynasticism between SC/ST and others to continue. If a relative dearth of prominent top-level politicians from the SC/ST groups explains why we observe fewer dynasties among SC/STs than among any other group, it does not, however, necessarily follow that the ethnic parties that openly claim to represent these categories – the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) being here the most obvious example – would count more political dynasties. The first circle of BSP leaders around Mayawati contains remarkably few prominent SC politicians, including from Mayawati’s own Chamar subcaste, and the party has in recent years resisted elevating SC leaders to the top ranks of the party. Mayawati’s first lieutenants have, in the past few years, been Muslim, Verma, or Brahmin.16 As a result, the party has generated no significant SC political dynasty. The data on recent Lok Sabha elections support this argument. Most of the party’s candidates in reserved seats were relatively low-level party workers trusted by the party for their efforts on the ground. Only one out of these seventeen candidates fielded by the party in 2009 was a political heir. This sharply contrasted with the situation in general seats, in which the BSP fielded an all-India record number of dynastic politicians, which often were prominent politicians that possessed a strong local following before they joined the party.17 Had the BSP won all SC-reserved seats in Uttar Pradesh in 2009 or 2014, the gap in dynasticism between SC-reserved and general 15 16 17

“The PM’s Point man,” Farzand Ahmed, India Today, August 14, 2000. “Mayawati confident of BSP victory in Uttar Pradesh,” The Hindu, April 30, 2009. “Relying on relatives in election times,” Times of India, April 7, 2009. “BSP forgets ideology, discovers family,” The Sunday Guardian, October 31, 2010.

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seats would thus have been even larger than it is now. As suggested in Chapter 7 (Chandra) and in several recent accounts of the internal politics of the BSP,18 this state of affairs is likely the result of a deliberate policy of Mayawati. In an effort to undercut threats from her potential rivals within the party, Mayawati has ejected many SC leaders who had attempted to build their own independent following. Insofar as a similar logic appears to be at play in many other parties that claim to represent the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes (Chandra, Chapter 7), it makes sense that we do not observe comparatively more SC/ST dynasties in these smaller parties than in the INC or in the BJP. Explaining the lack of party advancement Why then have SC/ST elites been relatively unsuccessful at reaching the most prominent positions of power within parties, including within the BSP? Socioeconomic, organizational, and attitudinal factors likely affect the extent to which elites from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have been incorporated into the leadership position of political parties. As noted by Chandra (2004), a prerequisite to party incorporation is the existence of a sizable educated middle-class within those categories. In that sense, the underrepresentation of SC/STs at the highest echelons of parties may simply be the consequence of inherited socio-economic inequalities. Just as the income gap between SC/STs and others has proved persistent (Shukla et al. 2010), so may have the gap in “political capital” – that is, the ability of these groups to generate a sizable pool of competitive politicians. A number of early empirical studies on SC legislators seem to validate this hypothesis. Until relatively recently, representatives elected in the SC and ST reserved seats were markedly younger, less educated, and less experienced (Narayana 1974, Galanter 1978, Narayana 1978). Because of these debilitating characteristics, it can easily be argued that they were less able to climb the echelons within their parties and become what I have termed above “prominent leaders.” And because these prominent leaders that could have – but did not – emerge in the 1970–80s are precisely those that would be able to create political dynasties nowadays, it makes sense that we would observe fewer and less prominent dynasties among those groups in recent Lok Sabhas. While inherited inequalities explain why the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes might have been incorporated later than other groups, it however does not convincingly explain why this incorporation has not happened during the last 18

Dhirendra K Jha, “Has Mayawati Forgotten Kanshi Ram?” Open Magazine, March 3, 2012, www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/has-mayawati-forgotten-kanshi-ram. Subhash Mishra, “Behenji in her Labyrinth.” The New Indian Express, June 5, 2011. http://newindianexpress.com/thesundaystandard/article430059.ece.

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few decades, as these groups developed a sizable middle-class. A second and complementary explanation thus lies in the internal organization of parties, and especially the INC. According to Chandra (2004), intraparty advancement was possible in the INC wherever the party had a competitive organizational structure, defined by open membership and intra-party elections. Wherever that competitive organizational structure was in place, elites from scheduled categories were incorporated in the INC. Wherever the party structure was centralized, party leaders strategically resisted the incorporation of elites from these disadvantaged groups in order to protect their own position within the party. Considering that the INC’s structure was in most of the states, and for most of the post-colonial period, centralized, it results from this argument that party organization may also explain the differential incorporation of SC/ST and others at the highest echelons of the INC. Interestingly enough, though for a slightly different reason, the centralized nature of the party also explains the relative dearth of prominent SC/ST leaders within the BSP. One hypothesis here is that Mayawati may have resisted elevating other SC leaders (and their families) to the most prominent positions for fear that this would one day threaten her own hold on the party, as suggested in this chapter and in Chapter 7 (Chandra) of this volume. Finally, beyond these socio-economic and organizational factors, it may be the case that members of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes trying to ascend in the hierarchies of parties simply faced a form of discrimination on account of their identity. There is ample evidence that the emergence of strong leaders from these scheduled categories was further slowed down by prejudiced and stereotypical attitudes within the main political parties. Brass (1966), Galanter (1979), Mendelsohn and Vicziany (1998), and McMillan (2005) all hint that the predominantly upper-caste based apparatuses of the main parties – and especially so of the INC – have long had a taste for rather docile and weak characters in selecting their candidates for SC-reserved seats. Without a critical number of prominent SC/ST leaders acting from within parties to promote the most talented, independent-minded and energetic SC/ST candidates, it may be that a form of adverse selection took place for most of the post-independence period, with the strongest characters – that is, precisely those that would be more likely to be the origin of today’s dynasties – not being drafted by the main parties. While it seems difficult to identify the exact reasons (which may be social, psychological, or ideological) for this preference for weak and disposable SC/ST candidates, it is difficult to rule out that such discrimination did not take place. Reservation as an aggravating factor? As I have emphasized the lack of intra-party advancement (and its various causes) in order to explain the differential in the number of SC/ST dynasties, I have so far insisted on the way in which the identity of candidates may have

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thwarted their dynastic ambitions. In addition to this, the fact that almost all of these SC/ST politicians were competing in reserved constituencies might have played a role. The relationship between reservations and dynasticism is likely complex, and there are credible reasons to believe that reservations could have actually boosted the creation of dynasties. The first one is institutional: since many reserved constituencies have been reserved for the same caste categories for decades, a direct consequence of assignment to reservation may be a reduction in the level of political competition. Because reservation restricts the right to compete to certain categories, existing dynasties from these categories may face more limited competition, and hence may be more likely to remain in office. The second reason is electoral: since one party (the INC) has overwhelmingly dominated politics in reserved constituencies over the postindependence period, stability in the party identity of legislators may have increased the likelihood that we observe political heirs elected in these constituencies today. The third reason is socio-economic: a larger number of well-off and/or prominent SC/ST families now exist in comparison to the 1950s, and we might expect these families to mimic the behavior of traditionally privileged groups, which includes an ability to develop political dynasties.19 Yet, I see even better reasons to believe that reservations actually hindered the creation of dynasties. The first one has to do with the strategic considerations of parties when choosing a candidate for a reserved seat. Simply put, candidates running in most reserved seats (except for a handful of ST-reserved constituencies) mostly need to convince voters from groups other than theirs; in a society in which inherited caste hierarchies remain a weighty reality, party executives have long strategized that relatively weak and docile politicians from these groups would be better at obtaining the votes of those of their constituents that continue to perceive themselves as belonging to a “superior” group. The second point has to do with the perceived value of politicians that have gained a seat in an assembly through a form of quota, which is inevitably lesser (an analysis that Kanshi Ram made early in his career, opting for the creation of an independent party over cooptation in one of the main national parties20). “Prominent” politicians have often forged themselves through an epic struggle; an election won through reservation may not quite constitute this, and hence diminish the legitimacy of those politicians that entered

19

20

In many ways, the popular idea according to which the benefits of reservation have been cornered by a tiny and self-perpetuating elite (the so-called “harijan elite” or “creamy layer”) within these categories seems coherent with the hypothesis that many MPs from these categories would have “inherited” their seats in the Lok Sabha. See Mendelsohn and Vicziany (1998: chapter 7) on this point.

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parliament through reservation. This deficit of legitimacy may ultimately have prevented many of the currently senior SC/ST politicians from climbing many of the top echelons of politics, and in their old days, to impose a son or a daughter on a party apparatus. Second, as illustrated by the case of Ashok Argal, the impact of reservation on dynasticism may have in recent times been even more negative due to changes in the location of SC-reserved constituencies, some of which have, for instance, been shifted both in 2002 and 2008 following the electoral commission’s delimitation efforts. Just like the permanent rotation of reserved seats at the panchayat level has seemingly ended the domination of a single group over village politics (Dunning and Nilekani 2013, Chauchard n.d.), these relatively frequent changes in the location of reserved seats for the Lok Sabha have probably impeded the dynastic transmission of constituencies. While the members of prominent dynasties can easily behave as electoral nomads, this is maybe less true of lesser-known politicians. For these politicians, the creation of a political dynasty probably hinges on the control of a specific territory or on the patient construction of a stronghold, as suggested by Bohlken and Chandra (2014). Since proportionally more SC/ST politicians can be considered as “lesser-known” and since political parties rarely allocate tickets to members of these scheduled categories outside of reserved seats, this stronghold has to be a reserved seat. Accordingly, recent changes in the location of reserved seats across a state may have hindered senior SC/ST politicians’ best efforts to build a dynasty and obtain tickets for their children.21 These two reasons, I believe, strongly suggest that reservations hindered the emergence of strong leaders from these categories – and hence, in keeping with Indian political norms, dynasts. This argument, if it was ascertained by additional data and through more rigorous tests, would add to the growing body of empirical work that has in recent years highlighted the (mostly) 21

The dataset on “Dynasticism Among Indian MPs 2004–2014” does not provide me with a fully convincing way to test this hypothesis. It, however, allows me to generate several relevant statistics. First, 65 of the 131 reserved constituencies in 2009 were newly reserved constituencies, following the implementation of the recommendations of the delimitation commission in 2008. If Bohlken and Chandra (2013) are correct when they argue that parties reward aspiring dynasts who seek tickets in the very same constituency in which one of their relatives served, this should imply that many SC/ST politicians pushing for a son or daughter to obtain a ticket ahead of these elections would have been disadvantaged. Second, 54% of the SC/ST “dynastic MPs” that were elected to the Lok Sabha in 2004 – that is, prior to the last delimitation (implemented in 2008) – had preceding ties in the same constituency. Since half of these constituencies were shifted, and since these candidates might have faced additional difficulties obtaining a ticket for themselves or a relative, this may also have deflated the rate of dynasticism in these categories. A simple comparison of rates of dynasticism in newly reserved versus formerly reserved SC/ST constituencies in the 2009 elections, by contrast, does not suggest that newly reserved constituencies produce fewer dynasts. In the absence of data about candidates, this does not, however, constitute decisive evidence against my hypothesis.

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disappointing impact of these policies on the welfare of members of these categories (Pande 2003, Dunning and Nilekani 2013, Jensenius 2013) and on the emergence of strong political leaders within these groups (Chauchard n.d., Jensenius 2013). 4

Implications for democracy In India

In Chapter 1 of this volume, Chandra emphasizes the roles of the state and of political parties in the development of democratic dynasties. Dynasties, she argues, exist because there are high returns to being part of the state and because elites have a superior interest in maintaining their access to the large resources disbursed by the various arms of government. If a politician derives important returns from access to the state, it logically derives that these returns may be enhanced by multiple points of access to the state, or at least by the continuous maintenance of a single point of access to the state. These benefits may be purely political (presence within the state allows a politician to weigh on a party apparatus), economic (important financial returns are attached to political offices) or legal (access to office provides a form of legal protection). But the point is the same: the size of the state in post-colonial democratic India explains why politicians may want to initiate a dynasty. Why they are so often able to do so in turn has to do with the weak organizational structures of political parties. The parties that provide the Indian democracy with its elected personnel are often more personalistic than properly democratic organizations. In this context, already powerful individuals exercise a disproportionate influence on the recruitment of the elected class. These two institutional features of the Indian democracy – the size of the state and the types of parties that control it – thus concur to make dynasties an equilibrium-like feature of Indian democracy. These institutional features of Indian democracy provide us with a general explanatory frame as to why and when “democratic dynasties” should exist in India. They also provide us with a convenient explanatory frame to explain patterns of dynasticism within specific subgroups. Following this framework, we should not be surprised if political elites from disadvantaged groups (such as the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) aspire to create and consolidate political dynasties. Indian elites remain attracted by the state, and SC/ST elites are no different (or at least, I cannot think of a valid reason why we should expect them to be). Following the logic developed above, given the weakness of intra-party democracy in most parties, we should thus expect to see SC/ST dynasties wherever prominent members of these groups were able to impose their preferences on party executives. In that light, the relative prevalence of SC/ST dynasties extensively documented in this chapter inspires a few comments about the kind of democracy that India has become.

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On the one hand, the sheer fact that such dynasties exist is remarkable, for a number of reasons. It confirms, first, that dynastic politics is a fundamentally modern phenomenon, rather than an atavism reserved for a few individuals or groups. Members of groups that were the least likely to be represented – let alone have family ties in politics – at the onset of the post-colonial period have now joined in the creation of political dynasties. This should strengthen our confidence that the explanation for dynasties is institutional and structural, rather than cultural. In the institutional context of post-colonial India, all groups attempt to create dynasties. Second, the relative prevalence of SC/ST dynasties indicates that Indian democracy has been somewhat successful at increasing the diversity of the political personnel. Independent India – and its party system – incorporated a number of members of these disadvantaged groups. Members of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were incorporated later, and likely at lower levels, in the leadership of parties. They initially counted few elected or unelected leaders, let alone dynasties. Yet, in a few decades, representative democracy has led to the creation of an oligarchic class within these groups. This may be seen as a relative achievement, in light of the complete exclusion of these groups before independence. A world in which oligarchic elites are equally drawn from all groups is probably preferable to a world in which they are all drawn from the same few groups. The relative dearth of SC/ST dynasties points, on the other hand, to some of the limitations of the Indian democratic experience. This relative dearth is, first, indicative of the ambiguities of a policy of political reservations for members of these categories. The fact that SC/ST dynasties exist should certainly remind us of some of the obvious achievements of reservation policies: members of SC/ST communities would probably not have occupied that many seats in the post-colonial period had reservations not been in place. Without mandated representation, members of these groups would not have been incorporated into parties as early as they did; the few of them who did reach leadership positions would not have done so that early. Yet, as suggested earlier in this chapter, one may also hypothesize that reservations have in the long run prevented the emergence of prominent political dynasties from these groups, and more importantly, of stronger leaders from these categories. The relative dearth of SC/ST dynasties eventually reminds us that we can only place limited stock in the democratic qualities of political parties. Party leaders – chiefly within the INC and the BJP, but also within smaller parties – have not promoted members from these categories on an equal footing. This may eventually indicate a fundamental flaw of Indian democracy: while disadvantaged groups have been granted mandated representation, members of these categories continue to struggle to access the powerful

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political positions within political parties. Mandated representation ensures minimum access to institutions, but it is fundamentally undemocratic intraparty politics that eventually continues to determine the identity of the political personnel. In this context, it is difficult not to feel normatively ambivalent about SC/ST dynasties. There are three reasons for which dynasties should be seen as a problematic feature of the Indian political system. The first reason is that they might undermine the quality of representation: dynastic representatives may not perform as well as other types of representatives. The second is that their existence may generate particularly negative externalities on the political system. The third reason is that the existence of dynasties in and of itself violates some of the key ideals of democracy – such as egalitarianism –, even if political dynasts do not impact the everyday practice of politics in India. Even if Chapter 8 (Bohlken) provides evidence suggesting that dynastic MPs are less experienced, support for the former critique remains, in my opinion, weak. It is unclear whether political dynasties – including SC/ST dynasties – do not perform as well as non-dynastic politicians. Even if dynasts are often seen as distant, less dedicated and more corrupt politicians, we do not have credible systematic evidence that they are. Worse, we may not have a good theoretical reason to think that they should be. Political dynasties enable long-term relationships between citizens and a family, and there are many ways in which citizens may actually benefit from being engaged in such a long-term relationship with their representatives. The desire to “pass on” a constituency may, for instance, make a politician more accountable. This points to the need for further data documenting the activities and the kind of constituency service that dynastic and non-dynastic MPs engage in. The second critique of dynasticism is in my view more serious. Dynasticism diminishes the degree of competitiveness of the political system (Bohlken and Chandra 2014), and prevents valuable new democratic leaders from nonpolitical families to obtain party tickets. One can certainly agree with Chandra (Chapter 1) that creating a new party remains a viable option in contemporary India. In which case we should simply expect dynasticism to delay the emergence of new leaders, and not altogether block their emergence. Because this is costly and time-consuming, this solution may, however, not always be an option, and many disappointed non-dynasts may rather choose to exit from politics. Besides, there are also systemic costs attached to the permanent creation of new parties and to the potential instability this generates. The biggest problem with democratic dynasticism, however, likely derives from the violation of egalitarianism that it entails. In the long run, a perception that dynasticism has become the law of the land likely depresses popular support for democracy and may even encourage support for other, eventually less democratic forms of government.

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Since these are grave accusations, we should hope that SC/ST democratic dynasties – just like any other democratic dynasties – would disappear. Yet, if we gave up on the somehow unrealistic idea that intra-party democracy will exist in the near future in India, and rather settled for second best, we may actually welcome the emergence of prominent SC/ST dynasties. This is not because members of disadvantaged groups would benefit from being represented by political dynasts, but precisely because dynasticism has become so systemic in India. In a political system whose features make the creation of political dynasties predictable, the existence of SC/ST dynasties signals equity in the system. By the same token, the relative dearth of SC/ST dynasties – as well as the conspicuous absence of a major national-level SC/ST dynasty – signals a form of persistent political inequity.

REFERENCES books and book chapters Bose, Ajoy. Behenji: A Political Biography Of Mayawati. New Delhi: Penguin, 2009. Brass, Paul R. Factional Politics in an Indian State: The Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Chandra, Kanchan. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Chauchard, Simon (n.d.). Political Representation and Intergroup Relations in Rural India: The Psychological Impact of Ethnic Quotas. Forthcoming, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dushkin, Lelah. ‘‘Scheduled Caste Politics,’’ in J. Michael Mahar ed., The Untouchables in Contemporary India. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972. Galanter, Marc. Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Gopal Jayal, Niraja. Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Jaffrelot, Christophe. “The Uneven Rise of the Lower Castes in Madhya Pradesh Politics,” in Rise of the plebeians? The changing face of Indian legislative assemblies. New Delhi: Routledge, 2008. Jaffrelot, Christophe and Sanjay Kumar. Rise of the plebeians? The changing face of Indian legislative assemblies. New Delhi: Routledge, 2008. Jensenius, Francesca R. Power, Performance and Bias: Evaluating the Electoral Quotas for Scheduled Castes in India. PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2013. Kumar, Narender. Dalit Policies, Politics and Parliament. Delhi: Shipra Publications, 2004. McMillan, Alistair. Standing at the Margins: Representation and Electoral Reservation in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Mendelsohn, Oliver and Marika Vicziany. The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Shukla, Rajesh, Sunil Jain and Preeti Kakkar. Caste in a different mould: Understanding the discrimination. New Delhi: NCAER/Business Standard, 2010. Yadav, Yogendra. “Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge.” in Francine Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava and Balveer Arora eds., Transforming India. Delhi: OUP, 2000, pp. 120–45. articles Asako, Yasushi, Takeshi Iida, and Tetsuya Matsubayashi. “Dynastic Politicians: Theory and Evidence from Japan.” Japanese Journal of Political Science, 2015, 16, 5–32. Bohlken, Anjali and Kanchan Chandra. “Why Dynastic Legislators Do Better in Elections: An Institutionalist Explanation.” Working Paper, 2014. Chandra, Kanchan, Anjali Bohlken, and Simon Chauchard 2014. “Dataset on Dynasticism in the Indian Parliament.” Chandra, Kanchan and Wamiq Umaira. “India’s Democratic Dynasties”, Seminar, June 2011. Chauchard, Simon. “Can Descriptive Representation Change Beliefs About a Stigmatized Group? Evidence From Rural India.” American Political Science Review, May 2014. Chhibber, Pradeep. “Dynastic Parties: Organization, Finance and Impact.” Party Politics, May 5 2011. Dunning, Thad and Janhavi Nilekani. “Ethnic Quotas and Political Mobilization: Caste, Parties, and Distribution in Indian Village Councils.” American Political Science Review, 2013, 107 (1): 35–56. Feinstein, Brien D. “The Dynastic Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections.” Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2010, 35(4): 571–98. Galanter, Marc. “Compensatory Discrimination in Political Representation: A Preliminary Assessment of India’s Thirty-Year Experience with Reserved Seats in Legislatures.” Economic and Political Weekly , 1979, 14 (7/8). Manikandan, C. and Andrew Wyatt. “Elite Formation Within a Political Party: The Case of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 2014, 52 (1): 32–54. Mendoza, Ronald U., Edsel L. Beja, Victor S Venida, and David Barua Yap II (2012). “An Empirical Analysis of Political Dynasties in the 15th Philippine Congress.” Ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1969605. Narayana, G. “The Political Elite among the Scheduled Castes.” Journal of Constitutional and Parliamentary Studies, 1974, 8: 2214–19. “Social Background of Scheduled Caste Lok Sabha Members, 1962–71.” Economic and Political Weekly, 1978, XIII: 1603–8. Pande, Rohini. “Can Mandated Political Representation Provide Disadvantaged Minorities Policy Influence? Theory and Evidence from India.” American Economic Review, 2003, 93: 1132–51.

7

Why “Forward Castes” have a dynastic advantage Intra-party politics and co-ethnic favoritism Kanchan Chandra

The “Forward Castes,” as we have seen already, are the principal beneficiaries of dynastic politics in the Indian parliament. In each of the three parliaments elected between 2004 and 2014, a greater proportion of MPs from these castes were dynastic than any other social category, with the exception of Muslims (see Table 1.6 in Chapter 1). “Forward Castes,” moreover, constituted the majority of the dynastic class in each parliament (see Table 1.12 in Chapter 1). This represents a double advantage: already over-represented in parliament in relation to their proportion in the population, they are over-represented again among dynastic MPs in relation to their proportion in parliament. What explains this “Forward Caste” advantage in dynastic representation? That is the question this chapter tries to address, locating the answer in the intra-party politics that drives the ticket allocation process. This question is important for the interpretation of democracy in India. The standard narrative about Indian democracy is that it has had a trickle-down effect: initially established by and among those on the top of the social pyramid, it has spread over time to the subaltern groups at the bottom, who, the argument goes, have begun to vote, contest elections, and win representation in higher proportions than before (Yadav 1999, Chandra 2004, Jayal 2006, Jaffrelot and Kumar 2009). Indeed, in the three parliaments under study, between 2004 and 2014, the proportion of subaltern caste MPs has been at its peak compared to previous decades, and there have been only minor fluctuations in the relative balance of MPs from “Forward Caste” and subaltern groups.1 But the scale of over-representation of “Forward Castes” among dynastic MPs has actually increased. Does the explanation for this advantage indicate the existence of a bottleneck in, or a reversal of, the trend towards the subalternization of Indian democracy?

1

See Table 1.12 in Chapter 1 for details. The percentage of “Forward Caste” MPs rose between 2004 and 2009 and then remained stable in 2014. The percentage of Backward Caste MPs dropped between 2004 and 2009 and then climbed again in 2014. The percentage of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe MPs remained largely stable across the three parliaments. The percentage of Muslim MPs declined from an already low 6% in 2004 to 4% in 2014.

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More generally, explaining the “Forward Caste” advantage in dynastic politics is important in order to understand how inclusion in multi-ethnic democracies is affected by dynastic politics. The alleged difficulties of democracy in multi-ethnic societies, according to the classic studies on the subject, are the consequence mainly of the difficulties of providing inclusion simultaneously to all significant ethnic groups (Lijphart 1977, Horowitz 1985, Horowitz 1994). Most of the literature on “conflict-management” in ethnically divided democracies, then, has focused on the question of how to design institutions that provide such inclusion (See Chandra 2008 for a review of this literature). Dynastic identities are altogether absent from the literature on ethnic inclusion. But to the extent that both belong to the family of descentbased identities, and in India as in many other cases, dynastic ties are usually nested within larger ethnic identities, it is reasonable to expect there to be some relationship between the two. Does dynastic representation deepen ethnic inclusion or obstruct it? The arguments in this chapter are a first cut at addressing this question. This chapter starts by establishing two surprising facts. First, even though the majority of parties across the three parliaments under study do not have an explicit ethnic platform, and those that do control only a small fraction of the seats in parliament, virtually all parties in these parliaments are dominated by a single ethnic category when it comes to the composition of their leadership. In principle, parties with a dominant ethnic group could be referred to as “ethnic parties” where the term “ethnic party” refers to the leadership composition of the party rather than its platform. This builds on my previous work (Chandra 2011) suggesting that ethnic parties can be classified using several indicators, including their name, platform, support base, arena of competition, and leadership composition and that these classifications are not equivalent: they can generate different counts of ethnic parties, and have distinct theoretical implications. Still, in order to avoid confusion with other sorts of ethnic parties, I try throughout to use the phrase “parties with a dominant ethnic group” to refer to the sort of party I am concerned with here. This sort of party, as the rest of this chapter shows, is important in understanding representation and dynasticism even in the absence of ethnic platforms. Second, the widespread expectation that politicians in ethnically divided societies consistently favor co-ethnics is belied when it comes to favoring co-ethnic dynasties: Parties dominated by the “Forward Castes” indeed favor co-ethnic (or “Forward Caste”) dynasties in their processes of candidate selection: they select a greater proportion of dynastic candidates from the “Forward Castes” than from other groups. But parties dominated by subaltern ethnic categories usually favor ethnic outsider dynasties: they select a greater proportion of dynastic candidates from other ethnic groups than their own. This does not mean that they do not send subaltern-caste MPs or

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subaltern-caste dynasties to parliament. They do. Indeed, among dynastic MPs elected from these parties, MPs from subaltern backgrounds are usually more numerous than MPs from “Forward Caste” backgrounds (see Tables 7.4–7.6) . But if we look at the percentage of dynastic MPs from each category in subaltern-led parties, a greater percentage of MPs from ethnic outsider categorie have dynastic ties than MPs from co-ethnic categories. The “Forward Caste” advantage in dynastic politics in India is an aggregation of the promotion of “Forward Caste” dynasties in both types of parties, with the first contributing the lion’s share. Explaining the “Forward Caste” advantage, then, requires explaining why both types of parties favor “Forward Caste” dynasts in their candidate selection process (also referred to here as the ticket allocation or nomination process). I attribute this to the intra-party politics that drives the candidate selection process in weakly institutionalized parties. In the absence of rules, this process is driven by two intra-party considerations that can be more important than, and usually shape perceptions of, the anticipated electoral performance of an aspirant: the need for the party leadership to placate leaders of important factions, and the need to sideline factions that could mount a challenge to the party leadership. As a result, the families most likely to be favored in the ticket allocation process are those which belong to groups which either dominate a party or faction, or are so weak that they do not constitute a threat to the dominant leadership. Intra-party politics systematically undermines dynastic representation among groups that are of intermediate strength – that is, groups that are strong enough to threaten the state or central leadership of a party, but not strong enough to assume leadership themselves. “Forward Castes” are the principal beneficiaries of this process across the party system because they control “Forward Caste” dominated parties, and are weak players in the factional competition in subaltern-dominated parties. This argument complicates but does not contradict the narrative of the increasing subalternization of Indian democracy. As the representation of subaltern groups in parliament increases, this indeed also produces increasing subaltern representation in the dynastic class. And as the introduction and several chapters in this volume suggest, these opportunities have indeed begun to be realized. But the rate at which increasing subaltern representation in parliament is translated into increasing subaltern representation in the dynastic class, this chapter suggests, depends on the party affiliation of subaltern MPs. Indeed, the fact that subaltern parties often favor “Forward Caste” rather than co-ethnic dynasties is testament to the overpowering role of institutions in producing and maintaining dynasticism that we have highlighted in this book – it overcomes what we might have thought was a natural affinity between members of subaltern groups and a natural antipathy towards members of ethnic groups representing dominant structures of power.

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Put in more general terms, this chapter suggests that the extent to which dynastic politics is accompanied by or reinforces patterns of ethnic inclusion depends on intra-party politics. Members of ethnic subaltern groups are more likely to enter the dynastic class when they establish secure control over the internal organizations of the parties to which they belong. When they do not have such control, their inclusion in the outer circles of politics may be accompanied by continued or increased exclusion in its inner circles, of which the dynastic class is one. This is a new contribution both to the literature on ethnic inclusion, which has focused largely on inter-party competition rather than intra-party politics, and to the literature on dynastic politics, which has not so far addressed the role either of ethnicity or intra-party politics in explaining dynasticism in modern democracies. Section 1 shows that most parties in the Indian parliaments under study are dominated by a single ethnic category. Section 2 shows that “Forward Caste” dominated parties are larger than subaltern-dominated parties, leading to the paradoxical result that most subaltern MPs enter parliament as representatives of “Forward Caste” rather than subaltern-dominated parties. Section 3 shows that “Forward Caste” dominated parties favor co-ethnic dynasties. Section 4 shows that subaltern-dominated parties favor ethnic outsider (“Forward Caste”) dynasties. Section 5 explains this “Forward Caste” advantage in both parties as a consequence of the intra-party politics that drives the ticket allocation process within weakly organized parties. Section 6 illustrates this explanation, using examples of the Congress party, the Samajwadi Party, and the Bahujan Samaj Party. As elsewhere in this volume, I use the term “ethnic” as an umbrella term to refer to descent-based identities, including those based on caste, ancestral religion, mother tongue and region of origin, and use the term ethnic “group” and ethnic “category” interchangeably (see Chandra 2012 for a justification). 1

Most parties in parliament are dominated by a single ethnic category

Although there is no single “correct” set of ethnic categories according to which the Indian population can be described, the categories that have been activated in national level politics in recent years include the “Forward Castes,” Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Muslims. “Forward” and Backward Castes, while not counted in the census, are generally understood to constitute a minority and a majority of the population respectively. Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Muslims, who are included in the Census, constitute 16%, 8%, and 13% of the population respectively. (See the Introduction for a discussion of the definition of these categories in this volume). This pattern of diversity in India as a whole is roughly replicated among parliamentary constituencies, which are also ethnically diverse for the most part.

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But the composition of the leadership of India’s parties – at least those in the national parliament – refracts rather than reflects this pattern of diversity. Most parties have a somewhat diverse composition – very few are mono-ethnic. But the majority of parties in the Indian parliament are dominated by one of the five ethnic categories listed in this section. I measure the dominance of an ethnic group within a party’s leadership in two ways: (1) Based on the identity of its main national leader in the year of election under study, hereafter called the “leadership” rule. The main national leader is defined as the person who heads the party organization at the national level (the National President [for most parties] or General Secretary [for the CPI or CPM] or its equivalent) and (2) Based on the identity of the plurality of its MPs, hereafter called the “plurality” rule. According to this rule, a party is coded as having a dominant ethnic category if at least a plurality of party MPs belongs to that category. Parties in which the majority of MPs come from a single ethnic category, therefore, are also coded as having a dominant ethnic category. Parties in which no ethnic group has a plurality of MPs – i.e. in which there are an equal number of MPs from more than one ethnic group – are not coded as having a dominant ethnic category. These are time-sensitive measures: the dominance of a group within a party can change if its national leader or the composition of its elected MPs changes. Both measures are necessary because of some important cases in which the identity of the leadership and of the plurality ethnic category do not match. For example, the leader of the AIADMK, Jayalalitha, is from a “Forward Caste” category (Brahmin) but the majority of its MPs in 2009 were from the Backward Castes. Should it be classified in 2009, then, as a “Forward Caste” or a Backward Caste dominated party? I classify it as a “Forward Caste” dominated party based on leadership, but a Backward Caste dominated party based on the plurality rule. Similarly, the BSP in 2009 had a Scheduled Caste (SC) leader (Mayawati) but the majority of its MPs came from the “Forward Castes.” I classify it in that year therefore as an “SC-led party” but as a “Forward Caste plurality” party. There are only a small number of parties in which the identity of the leadership and of the plurality ethnic category does not match. Still, I report each “fact” in this chapter using the leadership rule and the plurality rule separately, so that the reader can see that it is robust to the choice of different rules for classification. Table 7.1 describes the percentage of parties with a dominant ethnic group in each parliament, as well as the percentage of seats that it controls. This table does not describe ethnic dominance based purely on the leadership rule. According to that rule, all parties have a dominant ethnic group by definition, since all leaders have an ethnic identity. Here it is more meaningful, therefore, to examine parties based on the identity of the plurality of its MPs. I also report the percent of parties in which the identity of the leader and of the plurality ethnic category match, and the percent of seats controlled by such parties.

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Table 7.1 Ethnic dominance in political parties in Indian parliaments (2004– 2014) Definition of party with dominant ethnic group

2004

2009

2014

Percent of parties with a plurality ethnic category Percent of seats controlled by parties with a plurality ethnic category Percent of parties in which the leader and the plurality group are from the same ethnic category Percent of seats controlled by parties in which the leader and the plurality group are from the same ethnic category

89.47 97.24 73.68

83.78 94.84 62.16

91.43 97.97 74.29

89.87

80.66

89.13

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author

As the table indicates, parties with an ethnic plurality group constitute an overwhelming majority of parties, and control an overwhelming majority of seats in parliament. This includes parties with ideologies that are inclusive (such as Congress) or oppose overt mention of ethnicity altogether (such as the Communists), or have moderated previously overt ethnic appeals (such as the BJP or the BSP), or currently openly embrace an ethnic appeal (such as the TRS, SAD, or AIMIM). There are only a handful of parties, four in 2004, six in 2009 and three in 2014, which did not have an ethnic plurality category among their MPs. And this handful of parties controlled a remarkably small number of seats: ten seats in 2004, six in 2009 and eight in 2014. If we use a more restrictive indicator of ethnic dominance, considering only those parties which have a plurality ethnic category whose identity matches that of its leader, the size of the majority decreases somewhat but this basic fact remains unchanged. 2

“Forward Caste”-dominated parties are larger than subaltern-dominated parties

Parties dominated by the Hindu “Forward Castes” constitute less than half the total number of parties in each parliament (fifteen, seventeen, and sixteen in the 2004, 2009, and 2014 parliaments, respectively according to the leadership rule, and twelve, eleven, and fourteen according to the plurality rule) (See Tables 7.2 and 7.3). But they control the majority of seats in every parliament. This is true whether we classify ethnic dominance using either the leadership rule or the plurality rule. “Forward Caste” dominated parties, as these data indicate, tend to be large. The average number of MPs belonging to a “Forward Caste” dominated party between 2004 and 2014 is either twenty-eight or thirty-one, depending on whether we employ a classification based on either the leadership rule or the plurality rule. The two largest such parties, according to both rules, are the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Table 7.2 Classification of parties based on only on identity of leadership (2004–14) Category to which leader belongs

2004 2004 No. parties No. seats 2004 Party

2009 2009 2009 No. parties No. seats Party

2014 2014 2014 No. parties No. seats Party

FC

15

397

AGP, AIFB, AITC, BJP, BJD, CPI, CPI (M), INC, NCP, RLD, SAD, SHS, SJP(R), TRS, TDP

17

BC

8

93

SC

3

ST

426

AGP, AIFB, AIADMK, AITC, BJP, BJD, CPI, CPI(M), HJCBL, INC, NCP, RLD, SAD, SHS, SWP, TRS, TDP

16

498

AAP, AIADMK, AITC, BJP, BJD, CPI, CPI(M), INC, INLD, NCP, SAD, SHS, SWP, TRS, TDP, YSRCP

DMK, JD (S), 9 MDMK, PMK, RJD, RSP, SP, SDF

71

BVA, DMK, JD(S), JD(U), MDMK, RJD, RSP, SDF, SP

10

22

AD, AINRC, JD(S), JD (U), PMK, RJD, RLSP, RSP, SDF, SP

24

BSP, LJNSP, RPI (A)

2

22

BSP, VCK

1

6

LJP

4

8

BNP, JMM, MNF, NPF

4

6

BPF, JMM, JVM, NPF

3

4

JMM, NPF, NPP

Muslim

5

6

AIMIM, JKN, 4 JKPDP, MUL, NLP

7

AIMIM, AIUDF, JKNC, MUL

4

9

AIMIM, AUDF, IUML, JKPDP

Other

3

10

IFDP, JD(U), KEC

1

1

KEC(M)

1

1

KEC(M)

Total

38

538

37

533

35

540

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe). *Note that the total number of seats here does not include independents.

Table 7.3 Classification of parties based only on identity of plurality of MPs (2004–14)* Category to which plurality belongs

2004 2004 No. No. parties seats 2004 Party

2009 2009 No. 2009 No. parties seats Party

2014 No. parties

2014 2014 No. seats Party

FC

12

393

BJP, BJD, CPI, CPI(M), INC, JD(U), NCP, RLD, SAD, SHS, SJP(R), TRS

11

397

AITC, BJP, BJD, BSP, HJCBL, INC, NCP, RJD, RLD, SHS, SWP

14

456

AINRC, AITC, BJP, BJD, CPI (M), INC, NCP, RSP, SAD, SHS, SWP, TRS, TDP, YSRCP

BC

9

112

BSP, DMK, MDMK, NLP, PMK, RJD, SP, SDF, TDP

6

52

AIADMK, DMK, JD(S), JD(U), MDMK, SDF

9

56

SC

3

8

LJNSP, RPI (A), RSP

4

42

CPI, CPI(M), SP, VCK

2

8

AIADMK, CPI, JD (S) JD(U), PMK, RJD, RLSP, SDF, SP JMM, LJP

ST

4

8

BNP, JMM, MNF, NPF

4

5

BPF, BVA, JVM, NPF

2

2

NPF, NPP

Muslim

4

5

AIMIM, JKN, JKPDP, MUL

4

7

AIMIM, AIUDF, JKNC, MUL

4

8

AIMIM, IUML, JKPDP, AIUDF

Other

2

2

IFDP, KEC

2

2

AGP, KEC(M)

1

1

KEC(M)

No plurality

4

10

AGP, AIFB, AITC, JD(S)

6

18

AIFB, JMM, RSP, SAD, TDP, TRS

3

8

AAP, AD, INLD

Total

38

538

37

533

35

540

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe). *Note that if the largest number of MPs in a party comes from two social categories, that party is listed as having no plurality. Note also that the total number of seats here does not include independents.

Why “Forward Castes” have a dynastic advantage

215

The National President of the Indian National Congress throughout this period, Sonia Gandhi, is coded as “Forward Caste” based on marriage. The BJP has had several National Presidents during this period (Venkaiah Naidu, L. K. Advani, Rajnath Singh, Nitin Gadkari, and Amit Shah), all of whom belong to the Hindu “Forward Castes”. Parties dominated by subaltern groups – Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Muslims – constitute the majority or close to a majority of parties in parliament (twenty-three, twenty and nineteen in the 2004, 2009, and 2014 parliaments, respectively using the leadership rule, and twenty-two, twenty and eighteen using the plurality rule). But they control only a small percentage of seats. Subaltern-dominated parties, in other words, tend to be rather small in the Lok Sabha. The average number of MPs belonging to a subaltern-dominated party across the three parliaments is five, regardless of whether we employ a classification based on either the leadership rule or the plurality rule. The largest subaltern-dominated parties according to the leadership rule are either Backward Caste or Scheduled Caste dominated parties: the largest subaltern-led party in 2004 was the Backward Caste led Samajwadi Party (thirty-six seats). In 2009, the Samajwadi Party tied for first place with the Scheduled Caste led Bahujan Samaj Party (each had twenty-one seats). And in 2014, in a virtual decimation of subaltern-led parties in parliament, the largest such party was the Scheduled Caste led Lok Janshakti Party, with only six seats. Based on the plurality rule, the largest subaltern-dominated party in every parliament was the Samajwadi Party in 2004 and 2009, and the AIADMK (thirty-seven seats) in 2014. Scheduled Tribe dominated and Muslim dominated parties are usually exceedingly small. No such party has obtained more than five seats in any parliament between 2004 and 2014, and most usually send only one or two MPs to parliament. This means that, in a point usually neglected in discussions about the “subalternization” of Indian legislatures, most subaltern MPs enter parliament through parties dominated by “Forward Castes,” and not through parties dominated by co-ethnics. Most Backward Caste MPs, in other words, are elected from “Forward Caste” dominated parties rather than Backward Caste dominated parties. Most Scheduled Caste MPs are elected from “Forward Caste” dominated parties rather than Scheduled Caste dominated parties. Most Scheduled Tribe MPs are elected from “Forward Caste” dominated parties rather than Scheduled Tribe dominated parties. And most Muslim MPs are elected from “Forward Caste” dominated parties rather than Muslim dominated parties. To the extent that numerical strength indicates power, they are in subordinate positions in the political parties to which they belong. This has fundamental implications for the nature of representative politics and for the subject of this chapter.

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Tables 7.4–7.6 summarize the ethnic profile of MPs elected to parliament from both “Forward Caste” dominated parties and subaltern-dominated parties (categorized separately by plurality and leadership) between 2004 and 2014. As we see, “Forward Caste” parties are most likely to send “Forward Caste” MPs to parliament. But they also give tickets to members of subaltern groups. Each type of subaltern party is usually most likely to send members of subaltern groups to parliament, with some representation also for other groups. But the large number of seats controlled by the “Forward Caste” dominated parties means that most subaltern MPs in parliament belong to these parties.

Table 7.4a Profile of MPs from different party types (2004) (leadership) Party/MP

FC MPs

BC MPs

SC MPs

ST MPs

M MPs

FC dominated parties BC dominated parties SC dominated parties ST dominated parties Muslim dominated parties Other parties Total

184 19 2 0 0 4 209

96 40 10 2 1 1 150

53 21 8 0 0 1 83

44 1 0 6 0 1 52

15 11 4 0 5 0 35

Source: Chandra, Bohlken and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe); M (Muslim).

Table 7.4b Profile of MPs from different party types (2004) (plurality) Party/MP

FC MPs

BC MPs

SC MPs

ST MPs

M MPs

FC dominated parties BC dominated parties SC dominated parties ST dominated parties Muslim dominated parties Other parties No plurality Total

185 20 1 0 0 0 3 209

92 53 1 2 0 0 2 150

52 24 5 0 0 0 2 83

43 0 1 6 0 0 2 52

15 15 0 0 5 0 0 35

Source: Chandra, Bohlken and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe); M (Muslim).

Why “Forward Castes” have a dynastic advantage

217

Table 7.5a Profile of MPs from different party types (2009) (leadership) Party/MP

FC MPs

BC MPs

SC MPs

ST MPs

M MPs

FC dominated parties BC dominated parties SC dominated parties ST dominated parties Muslim dominated parties Other parties Total

204 19 10 0 0 0 233

87 30 5 0 0 0 122

66 16 3 1 0 0 86

46 2 0 5 0 0 52

17 2 4 0 7 0 31

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe); M (Muslim).

Table 7.5b Profile of MPs from different party types (2009) (plurality) Party/MP

FC MPs

BC MPs

SC MPs

ST MPs

M MPs

FC dominated parties BC dominated parties SC dominated parties ST dominated parties Muslim dominated parties Other parties No plurality Total

205 11 11 0 0 0 6 236

80 29 9 0 0 0 4 124

54 8 19 0 0 0 5 88

43 0 2 5 0 0 3 55

20 2 1 0 7 0 0 31

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe); M (Muslim).

Table 7.6a Profile of MPs from different party types (2014) (leadership) Party/MP

FC MPs

BC MPs

SC MPs

ST MPs

M MPs

FC dominated parties BC dominated parties SC dominated parties ST dominated parties Muslim dominated parties Other parties Total

229 4 2 0 0 0 235

125 17 0 0 0 0 142

81 0 3 0 1 0 85

49 0 0 4 0 0 53

12 1 1 1 8 0 22

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe); M (Muslim).

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Table 7.6b Profile of MPs from different party types (2014) (plurality) Party/MP

FC MPs

BC MPs

SC MPs

ST MPs

M MPs

FC dominated parties BC dominated parties SC dominated parties ST dominated parties Muslim dominated parties Other parties No plurality Total

224 5 2 0 0 0 4 235

99 42 0 0 0 0 1 142

71 7 3 0 1 0 3 85

49 0 2 2 0 0 0 53

11 2 1 0 8 0 0 22

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe); M (Muslim).

3

“Forward Caste” dominated parties favor co-ethnic dynasties

“Forward Caste” parties, as we have seen, favor co-ethnic (“Forward Caste”) MPs. In this section I show that they also tend to favor co-ethnic (“Forward Caste”) dynasties. Note that in this section, and for the rest of this chapter, I assume that the relative proportion of dynastic MPs from a given ethnic category within a party is a direct reflection of the relative proportion of dynastic candidates selected by the party from that category. This assumption becomes necessary because, as the introduction noted, collecting data on the dynastic backgrounds of all aspirants for tickets is a nearly impossible task. Focusing on renomination as a way of understanding candidate selection as we have done elsewhere in the volume is also not helpful here because renomination requires the prior presence of party MPs in parliament, and the representation of smaller, usually subaltern-dominated, parties in parliament fluctuates so much that they often do not have MPs to renominate. Tables 7.7a and 7.7b summarize the percentage of dynastic MPs from each ethnic category for “Forward Caste” dominated parties based on the leadership and the plurality rule respectively for each parliament individually. As Table 7.7a shows, when we classify “Forward Caste” parties according to the leadership rule we see that “Forward Caste” MPs in such parties are most likely to be dynastic, along with Muslim MPs. This is true in each parliament individually and all parliaments taken together. As Table 7.7b shows, the favoritism for co-ethnic dynasties (along with Muslims) remains when we classify parties according to the plurality rule. “Forward Caste” dominated parties also promote dynasticism among MPs from other categories, but to a lesser degree. Backward Caste MPs in such parties are more likely to be dynastic than other subaltern categories (with the exception of Muslims), followed by Scheduled Tribes and then finally

Why “Forward Castes” have a dynastic advantage

219

Table 7.7a Proportion of dynastic MPs from “Forward Caste” parties (leadership)

Category

2004 No. of MPs

2004 Percent dynastic

2009 No. of MPs

2009 Percent dynastic

2014 No. of MPs

2014 Percent dynastic

FC BC SC ST Muslim Other Total

184 96 53 44 15 5 397

22.83 20.83 15.09 9.09 26.67 0.00 19.65

204 87 66 46 17 8 426

36.27 32.18 22.73 23.91 35.29 0.00 31.46

229 125 81 49 12 2 498

26.64 20.00 6.17 18.37 25.00 0.00 20.68

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe).

Table 7.7b Proportion of dynastic MPs from “Forward Caste” parties (plurality)

Category

2004 No. of MPs

2004 Percent dynastic

2009 No. of MPs

2009 Percent dynastic

2014 No. of MPs

2014 Percent dynastic

FC BC SC ST Muslim Other Total

185 92 52 43 15 6 393

22.70 21.74 15.38 9.30 26.67 0.00 19.85

205 80 54 43 20 5 407

37.56 33.75 25.92 25.58 40.00 0.00 33.66

224 99 71 49 11 2 459

27.23 19.19 5.56 18.37 27.27 0.00 21.05

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe).

Scheduled Castes. Given the large numbers of MPs from “Forward Caste” parties in parliament, this means that the largest proportion of subaltern dynasties are also from “Forward Caste” parties. But as Chauchard’s chapter (6) in this volume suggests, the subordinate position of subaltern MPs in “Forward Caste” dominated parties means that they are less able to create dynasties than their “Forward Caste” counterparts. 4

Subaltern-dominated parties favor ethnic outsider dynasties

Subaltern-dominated parties, by contrast, do not favor co-ethnic dynasties regardless of which rule we use to classify them.

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Disaggregating these parties by the group that dominates its leadership shows that the “Forward Caste” advantage among subaltern-dominated parties is driven mainly by Backward Caste and Scheduled Caste dominated parties. Consider Backward Caste dominated parties first, classified according to either rule (See Tables 7.1 and 7.2 earlier in this chapter for the parties included under each rule). In such parties, as Tables 7.8a and 7.8b show, a greater proportion of “Forward Caste” MPs are dynastic compared to MPs from any other category, including the Backward Castes. Sometimes (e.g. in 2009), Backward Caste dominated parties also favor Scheduled Caste dynasties. They also appear to favor ST dynasties when classified according to the leadership rule, but this is again an artifact of small numbers, driven by the sole dynastic MP among STs in 2004.

Table 7.8a Proportion of dynastic MPs from Backward Caste parties (leadership)

Category

2004 No. of MPs

2004 Percent dynastic

2009 No. of MPs

2009 Percent dynastic

2014 No. of MPs

2014 Percent dynastic

FC BC SC ST Muslim Total

19 40 21 1 11 93

21.05 17.50 14.29 100.00 18.18 19.35

19 30 16 2 2 71

31.58 16.67 31.25 0.00 0.00 23.94

4 17 0 0 1 22

50.00 35.29

36.36

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe).

Table 7.8b Proportion of dynastic MPs from Backward Caste parties (plurality)

Category

2004 No. of MPs

2004 Percent dynastic

FC BC SC ST Muslim Total

20 53 24 0 15 112

20.00 15.09 16.67 13.33 16.07

2009 No. of MPs

2009 Percent dynastic

11 29 8 0 2 52

36.36 13.79 25.00 0.00 21.15

2014 No. of MPs

2014 Percent dynastic

5 42 7 0 2 56

20.00 26.19 14.29 0.00 23.21

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe).

Why “Forward Castes” have a dynastic advantage

221

This in any case supports the claim that they favor ethnic outsider dynasties more than co-ethnic dynasties. There is only one election (2014) when Backward Caste dominated parties classified by the plurality rule favor Backward Caste dynasties more than dynasties from any other social category. Broadly speaking, however, they are more likely to favor ethnic outsider rather than coethnic dynasties. The 2014 exception, furthermore, is consistent with the argument of this chapter that such parties, when they favor co-ethnic dynasties, favor mainly those who belong to their leader’s family. Scheduled Caste dominated parties, similarly, are more likely to promote ethnic outsider dynasties too (see Tables 7.9a and 7.9b). When classified according to the leadership rule (this includes the BSP, LJNSP, and RPI(A) in 2004, the BSP and VCK in 2009, and the LJP in 2014), we see that Table 7.9a Proportion of dynastic MPs from Scheduled Caste parties (leadership)

Category

2004 No. of MPs

2004 Percent dynastic

FC BC SC ST Muslim Total

2 10 8 0 4 24

50.00 20.00 25.00 0.00 20.83

2009 No. of MPs

2009 Percent dynastic

10 5 3 0 4 22

40.00 20.00 33.33 50.00 36.36

2014 No. of MPs 2 0 3 0 1 6

2014 Percent dynastic 50.00 0.00 66.67 100.00 66.67

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe).

Table 7.9b Proportion of dynastic MPs from Scheduled Caste parties (plurality)

Category

2004 No. of MPs

2004 Percent dynastic

FC BC SC ST Muslim Total

1 1 5 1 0 8

100.00 100.00 20.00 100.00 50.00

2009 No. of MPs

2009 Percent dynastic

2014 No. of MPs

2014 Percent dynastic

11 9 19 2 1 42

18.18 33.33 21.05 0.00 0.00 21.43

2 0 3 2 1 8

50.00 66.67 0.00 66.67 50.00

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe).

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Scheduled Caste-led parties have a greater proportion of dynastic MPs from among the Forward Castes and Muslims than from among Scheduled Castes (with the caution that these percentages are based on small numbers). The only exception to this pattern is the 2014 election. When classified according to the plurality rule (this includes the LJNSP, RPI(A), and RSP in 2004, the CPI, CPI (M), SP and VCK in 2009, and the JMM and LJP in 2014), we see that Backward Caste and “Forward Caste” MPs as well as Muslims in such parties have a greater percent of dynasties than Scheduled Caste MPs (again with the excpetion of the 2014 election). Parties which have either an SC leader or a plurality of SC MPs or both, in other words, appear to be actively biased against Scheduled Caste dynasties in parliament. Scheduled Tribe dominated parties, classified by either rule, appear to have a very small percentage of dynasts overall, and favor STs when they do send a dynastic MP to parliament (See Tables 7.10a and 7.10b). But the number of Table 7.10a Proportion of dynastic MPs from Scheduled Tribe parties (leadership)

Category

2004 No. of MPs

FC BC SC ST Muslim Total

0 2 0 6 0 8

2004 Percent dynastic

0.00 33.33 25.00

2009 No. of MPs 0 0 1 5 0 6

2009 Percent dynastic

0.00 0.00 0.00

2014 No. of MPs

2014 Percent dynastic

0 0 0 4 0 4

0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe).

Table 7.10b Proportion of dynastic MPs from Scheduled Tribe parties (plurality)

Category

2004 No. of MPs

FC BC SC ST Muslim Total

0 2 0 6 0 8

2004 Percent dynastic 0.00 0.00 33.33 25.00

2009 No. of MPs 0 0 0 5 0 5

2009 Percent dynastic

0.00 0.00

2014 No. of MPs 0 0 0 2 0 2

2014 Percent dynastic

0.00 0.00

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe).

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MPs from such parties is so small, even if we pool the data across elections, that no reliable conclusions can be drawn. A change in even one or two individuals could change these percentages significantly, either converging with or diverging from the patterns for other subaltern groups. Perhaps if our sample of representatives from ST dominated parties were larger, it would reveal a comparable degree of dynasticism. Certainly, several of these parties have a significant dynastic component that is not captured by looking at the small number of MPs. The JMM, for example, is led by a political dynasty headed by Shibu Soren. Three of Shibhu Soren’s sons – Durga, Hemant, and Basant – entered politics as members of the JMM. Durga Soren subsequently died, but his brothers remain politically active. JVM (P) leader Babulal Marandi’s brother Nunulal was a leader of the JVM (P) until he resigned from the party. Neiphiu Rio of the NPF also has family members active in politics. His younger brother Zhaleo Rio won an assembly seat in the Nagaland assembly elections in 2013, and his in-law Khekiho Zhimomi is a Rajya Sabha MPs.2 Muslim-dominated parties, however, are an exception to the trend of favoring ethnic outsider dynasties. Regardless of how they are classified, as Tables 7.11a and 7.11b show, Muslim-dominated parties consistently favor co-ethnic (Muslim) dynasties. Classifying them according to either the leadership or the plurality rule produces a virtually identical list, including the AIMIM, JKN, JKPDP, MUL, NLP, and AUDF (with some subtractions and additions across elections). While the number of Muslim MPs and Muslim dynasties in any individual election is too small to draw a reliable conclusion, the pooled data indicate an unequivocal preference for Muslim dynasties. This may be the consequence of the fact that Muslim-dominated parties, unlike other subaltern-dominated parties, are almost entirely mono-ethnic. Such parties almost never have a non-Muslim MP. Consequently, there are no ethnic outsiders available from among which to promote or suppress dynasticism. An explanation for the preference for co-ethnic dynasties among Muslim parties would require an explanation first for the preference for almost exclusively co-ethnic MPs. I do not undertake that explanation here: it may be related in part to the political isolation of Muslims in post-partition India, to patterns of residential or socio-economic segregation, and to the relatively uneven patterns of concentration of Muslim voters across electoral constituencies.

2

Dholabhai (2013).

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Table 7.11a Proportion of dynastic MPs from Muslim parties (leadership)

Category FC BC SC ST Muslim Total

2004 No. of MPs

2004 Percent dynastic

1

0.00

5 6

60.00 50.00

2009 No. of MPs

7 7

2009 Percent dynastic

42.86 42.86

2014 No. of MPs

2014 Percent dynastic

1

0.00

8 9

37.50 33.33

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe).

Table 7.11b Proportion of dynastic MPs from Muslim parties (plurality)

Category

2004 No. of MPs

FC BC SC ST Muslim Total

0 0 0 0 5 5

2004 Percent dynastic

2009 No. of MPs

60.00 60.00

0 0 0 0 7 7

2009 Percent dynastic

2014 No. of MPs

2014 Percent dynastic

42.86 42.86

0 0 1 0 8 9

37.50 33.33

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014), supplemented by author FC (Forward Caste); BC (Backward Caste); SC (Scheduled Caste); ST (Scheduled Tribe).

5

Why the ticket-allocation process favors “Forward Caste” dynasties

Why do “Forward Caste” led parties generally favor “Forward Caste” dynasties? Why do the parties led by the two principal subaltern groups – Backward Castes and Scheduled Castes – also favor “Forward Caste” dynasties, or at the very least resist Backward Caste and Scheduled Caste dynasties respectively? Relatedly, why do “Forward Caste” led parties allocate tickets to members of subaltern groups at all? Why is it that the main channel for subaltern dynasties from any group – Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Muslims – are “Forward Caste” led and not subaltern-led parties? The answer to all these questions, I suggest here, lies in the intra-party politics of the ticket allocation process. Political parties play a key role, then, in the founding and perpetuation of a political dynasty through their decision to

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allocate or withhold a ticket. An elected official seeking to create a dynasty needs a party willing to give a family member a ticket. Such a ticket by itself is not sufficient: once given a ticket, party nominees still need to obtain voter support. But it is a prerequisite: a politician whose family members do not get party tickets cannot create a political dynasty. The majority of voters in the Indian elections believe a party is more important, or as important, as the candidate in the election (see, for instance, NES 1996 and 1998 as cited in Chandra 2004, p. 200). And independents in general do not do well in Indian elections: although the number of independents contesting parliamentary elections in India has been increasing, the number of independents who win has been decreasing.3 Ticket allocation in virtually all political parties is a centralized process, with a single leader or committee at the apex of the party making decisions about party nominees in both parliamentary and legislative assembly elections. The central leadership’s decisions are influenced, not only by the anticipated electoral performance of the candidate, but by two intra-party considerations: (1) to ensure the compliance of powerful factions within the party so that they work for the party candidate or at a minimum do not work against the candidate and do not defect from the party and (2) to undercut factions that are becoming too powerful so that they do not threaten the leadership or its loyalists. Expectations of the electoral performance of the candidate are often subordinated to these two criteria or shaped by them: in a fluid environment in which new delimitations, new candidates, new party configurations, and new issues often make electoral predictions difficult, the balance of power between factions can often determine what information the central leadership receives about the potential performance of competing candidates and how it interprets the information. “Forward Caste” led parties favor “Forward Caste” families in their ticket allocation process because many “Forward Caste” led factions dominate factional competition in these parties, as both incumbents and challengers. At the same time, “Forward Caste” led parties allocate some tickets to members of subaltern groups and their families either where such groups have some factional clout, or where such allocation is important to the signal a party wants to send to voters, or both. Members of subaltern groups are rarely strong enough to pose a leadership challenge even in state level politics let alone at the national level. Consequently, members of subaltern groups are less successful overall in getting tickets for their family members than members of “Forward Caste” groups. Still, given the large numbers of seats controlled by “Forward Caste” led parties in parliament, a small proportion of seats given 3

Based on an analysis of parliamentary and assembly election returns from 1951–2011, as posted on www.eci.nic.in.

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to members of subaltern groups still translates into large numbers of such groups in parliament elected on these party tickets. In Backward Caste and Scheduled Caste led parties, the situation is different. These parties are typically led by a single leader – Mulayam Singh Yadav in the Samajwadi Party, Laloo Yadav in the RJD, Karunanidhi in the DMK, Mayawati in the BSP – and are usually concentrated in one or two states. In these parties, even one powerful faction can become a threat to the leadership, especially when its members come from the same ethnic category as the leadership. Consequently, leaders of such parties endeavour to make their own families the main legitimate representatives of their ethnic category and often deny tickets to co-ethnics and their family members. At the same time, they also promote members of ethnic categories other than their own. Giving tickets to members of other ethnic groups does not challenge their own stature within their party and their following, but can often also help the party win elections without nurturing internal rivals. 6

Illustration: the politics of ticket distribution in the Congress party, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party

To illustrate the logic of the argument put forward in Section 4, consider the examples of the Congress party, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, which are led by “Forward Caste,” Backward Caste and Scheduled Caste leaders, respectively. The Congress party is one of the two largest “Forward Caste” led parties in the parliaments under study. The Samajwadi Party is one of the largest Backward Caste led parties, and the Bahujan Samaj Party is the larger of the two Scheduled Caste led parties in parliament. Understanding the procedure by which tickets are allocated in these three parties, therefore, should tell us something about both the source of the lions’ share of dynasties in parliament as well as the dynamics within “Forward Caste,” Backward Caste and Scheduled Caste led parties more generally. The Congress party Ticket allocation in the Congress is the result of a struggle between factions within and across all three levels of the party – district, state, and national – competing for the ear of a central authority – the Congress’s Central Election Committee (CEC), which has the sole authority to nominate candidates for both parliamentary and state legislative assembly elections.4 The CEC consists 4

All information in this paragraph and on the formal procedures of candidate selection is from the Congress Constitution, downloaded on April 7, 2013 from www.aicc.org.in/new/documents .php.

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of the Congress President, the leader of the Congress Legislature Party, the eight other members of the Congress Parliamentary Board, and eight other members elected by the AICC. The CEC solicits recommendations from the “Pradesh Election Committees,” consisting of the President of the PCC/TCC, the leader of the Congress Legislature Party, and between four and ten other members, which may or may not in turn consult with the District Congress Committees at lower levels of the party organization.5 But the CEC is free to, and usually does, obtain information and recommendations through sources other than the Pradesh Committees, and its nominees may or may not match the recommendations forwarded to it by lower tiers of the party. The process of ticket allocation in the Congress is virtually unconstrained by formal rules. The Constitution lays down no rules by which the CEC obtains recommendations and no criteria that constrain the CEC beyond the minimal injunction that a Congress ticket for any election can only be allocated to someone who is a member of the party and has undergone a period of minimum training (for an unspecified duration on unspecified matters). The CEC is empowered to lay down additional criteria for the selection of candidates and direct regional committees to follow these criteria in their recommendations. Some guidelines are articulated, formally or informally, from time to time. But these guidelines change often, are often contradicted, and often ignored.6 As Rahul Gandhi himself notes: “The Congress is the world’s largest political organization, but there are no rules or laws here. We make a new rule every two minutes to cover up an old rule and perhaps nobody here knows what the rules are of this party.”7 If the sole consideration driving the ticket allocation process in the Congress was to win elections, one would expect that winnability – a calculation of the

5

6

7

See, for instance, the description of the Congress ticket allocation procedure in the Himachal Pradesh Assembly election, which appears to have been conducted in systematic fashion: 900 aspirants formally “applied” for tickets, the District Congress Committees met to make a recommendation and these recommendations were forwarded to the Congress Pradesh Committee. Sharma (2012). But even in this case, this procedure was non-binding; nothing prevented the Pradesh committee from soliciting other information, and making recommendations different from those sent by the District committees. And there is nothing in the Congress rules that make any of these recommendations binding on the Central Committee. For example, prior to the 2013 assembly elections in Karnataka, the CEC is believed to have laid down the guideline that those aspirants who had lost previous elections twice, or had lost the election with a margin of more than 15,000 votes would not be renominated. I could not find a primary source for this guideline. But at least two news sources refer to it, the first describing it as being in effect in the 2013 Karnataka elections, the second saying it had been in effect internally within the Congress since 2007. But this guideline was not followed in practice. See, for instance, “Tickets and Tantrums.” Frontline Volume 29 Issue 25, December 15–28, 2013. www.stantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/1046730.aspx. www.frontline.in/navigation/?type=static& page=flonnet&rdurl=fl2925/stories/20121228292503600.htm. Ramakrishnan (2013).

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expected votes a candidate is likely to get – would be the main criterion for ticket distribution. But the Congress, like any other party in India, is also driven by intra-party considerations that are as important as, and sometimes more important for the party as a whole or for individual factions within it than, winning. The two main considerations are those alluded to above – the need to placate powerful factions within the party and the need to protect the dominant leadership from imminent threat.8 These two main criteria as well as the others sometimes can override or shape the criteria of winnability. Indeed, recalling the Congress statement about ticket allocation policy quoted in the introduction, the party has declared explicitly that “Winnability alone should not be the benchmark for deciding nominees of the Party during elections and a balance is required between loyalty and winnability.”9 These criteria become the ammunition that fuel factional competition. Factions compete to determine which criterion is given priority. Further, since there are multiple and usually non-institutionalized channels for the transmission of information from bottom to top, factions compete to influence the flow of information about the extent to which ticket aspirants meet any given criterion. They offer competing assessments about the “winnability” of prospective candidates, aided by the fact that the previous track record of candidates cannot be used to assess the potential winnability of new aspirants, aspirants in constituencies which have changed since the past election, and aspirants in constituencies where the competitive environment has changed because of the emergence of new parties, new alliances, and new issues. Consider the first criterion of buying off powerful factions within the party. This is standard practice within the Congress. In the Karnataka assembly elections in 2013, for example, Congress party workers alleged that “two prominent leaders from Karnataka were able to corner the maximum number of tickets and distribute them to their loyalists.”10 Allocating tickets to faction leaders and their loyalists is a rational decision even if some are likely to lose. It allows such leaders to reward their followers, and at the same time undermine other factions, whose members are kept out of power even if the follower loses. Indeed, these factions often shape the ticket distribution process by controlling the flow of information to the central authority about the extent to which ticket aspirants meet any given criterion. They offer competing and self-serving assessments about their strength within the party, their “hold” on a constituency or region or ethnic category, likely alliance scenarios, and so on.

8 9 10

There are also other considerations, such as alliance politics or money, or sending certain ethnic signals, but these two are the most important. Jaipur declaration, a strategy document released by the Congress Party at an All India Congress Committee (AICC) meeting in Jaipur, Rajasthan on January 20, 2013. http://aicc.org.in/. Kannadiga World News (2013).

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The difficulty of obtaining reliable and objective information has been a consistent problem within the Congress party, so much so that the central leadership has repeatedly appointed its own observers to obtain reliable information. Such “observers,” however, can also become drawn into the factional competition within the party. When a ticket is given to one aspirant at the local level, other aspirants often leave the party with their followers or mobilize their followers to work against him or her. In the 2013 assembly elections in Karnataka, for example, the Congress leader central minister Ambareesh, who was given a ticket for one seat, threatened not to contest unless the candidate from another was changed. The party complied, replacing the candidate with an Ambareesh follower. When this ticket was changed, other district Congress office-bearers threatened to sit out the election in protest.11 It is common, furthermore, when ticket decisions are announced, to find the leaders of disgruntled rival factions not only sitting out the election but “working day in and day out to defeat their own candidates as their supporters were denied tickets.”12 This is a case of giving enough tickets to a powerful faction to appease them and maintain compliance. But there is another side: withholding tickets from a faction that is getting too powerful so that it does not become a threat. This is a common interpretation for example of why the Congress party denied a nomination to Jagan Reddy, a powerful factional leader in the Andhra Congress, whose subsequent exit split the Andhra Pradesh Congress party. The exit of one Reddy, however, simply led to the ascendance in the party of another – Kiran Kumar Reddy, who subsequently became Chief Minister of the Party.13 The result was the continued dominance of the “Forward Castes.” It follows then that within the Congress party, the family members most likely to be given tickets are family members of the numerically dominant groups: “Forward Castes.” These groups control the factions within the party and thus are most likely to win the factional struggles. Family members of other groups – Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Backward Castes, and Muslims – are also certainly given tickets, either in those states where they are in the ascendant in factional competition, such as Gujarat, or in those cases where the party is especially concerned about sending a signal to subaltern voters. Thus, Sachin Pilot, the son of the Congress Gujjar leader Rajesh Pilot, was given a ticket in the state of Rajasthan in order to cement the party’s association with the Gujjar category. Similarly, in the 2013 Karnataka assembly election the Congress party gave tickets to three family members of a prominent Congress Muslim politician, C K Jaffer Sharief, in order to bolster its image among Muslims.14 But given their relatively weak representation in positions of 11 14

12 Deccan Herald (2013). Rajashekara (2013). Johnson (2008). Nanjappa (2008).

13

Ramana (2010). Lulla (2011)

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power within the Congress, members of these groups are less successful in getting tickets for their family members than members of the “Forward Castes.” There is likely to be a difference in degree across “Forward Caste” led parties in the extent to which factional competition determines the outcome of the ticket allocation process. The Congress party has historically been more susceptible to factionalism than other parties, such as the BJP and the Communists, which have a stronger organizational structure. That said, factions are important in all such parties and the ticket allocation procedure, where information is available at all, is exceedingly centralized in most cases, without clear and transparent criteria influencing them. Consequently, when family members are favored by these political parties, they tend to belong disproportionately to the “Forward Castes.” The Samajwadi Party The Samajwadi Party constitution gives the authority to decide party nominees for both parliamentary and assembly elections to its Central Parliamentary Board.15 The National President of the Party chairs the board, a General Secretary of the party is its secretary, and it has up to five other members. The National President of the Party has complete control over the composition of the board. He nominates the General Secretaries of the Party along with other party officers, decides which one is to be secretary of the parliamentary board, and also nominates all the members of the parliamentary board. State parliamentary boards, composed of the state president, the state general secretary, and up to seven other members, may, according to the constitution, forward a panel of names to the Central Board for consideration as nominees for local, state, and parliamentary elections. But the final decision on party nominees rests with the Central Board, which is not bound in any way by the recommendations forwarded from below.16 In practice, the nomination process in the party is controlled by Mulayam Singh Yadav, the founder of the party, and his family. As National Party President, Mulayam Singh Yadav is the formal chairman of the board. But the SP does not provide information about the membership of the board, leaving the analyst to guess the membership of the board by piecing together 15

16

All information about the constitution is from the Constitution of the Samajwadi Party as adopted by its seventh national convention (May 26–28, 2008), as submitted to and made available by the Election Commission of India. Downloaded from www.eci.gov on June 28, 2013. Note that although the clause on state parliamentary boards says that these boards are to forward names for national, state, and local elections, the authority of the central board as spelt out here says nothing about local elections. Also, since local elections are for the most part partyless, it is not clear what this means.

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information from other sources. Although the party formally has six general secretaries, the one who is involved in ticket deliberations and makes announcements on behalf of the board about tickets publicly is his cousin, Ram Gopal Yadav. His brother, Shiv Pal Yadav, has also attended parliamentary board meetings in recent years.17 Yadav’s son Akhilesh Yadav, is the state president of Uttar Pradesh, the state which is the primary arena of activity for the Samajwadi Party. He has also been described as being present for at least one Parliamentary board meeting,18 and as being Mulayam’s main partner in the distribution of tickets.19 Two other SP members – Kiran Moy Nanda, and Mohammad Azam Khan – are also listed as either having attended a meeting or as a member, but it is clearly the Yadavs with whom the authority lies.20 There is, to be sure, disagreement and rivalry within the Yadav family. And non-family-members can surely influence the decision through their threats of withdrawal. Azam Khan, for instance, who is from outside the Yadav family, once made at least one bid for greater power over the power of ticket distribution, and family members, believing that his compliance was important for its ability to retain Muslim support, made attempts to mollify him.21 But all news sources locate the main decision-makers in the SP’s ticket distribution process as the Yadav family. Indeed, it is not clear if meetings of the parliamentary board are even held before many decisions.22 The considerations which drive the decisions of the Yadav family are the same as that in the other parties – promoting the electoral prospects of the party to the greatest extent possible while keeping important factions loyal and undermining potential threats. And in order to promote the party’s electoral prospects, the Samajwadi Party has for a long time been nominating candidates from across social groups: although its core base has historically been among Yadavs and Muslims, it has attempted to broaden its profile to include members of all caste groups, and this diversity is reflected in its candidate profile, which includes Brahmins, Thakurs, Backward Castes, and Scheduled Castes, But given the small size of this party, and the already strong power struggles within the family, preventing new challengers has also been important. Consequently, the family favors its own members in the distribution of tickets – with each family member competing for his own – and discourages the emergence 17 18 19 20

21

“Samajwadi Party Yet to Decide Over CM Post.” www.tejmedia.net/home/national/4-samaj wadi-party-yet-to-decide-over-cm-post.html. “Samajwadi Party Yet to Decide Over CM Post.” www.tejmedia.net/home/national/4-samaj wadi-party-yet-to-decide-over-cm-post.html. Nath (2011). For Nanda’s attendance, see “Samajwadi Party Yet to Decide Over CM Post.” www.tejmedia .net/home/national/4-samajwadi-party-yet-to-decide-over-cm-post.html. For Azam’s membership, see his biographical profile at http://164.100.24.167:8080/members/ biodata.asp?no=42&mpname=Khan+Shri+Mohd.+Azam. 22 Indian Express (2010). Bhatt (2011).

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of other powerful Backward Caste dynasties. Indeed, of the seven Backward Caste MPs the SP had in the 2009 parliament, only two are dynastic, and both come from the Yadav family. In the 2014 parliament, all five party MPs are from the Backward Castes, and all five are from the Yadav family: Mulayam Singh Yadav himself, his daughter in law, Dimple Yadav, two nephews (Akshay Yadav and Dharmendra Yadav) and one grand-nephew (Tej Pratap Yadav).23 In addition, other family members are important at other levels: Akhilesh Yadav is Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister; Shivpal Yadav is a minister in his cabinet, and several family members are active at the local level, including Ankur Yadav, the elder son of Shivpal Yadav, and Premlata Yadav, Mulayam Singh’s sister in law.24 But there are no other powerful dynasties within the SP, and no powerful Backward Caste dynasties in particular. Indeed, the party’s leadership has worked actively to prevent the emergence of such dynasties. Perhaps the best example of this is the expulsion and exit of the Kurmi Leader Beni Prasad Verma from the Samajwadi Party. Kurmis are also classified as Backward Caste in UP, and Verma and Yadav were the two main founders of the Samajwadi party; between them they were architects of the Yadav–Kurmi caste combination, which, along with Muslims, formed the core base of the party. Both Yadav and Verma began to promote their own families within the party: Mulayam Singh’s brothers joined the SP in the 90s, and his sons much later when they came of age. Verma, in the meantime, inducted his Rakesh. But there was not space for two Backward Caste dynasties within the party and an acrimonious struggle took place between Verma and Yadav. Verma and his son eventually left to form a new party, the Samajwadi Kranti Dal, in 2007 and subsequently joined the Congress.25 The Bahujan Samaj Party The Constitution of the BSP says nothing about ticket allocation.26 But it sets up a highly centralized organizational structure in which the party is headed by a single National President (elected by vote or consensus) who then has the authority to appoint and dismiss all office bearers of the Central Executive Committee. The CEC has the authority to make final decisions on all matters that concern the party, and the National President has the authority both to call CEC meetings and to exercise all functions of the Committee when it is not in session. In practice, all key decisions are made by Kumari Mayawati, the party’s main leader, in consultation with a revolving group of “lieutenants.” 23 25 26

24 See also Times of India (2012). Yadav (2012). Kumar and Mishra (2013). Economic Times (2007). All references to the constitution taken from BSP constitution (not dated) downloaded from ECI on June 28, 2013.

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In both formal rules and in practice, then, the centralized nature of the ticket allocation process of the BSP is clear. There are also no formal criteria by which the BSP allocates tickets. In practice, the BSP treats ticket distribution as an important component of its election platform, using the ethnic profile of its candidates and office bearers to signal the ethnic categories on behalf of whom it expects to advocate while in government (Chandra 2004). Although it began as a Scheduled Caste party, is headed by a Scheduled Caste leader and has a core set of voters among Scheduled Castes, it has attempted to reinvent itself as a party that belongs to all social categories (sarvsamaj). Accordingly, in the 2012 assembly elections in UP, for example, it purposefully advertised the broad composition of its candidate list: “While 88 members of the Scheduled Castes have been given ticket (there are 85 reserved constituencies in the State), the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) account for 113 and Muslims 85. Brahmins follow next, with 74 nominations and Kshatriyas (Thakurs) 33.”27 The organizational profile of the BSP in recent years has become similarly broad: the only people listed as leaders on the party’s website, in addition to Mayawati, are Satish Chandra Mishra (FC), Swami Prasad Maurya (BC), Suresh Mane, and Naseemuddin Siddique (Muslim).28 The broadening of the BSP’s profile of candidates and leaders in the party’s allocation of tickets, goes hand in hand with a deliberate downgrading of SC leaders. Mayawati, deeply concerned about intra-party challenges, is deeply invested in undercutting potential rivals – and in a party whose core base comes from Scheduled Caste voters, this threat is greatest from Scheduled Caste leaders. Members of other social categories are dependent on Mayawati’s favor in order to have Scheduled Caste voters vote for them. But Scheduled Caste leaders, by contrast, can in principle have their own base among this voting population. Consequently, aided by the President’s virtually complete and total control of entry into and expulsion from the BSP, the party has ejected many Scheduled leaders who have attempted to build their own following – especially R. K. Chowdhury, a leader from the Pasi Scheduled Caste category – and downgraded others.29 There are currently not many significant SC leaders within the party and those that do exist do not occupy important positions.30 In the 2004 parliament, for example, only a quarter of BSP MPs were from the Scheduled Castes (five out of nineteen). In the 2009 parliament, the share of SCs among BSP MPs dropped further: only two of the BSP’s twenty-one MPs (9%) were from the Scheduled Castes. The party did not win any parliamentary seats in 2014. 27 28 29

Khan (2012). BSP India website www.bspindia.org. The organizational list of the BSP (Election Commission) has a broad based set of names. 30 Jha (2012). Mishra (2011).

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It is not surprising then that when the BSP favors family members in the ticket distribution process, those family members are rarely from the Scheduled Caste category. Consider the examples of those BSP leaders whose family members have found a place in politics. These include Satish Kumar Mishra, currently a close aide of Mayawati, and a Brahmin. Mishra’s cousin was a Cabinet minister, his father-in-law a member of the Legislative Council, and his sister, niece and cousin held appointed positions in the government (chairperson of the State’s Women’s Commission, chairperson of the State welfare Board, and Chairman of the State Pollution Control Board, respectively).31 The wife of Naseemuddin Siddiqui, a Muslim BSP leader considered close to Mayawati, was an MLA. A third Brahmin, BSP leader, Ramvir Upadhyay, was himself a minister in the BSP government, while his wife is an MP, his brother was an MLA and his sister-in-law contested the panchayat elections. While the BSP, like most other political parties in India, has a number of dynastic representatives, very few come from the Scheduled Castes. In the 2004 parliament, the party had two dynastic MPs, one from the Backward Castes and one from the Scheduled Castes. In the 2009 parliament, of the eight dynastic MPs from the BSP, only one was from the Scheduled Castes, compared to four “Forward Caste” MPs, one Backward Caste MP, and two Muslim MPs. 7

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that even as dynastic politics brings more subaltern groups into representative politics in India that might have entered otherwise, “Forward Castes” have benefited more from dynastic politics than subaltern groups. The root of both this inclusion and imbalance lies in the intra-party politics of weakly organized parties. This process favors “Forward Caste” dynasties in most types of parties, regardless of their leadership. It is testament to the role that intra-party politics plays that this trend towards “Forward Caste” privilege has become reproduced even in the new subaltern political parties through which many new subaltern leaders fought their way into power when they found themselves blocked in the older national parties. This “Forward Caste” advantage is likely to be diminished significantly only if there is also a change in the internal dynamics of political parties that either favors factions from subaltern categories, or introduces a rule-bound process of ticket allocation that undermines the power of factions altogether. The pressures of electoral politics are likely to slowly increase the power of subaltern 31

The examples in this paragraph are from Mishra (2011) and “BSP Forgets Ideology, Discovers Family” Sunday Guardian, October 31, 2010. www.sunday-guardian.com/news/bsp-forgetsideology-discovers-family.

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groups within political parties – the ascendance of the Backward Caste leader Narendra Modi in a party historically dominated by Hindu “Forward Castes” is perhaps the clearest indication of this. Several parties, including the Congress party and the Samajwadi Party, have announced quotas for women and minorities within the party organization, which, if implemented, should change the politics of ticket distribution, and therefore the level of dynasticism in the Indian parliament. This ascendance of subaltern groups within party structures, either informally or through quotas, may be more likely the immediate future than a rationalization of intra-party procedures for the allocation of posts or tickets. In the Congress party, for example, Rahul Gandhi delegated the task for holding intra-party elections in the Congress Youth Congress to the Foundation for Advanced Management of Elections (FAME), run by former Election Commissioners.32 There has also been an attempt to hold primaries in a subset of constituencies. These experiments have met with a great deal of resistance, and are a long way from being accepted within the Congress party as a whole or in other political parties. But if implemented, they are likely to have a fundamental effect on the existence, and identity, of dynasties in the Indian parliament. REFERENCES Bhatt, Virendra Nath. “Storm Brews in SP Over Ticket Distribution.” Indian Express June 10, 2011. http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/storm-brews-in-sp-overticket-distribution/801788/. Bavadam, Lyla. “Tickets and Tantrums.” Frontline, Volume 29-Issue 25, December 15–18 2013. http://www.stantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/1046730.aspx. Bohlken, Anjali and Kanchan Chandra (2014). “Why Dynastic Legislators Do Better in Elections: An Institutionalist Explanation.” Working Paper. Brass, Paul (1965). Factional Politics in an Indian State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chandra, Kanchan, Anjali Bohlken, and Simon Chauchard (2014). “Dataset on Dynasticism in the Indian Parliament.” Chandra, Kanchan, ed. (2012). Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Chandra, Kanchan and Wamiq Umaira (2004). Why Ethnic Parties Succeed. New York: Cambridge University Press. (2008). “Ethnic Invention: A New Principle for Institutional Design in Multi-Ethnic Democracies.” James Johnson, Jack Knight, Margaret Levi and James Johnson eds., Mobilizing Democracy (Jointly published by the American Political Science Association and the Russell Sage Foundation). (2011). “India’s Democratic Dynasties.” Seminar 622 (Special issue on Dynasties in South Asia), May 2011. (2011). “What is an Ethnic Party.” Party Politics, March 2011. 32

See the account of this decision on the FAME website http://fame-india.com/event.php.

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Constitution of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Accessed on June 28, 2013. http://eci.nic.in/ eci_main/mis-Political_Parties/Constitution_of_Political_Parties/ ConstitutionOfBSP.pdf. Constitution of the Indian National Congress. Accessed on April 7, 2013. www.aicc .org.in/new/documents.php. Constitution of the Samajwadi Party. Accessed on June 28, 2013. www.eci.gov. Deccan Herald. “Karnataka Poll: Congress Faces Rebellion Over Tickets.”, April 16, 2013. www.deccanherald.com/content/326834/karnataka-poll-congress-faces-rebellion.html. Dholabhai, Nishit, “Home Is Where the Hearth Is.” Telegraph, March 1, 2013. www .telegraphindia.com/1130301/jsp/northeast/story_16617932.jsp#.UcslM-u1w7A. Horowitz (1994). “Democracy in Divided Societies”, in Larry Diamond & Marc F. Plattner eds., Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press (35–55). (1985). Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press. Economic Times. “Two More MLAs jump Mulayam Ship for Beni.” March 26, 2007. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2007-03-26/news/ 28385101_1_assembly-polls-samajwadi-party-beni-prasad-verma. Indian Express. “Shivpal offers to step down to accommodate Azam Khan.” November 5, 2010. www.indianexpress.com/story-print/707394/. Kannadiga World News. “Antony-led panel to probe Congress ticket sale charges.” April 8, 2013. http://kannadigaworld.com/news/karnataka/5255.html. Jaffrelot, Christophe and Sanjay Kumar, eds. (2009). Rise of the Plebeians?: The Changing Face of Indian Legislative Assemblies. New Delhi, Abingdon: Routledge. Jaffrelot, Christophe (2003). India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India. London: Hurst and Co. Jaipur Declaration. All India Congress Committee (AICC), Jaipur, Rajasthan, January 20, 2013. http://aicc.org.in/. Strategy Document. Jayal, Niraja (2006). Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jha, Dhirendra K. “Has Mayawati Forgotten Kanshi Ram?” Open Magazine, March 3, 2012. www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/has-mayawati-forgotten-kanshi-ram. Johnson, T. A. “Grandson Denied Ticket: Jaffer Resigns.” Indian Express, April 26, 2008. www.indianexpress.com/news/grandson-denied-ticket-jaffer-resigns/301684/. Khan, Atiq. “BSP Chief Places her Bets on OBC-Muslim Combination.” The Hindu, January 24, 2012. www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/bsp-chiefplaces-her-bets-on-obcmuslim-combination/article2804202.ece. Kumar, Navtan and Abhinandan Mishra. “Beni’s Anger Against Mulayam has Deep Roots.” Sunday Guardian, March 23, 2013. www.sunday-guardian.com/news/ beni-vermas-anger-against-mulayam-has-deep-roots. Lijphart, Arend (1977). Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration. Yale University Press. Lulla, Anil Budur. “Jagan Rocks the Congress.” Open Magazine, August 27, 2011. www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/jagan-rocks-the-congress. Mishra, Subhash. “Behenji in her Labyrinth.” The New Indian Express, June 5, 2011. http://newindianexpress.com/thesundaystandard/article430059.ece. Nanjappa, Vicky. “Karnataka: Jaffer Sharief Withdraws Resignation.” Rediff India Arpad, April 27, 2008.

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Nath, Virendra. “Storm Brews in SP Over Ticket Distribution.” Indian Express, June 10, 2011. www.indianexpress.com/story-print/801788/. Parliamentary and Assembly Election Returns (1951–2011). www.eci.nic.in. Rajashekara, S. “Congress Fears it May Fall Short.” New Indian Express, April 26, 2013. http://newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka/Congress-fears-it-may-fallshort/2013/04/26/article1562240.ece. Ramakrishnan, Venkitesh. “Rhetoric and Reality.” Frontline, Vol 31, Issue 3, February 22, 2013. www.frontline.in/cover-story/rhetoric-and-reality/article4372348.ece. Ramana, K. V. “Kiran Kumar Reddy to be New Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister.” DNA India, November 24, 2010. www.dnaindia.com/india/report-k-rosaiah-resign-1471306. Sharma, Ashwani, “HP Polls: Congress ticket distribution exercise today.” Indian Express, September 24, 2012. www.indianexpress.com/story-print/1007044/. Sunday Guardian. “BSP Forgets Ideology, Discovers Family.” October 31, 2010. www.sunday-guardian.com/news/bsp-forgets-ideology-discovers-family. Times of India. “4 Yadav clan members make it to SP’s First 2014 Lok Sabha Polls List.” November 17, 2012. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-11-17/ lucknow/35171332_1_first-list-dimple-yadav-candidates-with-criminal-cases. Yadav, Shyamlal. “The Samajwadi Parivar.” Indian Express, March 7, 2012. www.indianexpress.com/story-print/921192/. Yadav, Yogendra (1999). “Electoral Politics in the Time of Change: India’s Third Electoral System, 1989-99.” Economic and Political Weekly, Volume XXXIV (No. 34 and 35), August 21–28, 1999, pp. 2393–9. (2000). “Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge.” In Francine Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava and Balveer Arora eds., Transforming India. Delhi: OUP (120–45). (2010). “Representation.” In Niraja Jayal and Pratap Mehta eds. The Oxford Companion to Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press (347–60).

8

Dynasty and “paths to power” Anjali Thomas Bohlken

Omar Abdullah became a Member of Parliament in 1998. Two years later, he became a Cabinet minister in the national government. Eleven years later, he became Chief Minister of Kashmir. Abdullah attributes his rapid rise in politics to his family background. In his words: “Thanks to the family I belong to, I knew that at least my entry would be at a level suitable enough for me to make a contribution.”1 Indeed, Abdullah is a third-generation dynast of one of India’s most prominent political families. He is the son of Farooq Abdullah and the grandson of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, both of whom served as chief minister of Kashmir before him. Sheikh Abdullah was the founder of the National Conference, the party to which Omar Abdullah now belongs, and was known as the “Lion of Kashmir.” Few politicians in India can boast the family connections that Omar Abdullah possessed when he became an MP. However, another notable feature of Omar Abdullah’s background is his significant lack of experience when he entered national parliament. Omar Abdullah was only twenty-eight years old when he entered the Lok Sabha and his youth itself can be seen as one indicator of his inexperience. Moreover, he had never held a position in state or local government prior to becoming an MP.2 Reports suggest that when he first became a Lok Sabha candidate, he did not even speak the language of his home state – Kashmiri.3 And yet, when Omar Abdullah first filed his nomination papers for the Srinagar Lok Sabha seat in 1998, a number of ministers were present on the occasion and endorsed the party’s decision to nominate the young Abdullah.4 Expressing his support for the young political heir, one “senior minister” was quoted as saying “He is coming to politics via Parliament as had his father done . . .”5 Omar Abdullah went on to win a seat in the 1998 Lok Sabha, defeating his nearest opponent by a large margin.6 1 2 3

Bhandare (2009). Fourteenth Lok Sabha Bio-Profile. http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/former_Biography .aspx?mpsno=2. 4 5 6 Gunalan (1998). Hindustan Times (1998a). Ibid. Hindustan Times (1998b).

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Is Abdullah’s experience typical? Are dynastic politicians better able to bypass the lower rungs of the political career ladder than those without family members who have preceded them into politics? Focusing on the 14th and 15th Lok Sabhas, this chapter addresses this question by asking whether dynastic MPs are less likely to have gained political experience at lower levels of government before entering the Lok Sabha than are non-dynastic MPs. The question has both normative and practical implications. From a normative standpoint, Dahl considers political equality to be a defining feature of a democratic political system (e.g. Dahl 1998, Dahl 2006). At the same time, he recognizes that there is bound to be an unequal distribution of “political resources” within any society that, in turn, result in differences in the extent to which individuals are able to gain political influence (ibid.) This basic fact then begs the following question: What kinds of “political resources” should determine access to political influence? Democratic theory does not give us a definitive answer to this question. But, a logical consequence of many theories of distributive justice and political equality is that political resources that are not a product of an individual’s actions or decisions should not determine access to political influence (e.g. Rawls 1971, Dworkin 1981, Cohen 1989). Conversely, if an individual obtains public office by taking deliberate action to increase her knowledge and political skills, this route to power would be compatible with the kind of political equality that should, according to these theories, exist in a society. What are the normative implications of these theories for dynastic politics? One implication they suggest is that the mere existence of dynasties in the political sphere does not necessarily violate the principle of political equality. In fact, if those with family connections in politics simply have a greater predisposition towards acquiring the knowledge and skills that allow them to gain public influence, then the prevalence of politicians with family connections in politics may be perfectly compatible with ideals of political equality. What would be normatively problematic, however, is if individuals with family connections in politics were more likely than others to be able to achieve success in the political arena without climbing up the institutional ladder and acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge on the way. The question of whether dynasts are able to gain power without proceeding through the “normal” channels of entry that non-dynasts must pass through has practical implications as well. A politician who is able to gain political office by virtue of family connections alone may be less able to perform their duties well as they lack the skills or background that a politician who has “legitimately earned” their position might have. In his comparison of different paths to power taken by India’s political leaders, Hart (1988, 52) argues that leaders who have gained power at the upper echelons of the political hierarchy by climbing the institutional ladder tend to be of higher quality than leaders who

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have achieved power through dynastic succession because the former group of leaders need to demonstrate certain orientations and skills in order to take each step up the ladder. Leaders who have taken this route tend to be “insiders” who become gradually more aware of the “rules of the game” as they ascend the political hierarchy (Spary 2007). These leaders thus tend to have certain orientations that make them effective leaders such as appreciating “the need for vigorous party organization reaching to the voters” and “for bureaucratic staff and procedures capable of delivering services and carrying policies into execution” (Hart 1988, 52). Since each step in the ladder is competitive, this route to power may also grant the leader more legitimacy amongst other contenders for the post (Hart 1988: 52). If this characterization of the institutional route to power is accurate and if dynasts are more likely to be able to avoid the institutional or insider route to political power, it follows that dynasts would also be more likely to suffer a relative lack of political knowledge, skill and legitimacy compared to other politicians. Using information on background of MPs in the 14th and 15th Lok Sabhas collected from the Lok Sabha Who’s Who7, the chapter first establishes clearly that, in general, those MPs with family members preceding them into politics (henceforth “dynasts”) are less likely to have acquired political experience at lower levels of government than those without preceding family ties (henceforth “non-dynasts”). It also shows that this pattern holds regardless of whether we are considering experience at the state level or experience at local levels of government. With a view to gaining a deeper understanding of why dynasty matters at all, the chapter then proceeds to understand why, when, and how dynastic ties serve as a substitute for political experience. Three key lessons emerge from this exercise. First, this “dynastic advantage” (i.e. the ability of dynastic ties to serve as a substitute for political experience at lower levels of government) does not seem to exist amongst Muslim and SC or ST MPs and exists only sometimes for women. However, the data suggests that MPs who are male and who belong to a “Forward Caste” are able to consistently use dynastic ties as a substitute for experience in lower levels of government. The chapters in this volume by Basu (Chapter 5), Chauchard (Chapter 6), and Chandra (Chapter 7) are used to interpret and shed light on some of these patterns. Second, while dynastic ties themselves are a privilege, we find that not all dynasts are created equal. Some types of family connections are particularly powerful in terms of serving as a substitute for political experience while others are not. MPs whose family members did not attain a position in national parliament and, in some cases, those whose family connections in 7

The Lok Sabha Who’s Who is available at: http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/lokprev .aspx.

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politics were through someone other than a parent, did not have to work any less hard than those MPs without a family member who preceded them in politics. Third, we find that the tendency of dynastic ties to serve as a substitute for lower level political experience exists both in parties that are perceived as weakly organized, such as the Congress, as well as in parties that are perceived to have relatively stronger organizations, such as the BJP and the CPI-M. Thus, while Ziegfeld’s chapter (4) in this volume has shown that parties that are organizationally weak and autocratically run are more prone to dynasticism in general, the variation in organizational weakness that exists across Indian parties does not seem to significantly shape the degree to which parties are willing to trade off family connections for political experience at lower levels of government. What do these findings imply about how we interpret the phenomenon of dynasty in Indian politics? First, it appears as if dynastic connections are but one form of privilege possessed by the politicians who make it into national parliament. While MPs with the most powerful kind of dynastic ties appear to have more of an advantage than their non-dynastic peers, those belonging to subaltern dynasties or those with less powerful family members did not have a particular advantage over non-dynasts. Thus, the education, connections and experience outside politics or wealth of non-dynasts may have granted them similar privileges as those possessed by dynasts with weaker family ties. This finding also indicates the degree to which the prevalence of dynastic ties should be normatively troubling. While we may be concerned that the prevalence of dynastic politicians on the national stage is also indicative of rampant nepotism and of a political class that is less deserving of their position, our concern should be confined to dynasts from dominant groups or those with political connections to individuals who have achieved national public office. Similarly, on a practical level, if political experience in lower levels of government improves the quality of public service that a politician provides, we should be particularly concerned about the election of these kinds of dynasts but not others. The chapter proceeds as follows. The next section discusses how dynastic ties relate to political experience and other alternative paths to success in national politics. Section 2 examines the degree of “dynastic advantage” amongst subaltern groups. Section 3 discusses how the nature of the family ties of an MP shapes the relationship between dynasty and experience. Section 4 examines the strategies of various parties in the extent to which they privilege, and trade off, dynasty and political experience. Section 5 discusses possible reasons why parties might have a preference for dynasts. The conclusion suggests some avenues for further research and discusses the likely implications of reforms to local institutions and parties in the Indian context.

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1

Dynasty and political experience as paths to power

Patrick French describes Rahul Gandhi addressing a gathering of students in Madhya Pradesh as follows: “There are three-four ways of entering politics . . . “First, if one has money and power. Second, through family connections. I am an example of that. Third, if one knows somebody in politics. And fourth, by working hard for the people.”8 This statement by Rahul Gandhi, a self-professed political dynast, reflects a common perception that dynastic ties can serve as a substitute for other modes of entry into politics such as wealth, connections or political experience. While we cannot be sure what Rahul Gandhi intended to convey with this statement, one reading of it is that dynastic ties should serve as a substitute for political experience in becoming an MP, but that family ties are just one way in which an MP can achieve political success without “working hard for the people.” Wealth or fame acquired in areas outside politics may be equally likely to allow individuals to achieve success in the political arena without political experience. Thus, while we may expect the average “dynast” to have less experience than the average “non-dynast,” we may also expect that amongst the non-dynasts are many individuals who have had some sort of privileged access to political success that allows them to avoid acquiring political experience. Our data allow us to investigate both of the above implications. To what extent do dynastic ties serve as an alternative path to political experience to become an Indian MP? What proportion of MPs use either or both of these paths? What are the characteristics of the MPs that use neither? Tables 8.1.1 and 8.1.2 shed some light on these questions for the 15th and 14th Lok Sabhas respectively. The tables show that for each of the parliaments it is much more common for an MP to enter the Lok Sabha without preceding dynastic ties, but having served at lower levels of government rather than the other way around. 37% of the MPs in the 15th Lok Sabha and 46% in the 14th Lok Sabha seem to have achieved their positions through hard work independent of family connections. The table also shows that there are sizeable opportunities for entry into the national political arena outside of these two possible paths. About a third of MPs in both parliaments have entered the Lok Sabha without either lower level political experience or preceding dynastic ties. Who are the MPs who have entered the Lok Sabha with neither dynastic ties nor experience in lower tiers of government? In the 15th Lok Sabha, around 30% of the MPs with neither dynastic ties nor political experience are from SC or ST constituencies. Thus, reservations may provide a path to entry into politics that is separate from

8

Quoted in French (2011).

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Table 8.1.1 Relationship between dynasty and experience at state or local level (15th Lok Sabha)

No preceding dynastic ties Preceding dynastic ties Total

No experience at state or local level

Experience at state or local level

Total

33% 19% 53% (285)

37% 11% 48% (258)

70% (380) 30% (163) 100% (543)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014). Data on Lower-level experience are compiled from the Lok Sabha Who’s Who available at: http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/lokprev.aspx.

Table 8.1.2 Relationship between dynasty and experience at state or local level (14th Lok Sabha)

No preceding dynastic ties Preceding dynastic ties Total

No experience at state or local level

Experience at state or local level

Total

34% 12% 46% (251)

46% 8% 54% (292)

80% (434) 20% (109) 100% (543)

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014). Data on lower-level experience are compiled from the Lok Sabha Who’s Who available at: http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/lokprev.aspx.

either dynasty or prior experience at lower levels of government. A quick glance at the names of non SC/ST MPs who lack both dynastic ties and political experience reveals that some have acquired the name recognition, connections and/or wealth necessary to succeed in Indian politics by virtue of their success in other careers such as film (e.g. Jaya Prada, Raj Babbar, Shatrughan Sinha), sports (Navjot Sidhu) or international diplomacy (Shashi Tharoor). Other notable names on this list are prominent party leaders such as LK Advani, Sharad Pawar and Mamata Banerjee. Thus, founding a party or, in the case of less prominent MPs, rising through the ranks of the party organization or its affiliates (e.g. the RSS in the case of the BJP) may be another path to electoral success at the national level. Other possible paths to entry into politics could be wealth and connections secured through involvement in criminal activities or membership in key party leaders’ social or political networks. Regardless of other possible paths to entry into politics, however, Table 8.1 suggests that the path of acquiring political office through dynastic ties does seem to be pursued as an alternative to acquiring political experience at other levels of government. In each parliament, only a small proportion of MPs have both preceding dynastic ties as well as

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Table 8.2 Experience at lower levels conditional on presence of dynastic ties

15th Lok Sabha Dynastic MPs Non-dynastic MPs 14th Lok Sabha Dynastic MPs Non-Dynastic MPs

Absolute number

Percentage of MPs with experience at the state or local level

163 380

36% 55%

109 434

38% 58%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014). Data on lower-level experience are compiled from the Lok Sabha Who’s Who available at: http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/ Members/lokprev.aspx.

prior political experience in lower levels of government. The majority of MPs with dynastic connections have not served in state or local government before becoming an MP. As Table 8.2 shows, non-dynasts are, on average, far more likely to enter the Lok Sabha with political experience at lower levels of government than are dynasts. In the 15th Lok Sabha, 36% of dynasts have experience at the state or local level as compared to 55% of non-dynasts. And this difference is statistically significant. We find a similar picture in the 14th Lok Sabha as well: in this parliament, 38% of dynasts have experience at the state or local level while the relevant number for non-dynasts is 58%. Moreover, while we do not have data on state and local level experience for the newly elected MPs in the 16th Lok Sabha, our data on the 188 MPs in the 16th Lok Sabha who had served in either of the two previous Lok Sabhas suggest that there may be similar differences between the dynasts and non-dynasts in the 16th Lok Sabha as well.9 Thus, in both the 14th and the 15th Lok Sabhas, and possibly in even the 16th Lok Sabha, we find that dynastic MPs have significantly less experience at lower levels of government than their nondynastic counterparts. Why might dynastic MPs have been able to avoid climbing up the institutional ladder to a greater extent than non-dynastic MPs? This pattern is a result of the choices made by the candidates themselves as well as both parties 9

Amongst this group of MPs we find that the percentage of dynasts with political experience at lower levels of government is 30% while the relevant percentage for non-dynasts is 55%. Note, however, that the data we use for the 16th Lok Sabha underestimates the prevalence of state and local level experience since they do not capture whether a 2004 MP obtained state or local level experience between 2009 and 2014.

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and voters. Yet, as Chandra describes in the introductory chapter, the choices that voters make in electing dynastic politicians – and specifically in electing dynastic politicians without political experience at lower levels of government – are likely to be heavily circumscribed by the structures of state and party. Moreover, unlike earlier periods in Indian political history where candidate selection procedures in the Congress were fairly decentralized (Kochanek 1967), the candidate selection procedures in Indian parties today are heavily centralized with the power over these decisions being concentrated heavily in the hands of party leaders at the apex (Farooqui and Sreedharan 2014). The main difference between the major Indian parties in the process of candidate selection is only in the degree to which sub-national party organs have input into this process (ibid.). For example, even in the DMK – a party in which lower level party officials enjoy a considerable degree of autonomy – decisions on nominations are in practice made by the party leader, who is lobbied by other party members (Manikandan and Wyatt 2014). Thus, the choices made by parties in selecting dynastic candidates who lack lower level political experience are likely to be driven by the decisions of the upper echelons of the party leadership rather than the party as a whole. In some cases, this concentration of power over candidate selection in the hands of a single leader, or a handful of them, results in the party leaders nominating their own family members, while in other cases the party leadership may respond to the requests of active senior politicians in the party to include their family members in the party and in politics by giving them a nomination (ibid.). As Ziegfeld’s chapter (4) in this volume suggests, the party’s top leadership may succumb to these pressures in order to keep these senior politicians loyal to the party. However, in other cases, party leaders may themselves decide to nominate relatives of existing politicians into the party even absent this pressure. In a study of women politicians in Andhra Pradesh, Wolkowitz (1987, 213) observes that women often obtained nominations even without the support of their husbands because of the important role that extrafamilial leaders played in the process of bargaining. I suggest later in this chapter that one reason that party leaders might favor dynastic politicians in the nomination process may have to do with the ability of family ties to substitute for, or strengthen, a party’s local organizational capacity. Dynasty and level of government Given the institutionalization of Panchayati Raj brought about by the 73rd constitutional amendment, it is also interesting to examine whether dynastic ties have a differential effect depending on the level of government in question. Table 8.3 shows that dynastic MPs are very unlikely to have previously served in local government and are significantly less likely to have previously served in

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Table 8.3 State and local level experience conditional on dynasty 15th Lok Sabha

Dynasts Non-dynasts

14th Lok Sabha

Percentage with experience at state level

Percentage with experience at local level

Percentage with experience at state level

Percentage with experience at local level

32% 48%

5% 10%

30% 48%

9% 22%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014). Data on lower-level experience are compiled from the Lok Sabha Who’s Who available at: http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/lokprev.aspx.

a local government than in state government. In fact, only 5% of dynasts in the 15th Lok Sabha and 9% of dynasts in the 14th Lok Sabha have had experience in local government. Jitendra Singh Malik, an MP from the Sonepat constituency in Haryana, is a rare example of a dynastic MP with experience in local government. He entered politics with dynastic ties – his father, Rajinder Singh Malik served as a two term Haryana MLA before him. And yet, he started out his career in politics not as an MP or even an MLA, but as a member of the Zilla Parishad in Sonepat from 1995–2000. He then served as an MLA for two terms in the Haryana Vidhan Sabha before becoming an MP in 2009. Jitendra Singh Malik, however, is an exception rather than the rule. Although the proportion of MPs from the 14th Lok Sabha who had local level experience is higher than the relevant proportion for the 15th Lok Sabha, MPs within each parliament were far more likely to have state level experience than local level experience. A similar pattern also holds for non-dynastic MPs. However, the most important pattern that emerges is that, in both parliaments, non-dynastic MPs are more than twice as likely to have had experience at the local level as their dynastic counterparts. This difference is statistically significant in each of the parliaments. Thus, regardless of whether we are considering the local or the state level, dynastic MPs have on average a significantly greater advantage in bypassing that level when compared to non-dynastic MPs. Dynasty and age It could be argued that focusing on whether an MP has served in lower levels of government does not capture the range of political or other experience that might be relevant for the career of an MP. For example, an MP might have acquired political experience by having served in various important party posts or equally they may have acquired experience running for political office at various levels although not necessarily winning. In addition, MPs may have experience in other careers closely related to politics such as in the bureaucracy

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80

Age (As of 2011)

70

60

50

40

30 Non-Dynastic MPs Excludes outside values

Dynastic MPs

Figure 8.1 Box plot of age of dynastic and non-dynastic MPs (15th Lok Sabha) Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014). Data on age for the 15th Lok Sabha are taken from PRS Legislative Research.

or judiciary. Absent data on these issues, one indicator of the extent to which MP has political experience (or any career experience, for that matter) is their age. Examining the relationship between age and dynasty can provide an alternative means of gauging the extent to which preceding dynastic ties can substitute for political or other experience of MPs. Examining the data reveal that the average age of a dynastic MP in the 15th Lok Sabha is forty-nine and is around nine years younger than the average age of a non-dynastic MP.10 The relevant difference for the 14th Lok Sabha is eight years.11 Figures 8.1 and 8.2 show, using a boxplot, the age distributions of MPs without and with dynastic ties. The graph shows that dynasts tend to be significantly younger than non-dynasts12 and that the

10 11 12

Data on age for the 15th Lok Sabha are taken from PRS Legislative Research. Data on age for the 14th Lok Sabha is taken from the Election Commission of India. French (2011) also documents a correlation between age and dynasty, but somewhat differently. He notes that for the Congress party, the proportion of dynastic ties amongst the youngest MPs is far greater than for the older MPs. He interprets this as an indicator of the extent to which Indian politics is becoming more dynastic with each successive generation of politicians.

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Age in 2004

80

60

40

20 Non-Dynastic MPs Excludes outside values

Dynastic MPs

Figure 8.2 Box plot of age of dynastic and non-dynastic MPs (14th Lok Sabha) Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014). Data on age for the 14th Lok Sabha are taken from the Election Commission of India.

difference between these two groups is not just driven by a few well-known younger MPs. Rather the entire distribution of ages across the group of dynasts is visibly lower than the relevant distribution for non-dynasts. These differences tend to corroborate the findings with regard to formal political experience in lower tiers of government. If an MP’s age reflects the degree to which he or she has acquired any career experience, dynastic ties seem to serve as a substitute for experience in general as a path to entering the Lok Sabha. Moreover, while we do not have the equivalent data for the 15th Lok Sabha, our data on MPs in the 14th Lok Sabha show that the average length of time for which a dynastic MP has held any kind of political position is ten years while the relevant length of time for a non-dynastic MP is eighteen years.13 This difference is statistically significant at the 99.99% level. Thus, even beyond a simple 13

This information is coded based on the first year that the MP is recorded as having held a political position in his or her bioprofile in the Lok Sabha Who’s Who. The political positions included are MP, MLA, member of local government or an official position within the party organization.

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indicator of positions in lower levels of government, the data suggest that dynastic MPs have significantly less overall political experience than non-dynastic MPs. The figures on age, however, suggest what may be construed as a positive aspect of dynastic politics – that it brings younger people into the national political sphere who likely bring along with them new ideas and skills. The entry of younger people into the Lok Sabha may be especially valuable in India, whose youth population is projected to be one of the world’s largest in 2020 and whose youth seem to buck the general global trend of declining interest in politics.14 On the flip side, however, our data suggest that youth brings along with it political inexperience. Regardless of whether they are dynastic or not, our data show that the proportion of MPs under thirty-five who have experience at lower levels of government is very low – 15% in the 2004 parliament and 17% in the 2009 parliament.15 Moreover, our data on MPs in the 14th Lok Sabha show that the average length of time for which an MP under thirty-five has held any kind of political position is less than three years. Thus, while dynastic politics is responsible for producing a more youthful parliament, this is not necessarily an unqualified benefit and may even be a cost. Dynasty and education It is clear so far that dynastic ties serve as a clear substitute for political experience regardless of the type of political experience we are concerned with. Yet, this should not lead us to automatically conclude that dynasts are less deserving of their positions. It may be argued that although MPs with preceding dynastic ties lack political or other experience, they may have other attributes that make them better leaders. One important possibility is that dynasts are better educated than those without preceding dynastic ties. Table 8.4, which shows the level of education of MPs with and without preceding dynastic ties16, indicates that this is true. In each parliament, a smaller proportion of dynasts have failed to either enter or complete college as compared to non-dynasts and this difference between the groups is statistically significant for each of the parliaments.

14 15

16

deSouza, Kumar, and Shastri (2009), Shivakumar (2013). The proportion of dynastic MPs under thirty-five with political experience is even lower, although there is no statistically significant difference between dynasts and non-dynasts in this age group for either parliament. Data on education are taken from PRS Legislative Research for the 15th Lok Sabha. For the 14th Lok Sabha, these data are collected from candidate affidavits submitted in 2004, downloaded from http://myneta.info/. Where the information was unavailable from the affidavits, the information was collected from the Lok Sabha Who’s Who. Data is missing for one MP in the 14th Lok Sabha and for thirteen MPs in the 15th Lok Sabha.

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Table 8.4 Education and dynasty

Education level Less than college graduate College graduate, postgraduate or doctorate

15th Lok Sabha

14th Lok Sabha

Percentage amongst dynasts

Percentage amongst non-dynasts

Percentage amongst dynasts

Percentage amongst non-dynasts

15% 85%

22% 78%

16% 84%

23% 77%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014). Data on education are taken from PRS Legislative Research for the 15th Lok Sabha. For the 14th Lok Sabha, these data are collected from candidate affidavits submitted in 2004, downloaded from http://myneta.info/. Where the information was unavailable from the affidavits, the information was collected from the Lok Sabha Who’s Who. Data are missing for one MP in the 14th Lok Sabha and for thirteen MPs in the 15th Lok Sabha.

Thus, in terms of the question posed originally, as to whether MPs with preceding dynastic ties have earned their position through merit, one possibility is that dynasts are able to bypass gaining political experience because they tend to be better educated. In the 15th Lok Sabha, the percentage of college graduate MPs amongst those who have no experience at lower tiers of government is 85%, while the relevant percentage amongst those who have had some experience is only 75%. The relevant proportions for the 14th Lok Sabha are 84% and 74% respectively. In each parliament, the differences are statistically significant. One conclusion we might draw from these numbers is that education serves as a substitute for prior political experience insofar as MPs with no political experience at lower tiers of government are better educated than those with political experience. Indeed, for a select group of MPs, such as P. Chidambaram, Shashi Tharoor, and Salman Khurshid, their educational qualifications may have paved the way for their political success by allowing them to perform well both in the political arena and outside of it. However, in most other cases, education itself is not likely to have been a path to power. Instead, education may simply be a proxy for wealth, privilege or social standing and these factors, and not education, may have been the primary reasons for the individual’s political success. Nevertheless, the possibility still remains that the ability of dynastic MPs to bypass gaining experience at lower tiers of government can be explained by their higher levels of education. To address this possibility, I examine the relationship between dynastic ties and political experience conditional on the level of education of the MP. The results of this analysis for both the 14th and

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Table 8.5 Percentage of dynasts and non-dynasts with political experience at lower levels of government, conditional on education

Education category Less than college graduate College graduate, post graduate or doctorate

15th Lok Sabha

14th Lok Sabha

Dynastic ties

No dynastic ties

Dynastic ties

No dynastic ties

33% 37%

69% 50%

24% 40%

72% 54%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken and Chauchard (2014). Data on education are taken from PRS Legislative Research for the 15th Lok Sabha. For the 14th Lok Sabha, these data are collected from candidate affidavits submitted in 2004, downloaded from http://myneta.info/. Where the information was unavailable from the affidavits, the information was collected from the Lok Sabha Who’s Who. Data are missing for one MP in the 14th Lok Sabha and for thirteen MPs in the 15th Lok Sabha.

15th Lok Sabhas are depicted in Table 8.5. The table shows that in each of the parliaments, regardless of their level of education, an MP with dynastic ties is significantly less likely to have political experience at lower tiers of government than an MP with no dynastic ties. Thus, although dynastic MPs tend to be better educated than non-dynastic MPs and although education itself, or the privileges associated with it, may serve as a substitute for political experience at lower tiers of government, a closer look at the data reveals that the ability of dynastic ties to substitute for political experience are unlikely to be explained by the higher average levels of education of dynastic MPs. Having established that dynastic ties serve as an alternative to political experience, regardless of how it is measured and even controlling for education levels, the next section explores how MPs’ membership in subaltern groups affects the degree to which dynastic ties substitute for political experience. 2

Subaltern groups

As documented in other chapters in this volume, a growing number of politicians from subaltern groups have gained representation in the Lok Sabha. In this section, I investigate whether MP’s who belong to these subaltern groups are equally able to use their dynastic ties to substitute for political groups as MPs who do not belong to these groups. First, I ask whether dynastic connections allow MPs who are Muslims, who are women or who belong to lower caste groups to avoid serving in lower levels of government. Table 8.6 focuses on the 15th Lok Sabha and shows, for each group, the proportion of dynastic and non-dynastic MPs respectively who

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Table 8.6 Proportion of MPs in each category with experience at the state or local level (15th Lok Sabha)

Women Men Muslim SC/ST Backward Caste Forward Caste

Dynastic ties

No dynastic ties

Statistical significance

35% 37% 64% 44% 33% 31%

33% 56% 60% 51% 56% 56%

P-Value=0.90 P-Value=0.0002 P-Value=0.84 P-Value=0.45 P-Value=0.03 P-Value=0.0002

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

Table 8.7 Proportion of MPs in each category with experience at the state or local level (14th Lok Sabha)

Women Men Muslim SC/ST Backward Caste Forward Caste

Dynastic Ties

No Dynastic Ties

Statistical Significance

31% 40% 78% 35% 37% 30%

58% 58% 65% 50% 66% 56%

P-Value=0.07 P-Value=0.003 P-Value=0.49 P-Value=0.19 P-Value=0.003 P-Value=0.001

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

have political experience at the state or local level. The last column shows the p-value derived from a test of whether the difference in the proportions between dynastic and non-dynastic MPs is statistically significant. Table 8.7 shows a similar table for the 14th Lok Sabha. With regard to women, there are some differences across the two parliaments. Table 8.6 shows that in the 15th Lok Sabha dynastic ties do not give women MPs a special advantage in bypassing lower levels of government. The proportion of dynastic women who have experience at lower levels of government is very similar to the proportion of non-dynastic women who have this experience. However, Table 8.7 shows that in the 14th Lok Sabha nondynastic women MPs are significantly more likely to have experience at lower levels of government than are dynastic women MPs. Thus, we do have some evidence that dynastic ties allow women to bypass lower levels of government, although it is not consistent across parliaments. Interestingly, our data show that for both parliaments the overall proportion of women MPs with political experience at lower levels of government is

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significantly lower than the proportion amongst their male counterparts.17 This fact is particularly interesting given the 73rd Amendment enacted in 1993, which mandated that one-third of seats in local bodies be reserved for women. While this amendment has resulted in significant numbers of women gaining positions in panchayats, these women appear not to have been able to ascend the ranks as quickly or as often as their male counterparts. Interpreted another way, however, the lower proportion of women MPs with experience at lower levels suggests that women MPs enjoy an advantage over male MPs in being able to bypass lower levels of government. Yet, this pattern may not imply that women enjoy an unfair advantage over men overall. As Basu notes, women have often entered political institutions as a result of their participation in social movements and so, especially in the case of women, a lack of experience in lower levels of government may not indicate a lack of political experience overall. However, the patterns do suggest that, overall, the paths through which women enter parliament seem to be significantly different than those that men traverse. The data also suggest that significant proportions of non-dynastic women MPs appear to have been able to gain power without rising up the levels of government, perhaps through their participation in social movements or perhaps, as suggested by Basu, by being able to “cultivate non-biological family relations.” Meanwhile Table 8.6 shows that male MPs with dynastic connections are significantly less likely to have experience at lower tiers of government than those without dynastic connections. Thus non-dynastic male MPs appear to have had fewer alternative routes to power outside of state and local government than non-dynastic female MPs. Turning to Muslim MPs, Tables 8.6 and 8.7 show that there is no real difference between dynasts and non-dynasts in the degree to which they avoid gaining political experience at lower tiers. Thus, dynastic ties do not appear to have conferred a significant advantage on Muslim MPs in terms of allowing them to bypass lower levels of government. Unlike in the case of women MPs, however, our data show that the proportion of Muslim MPs who have acquired experience at lower levels of government is significantly higher than the proportion of non-Muslim MPs who have acquired this experience.18 Thus, the differences across Muslim and women MPs are interesting. Women MPs have been better able than their male counterparts to avoid experience at lower levels of government. Thus, for women MPs, the absence of an effect of 17

18

In the 15th Lok Sabha, the proportion of female and male MPs with experience at lower levels of government was 35% and 50%, respectively. In the 14th Lok Sabha, the relevant proportions were 42% and 55%, respectively. In the 15th Lok Sabha, the proportion of Muslim and non-Muslim MPs with experience at lower levels of government was 61% and 48%, respectively. In the 14th Lok Sabha, the relevant proportions were 68% and 53%, respectively.

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dynastic ties on political experience in the 15th Lok Sabha may be due to the fact that most women come into parliament without having served in lower levels of government. For Muslim MPs, however, the path to the Lok Sabha is most commonly one that traverses state or local government and this “disadvantage” is not mitigated by the presence of dynastic ties. Turning to caste, Tables 8.6 and 8.7 show that among SC/ST MPs in both Lok Sabhas, those who are dynasts do not have a significant advantage over non-dynasts in being able to bypass serving in lower tiers of government. While the proportion of SC/ST non-dynasts with political experience at lower levels is higher than the proportion of SC/ST dynasts with this experience in both parliaments, this difference is not statistically significant. This maybe because, as discussed by Chauchard in this volume, few of the SC and ST dynasties have achieved national prominence. Indeed, subsequent sections in the present chapter suggest that the dynastic advantage in being able to bypass lower levels of government may accrue especially to heirs of dynasties that have achieved national prominence. Tables 8.6 and 8.7 show, however, that when we look at Backward Caste MPs in both parliaments, dynasts do seem to have a significant advantage over their non-dynastic counterparts in terms of bypassing experience at lower tiers of government. This advantage holds amongst “Forward Caste” MPs as well in both parliaments. Interestingly there is, in the 14th Lok Sabha, a significant difference between Backward and “Forward” Caste MPs in the degree to which they have been able to bypass gaining experience at lower levels of government.19 Thus, the privileged treatment that parties accord to “Forward Castes” (Chandra, this volume), may also mean that “Forward Caste” MPs enjoy a special advantage relative to Backward Caste MPs in terms of being able to bypass lower levels of government. This difference however does not hold at conventional levels of significance for the 15th Lok Sabha.20 Taken together, the above results show that MPs belonging to subaltern groups such as SC/STs and Muslims are not able to use their dynastic ties to serve as a substitute for political experience at lower levels of government. The results for the 14th Lok Sabha indicate that women may sometimes be an exception to this rule. However, in both parliaments MPs who are male and “Forward Caste” have a significant advantage over other MPs. The next three sections explore how contextual factors shape the degree to which dynastic ties can serve as a substitute for experience.

19 20

The proportion of Backward Caste MPs with lower level experience is 60% while the relevant proportion for “Forward Caste” MPs is 50%. The proportion of Backward Caste MPs who had experience at lower levels of government is 50% while the relative proportion amongst “Forward Caste” MPs is 47%. This difference, however, is not statistically significant. (P-value=0.59).

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Nature of family ties and political experience

The discussion of subaltern groups in Section 2 has already shown that not all dynastic ties are equally powerful in terms of being able to serve as a substitute for gaining political experience at lower levels of government. This section examines other features that may shape the effects of dynastic ties in this regard. Specifically, it examines whether the position of the family member, the closeness of the family member and the gender of the family member have an influence on the degree to which dynastic ties can substitute for political experience. First, we examine whether the level of government at which the family member of the MP had a position can influence the extent of the “dynastic advantage” – that is, the ability of dynastic ties to serve as a substitute for gaining political experience at lower levels of government. Table 8.8 focuses on the 15th Lok Sabha and shows the percentage of dynastic MPs whose family members had their highest level of experience in national, state and local government, respectively, and the proportion of the MPs in each of these categories who have no experience at lower tiers of government. Table 8.9 shows a similar table for the 14th Lok Sabha. The tables show that the overall number of MPs whose family members had served in local government but not at higher levels is extremely small. Since our sources may be less likely to report family members who have served in local government, it is possible that these low numbers are an artifact of our data collection strategy. Yet, insofar as they are accurate, these numbers Table 8.8 Level of government of dynastic origins and political experience (15th Lok Sabha) Highest level at which immediate family member has experience

Number of MPs with preceding family ties in category (not exclusive)

Number of MPs with preceding family ties exclusively in this category

Percentage of dynasts with immediate family member ties at this level

Percentage of dynasts in this category with no experience at state or local level

National State Local

74 33 3

47 33 3

45% (29%)a 20% 2%

69% (70%)a 58% 67%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014) Although these data pertain to MPs with only preceding dynastic ties, our data do not allow us to determine whether the family member’s highest position was obtained before or after the MP entered politics. To guard against misattributing the level of government in which the family member served prior to the MP entering politics, the number of MPs with family ties exclusively at a given level is also presented. The percentages in parentheses pertain to the MPs whose ties are exclusively at the particular level.

a

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Table 8.9 Level of government of dynastic origins and political experience (14th Lok Sabha) Highest Level at which immediate family member has experience

Number of MPs with preceding family ties in category (not exclusive)

Number of MPs with preceding family ties exclusively in this category

Percentage of dynasts with immediate family member ties at this level

Percentage of dynasts in this category with no experience at state or local level

National State Local

53 20 3

22 16 3

49% (20%)a 43% (19%)a 3%

75% (82%)a 45% (50%)a 67%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014) a Although these data pertain to MPs with only preceding dynastic ties, our data do not allow us to determine whether the family member’s highest position was obtained before or after the MP entered politics. To guard against misattributing the level of government in which the family member served prior to the MP entering politics, the number of MPs with family ties exclusively at a given level is also presented. The percentages in parentheses pertain to the MPs whose ties are exclusively at the particular level.

suggest that national level dynastic politics is unlikely to originate from local level politics. On the other hand, state level dynasties appear to generate a significantly larger percentage of dynastic politicians at the national level and national level dynasties generate the largest proportion. While the differences between state and national level dynasties are not as stark as in the 14th Lok Sabha, the patterns in the 15th Lok Sabha suggest that there may be an intrinsic hierarchy of dynasties themselves and that the degree of upward mobility of a dynasty across generations may be limited. The tables also shed light on the degree to which the highest level of government at which the family member has experience can influence the extent to which dynastic ties substitute for political experience. We might expect that many of the advantages that dynastic ties bestow on a politician that allow her to bypass acquiring political experience at lower levels of government – such as name recognition, connections or influence – are specific to a certain level of government. For example, a family name that is well known in a certain Assembly constituency may not be as well known in a larger Lok Sabha constituency encompassing a greater diversity of membership. Similarly, the ability to get things done at the state level may depend on connections to state-level government officials and bureaucrats rather than national level administrators. Thus, an MP with family ties to state level politics may not be as able to avoid gaining some political experience before entering national politics as an MP with family ties to national politics.

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Do family connections through an MP confer a greater career advantage than family connections through an MLA or panchayat member? Tables 8.8 and 8.9 show a strong indication that this is true. In the 15th (14th) Lok Sabha, 70% (82%) of MPs with dynastic connections exclusively at the national level were able to bypass lower levels of government to attain their position in parliament. Meanwhile, the relevant proportion of MPs whose family members served as an MLA is 58% for the 15th Lok Sabha and 50% for the 14th Lok Sabha. Statistical tests show that, for both parliaments, there is no significant difference in political experience between MPs with dynastic connections only to an MLA and those with no dynastic connections at all.21 Thus, while MPs with family members who served as MPs appear to have had an advantage compared to non-dynastic MPs, those with family members that did not obtain a political position in the national arena had no significant advantage relative to those with no family connections.22 These patterns suggest that the political capital that dynastic ties bestow, in terms of allowing dynasty to substitute for political experience, may be specific to a given level of government. In terms of the closeness of the family connection, one could imagine again that some of the advantages that dynasty bestows might depend on whether the family member is a parent rather than a cousin or in-law. Since our data allow us to distinguish between whether the family member of the MP is the MP’s parent or other relative, we can investigate the extent to which the type of family connection can influence the degree to which dynastic ties can serve as a substitute for acquiring political experience at lower levels of government.23 Tables 8.10 and 8.11 show a difference across the two parliaments in terms of how the closeness of a family connection can shape the degree to which dynastic ties can serve as a substitute for lower-level political experience. In the 15th Lok Sabha, we observe that there is no significant difference between a parent-based dynastic connection and family connections through another relative in terms of whether they allow MPs to bypass lower levels of government. In the 14th Lok Sabha, however, we do observe that MPs with a dynastic connection through a relative other than a parent are somewhat less able to bypass lower levels of government than those whose dynastic connection is through a parent. In fact, the difference in the prevalence of lower level

21 22 23

The same is true for MPs whose highest dynastic connections are in local government, although the numbers in this category are extremely small. Since the number of MPs whose family members served only at the local level is very small, we should not make much of the percentage of MPs with lower level experience in these groups. Since our data do not allow us to completely parse out the extent to which a preceding tie is determined by a spouse rather than another family member, the table simply presents the distinction between a parental and non-parental tie.

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Table 8.10 Type of family member, dynastic ties and political experience (15th Lok Sabha) Type of family member producing dynastic tie

Absolute number of MPs in category

Percentage with no experience at state or local level

Preceding tie through parent Just father Just mother Both parents Preceding tie through other family member (No parent tie) No preceding dynastic ties

116 97 7 12 47

64% 64% 57% 67% 64%

380

45%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

Table 8.11 Type of family member, dynastic ties and political experience (14th Lok Sabha) Type of family member producing dynastic tie Preceding tie through parent Just father Just mother Both parents Preceding tie through other family member (No parent tie) No preceding dynastic ties

Absolute number of MPs in category

Percentage with no experience at state or local level

70 57 3 10 39

66% 63% 100% 70% 56%

434

42%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014)

experience amongst MPs with a non-parent based dynastic connection and MPs with no dynastic connections at all is not statistically significant. Thus, it appears that the closeness of the family connection does sometimes shape the degree to which dynastic connections allow an MP to bypass lower levels of government. Yet, especially in the 15th Lok Sabha, MPs with powerful relatives who were not their parents were also able to bypass lower levels of government to a large extent. One possibility is that this phenomenon is cultural – a reflection of the fact that extended family structures may play as big a role as nuclear family structures in the Indian context. Yet, it could also reflect the fact that the prominence of the dynasty as a whole can often overcome the lack of closeness of a family connection – an MP who is even a distant family member in a powerful dynasty may be better able to bypass lower levels of government than other MPs regardless of his or her precise relationship to the dynasty’s founder.

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A final question is whether the extent to which dynastic ties can substitute for political experience is driven by the gender of the family member(s) producing the dynastic ties. Tables 8.10 and 8.11 show the percentage of dynastic MPs with no political experience at lower levels of government broken down by the gender of the parent producing the MP’s dynastic tie.24 Both tables demonstrate the low absolute proportions of MPs who enter the Lok Sabha by virtue of a preceding political connection based on just a mother. This pattern suggests that female dynastic connections are a much rarer path to entry into the national parliament than male dynastic connections. This could be because there were fewer female politicians in previous national and state parliaments who could be potential founders of dynasties. Basu’s chapter in this volume shows the low proportions of women MPs in the Indian parliament ever since 1951. Or it could suggest that even where dynasties with female founders were present the heirs of these female founders have been less successful at gaining entry into national parliament. This, in turn, may be because of the low representation of women in the highest decision-making bodies of the major parties as highlighted by Basu. Whatever the reason, however, the low numbers of MPs whose dynastic tie was through a female parent makes it difficult to draw conclusions about whether there is a real difference between dynastic ties through a mother and father. In both parliaments, these low numbers render the difference between MPs with motherbased connections and other MPs statistically insignificant. 4

Parties and paths to power

Previous work on dynastic politics, as well as Ziegfeld’s chapter (4) in this volume, have noted the significant variation in dynasticism across parties and have argued that the degree to which parties favor dynasts is a function of their organizational weakness, and whether there has been dynastic succession in the top leadership post of the party (Chandra and Umaira 2011, Chhibber 2013, Ziegfeld, this volume). In this section, I examine whether parties also differ significantly in the degree to which they trade off dynastic ties for political experience at lower levels of government and whether any differences that may exist can be explained by similar factors.25 The patterns uncovered

24 25

Note that a single MP may fall into multiple categories if he or she is preceded into politics by both a father and husband, for example. Of course, since our data consist of only MPs, we only observe each party’s successful candidates. Nevertheless, if we assume a roughly similar likelihood across parties of winning elections conditional on dynasty and/or experience then the profile of successful candidates in each party can give us clues about how the extent to which dynasty is privileged over political experience differs by party organization.

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Table 8.12 Dynasty and political experience by party (15th Lok Sabha)

(1) Party name

(2) Total number of MPs

(3) Percentage with preceding family ties

(4) Percentage with experience in state or local government

AITC (Trinamool) BJP BSP CPI(M) DMK INC JD(U) Samajwadi

19 115 21 16 18 207 20 21

16% 19% 38% 19% 33% 40% 15% 29%

58% 48% 48% 38% 22% 47% 65% 62%

(5) Percentage of dynasts with experience in state or local government

(6) Percentage of non-dynasts with experience in state or local government

33% 18% 38% 0% 17% 39% 67% 67%

63% 55%* 54% 46% 25% 52%* 65% 60%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014) The difference between the percentage of non-dynasts with experience at the state or local level and the percentage between the dynasts with experience at the state or local level for this party is statistically significant at the 90% level or higher.

*

suggest an explanation for why dynasty matters to political parties – a discussion taken up in the next section. Tables 8.12 and 8.13 show the percentage of MPs with dynastic ties and lower-level political experience for the major parties in the Lok Sabha (in each parliament, major parties are those who have more than fifteen MPs). First, we observe that, for most parties, the proportion of non-dynasts with lower level political experience is higher than the proportion of dynasts with this experience. There are some exceptions to this rule, however, and more importantly the low numbers of observations renders many of these differences statistically insignificant. Yet even amongst the statistically significant differences, we notice that this tendency to trade off dynastic ties and political experience is prevalent amongst less organized parties such as the Congress as well as more organized parties such as the BJP and the CPI-M. For example, Ziegfeld’s chapter (4) in this volume codes the Congress as more autocratically run than the BJP and CPI-M. Thus, Ziegfeld’s chapter and other studies (e.g. Chandra and Umaira 2011, Chhibber 2013) have argued that the level of organizational weakness of political parties explains the overall prevalence of dynasticism; data from the 14th and 15th parliaments suggests that organizational weakness cannot explain the degree to which parties allow MPs to trade off dynastic ties for political experience. If anything, the patterns in the 15th Lok Sabha suggest

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Table 8.13 Dynasty and political experience by party (14th Lok Sabha)

(1) Party name

(2) Total number of MPs

(3) Percentage with preceding family ties

(4) Percentage with experience in state or local government

(5) Percentage of dynasts with experience in state or local government

(6) Percentage of non-dynasts with experience in state or local government

BJP BSP CPI(M) DMK INC RJD SP

138 19 43 16 145 24 36

15% 11% 14% 19% 28% 8% 28%

59% 53% 51% 38% 50% 79% 58%

40% 50% 17% 33% 34% 50% 60%

63%* 53% 57%* 39% 56%* 82% 58%

Source: Chandra, Bohlken, and Chauchard (2014) * The difference between the percentage of non-dynasts with experience at the state or local level and the percentage between the dynasts with experience at the state or local level for this party is statistically significant at the 90% level or higher.

that better organized parties may in some cases be more apt to trade off dynastic ties and political experience. Data from the 15th Lok Sabha show that, conditional on having dynastic ties, it is on average much more likely that an MP has bypassed serving at lower tiers of government if she belongs to the BJP (82%) rather than to the Congress (61%). We do not, however, observe this difference between the Congress and the BJP in the 14th Lok Sabha. Nevertheless, the data suggest that this tendency to allow dynastic ties to substitute for local level experience exists amongst parties that are organizationally weak as well as those who are relatively well organized. 5

Why parties prefer dynasts: a discussion

Why do Indian parties – even those that are relatively well organized – tend to allow dynasts to bypass gaining experience at lower levels of government to a greater extent than non-dynasts? One possible answer could be that dynasts have better qualifications or perform better in office compared to non-dynasts. However, the information we have suggests that this answer is unlikely to account for the privileged treatment accorded to dynasts. This chapter has already established that although dynasts are better educated than non-dynasts the substitutability of dynastic ties for political experience cannot in fact be explained by the superior educational qualifications of dynasts. Moreover, Chandra’s introductory chapter in this volume shows that dynasts are similar

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to non-dynasts in terms of multiple measures of performance including parliamentary performance and constituency spending. Thus, the privileged treatment that parties accord to dynasts is unlikely to be explained by their superior qualifications or performance. Another possibility is that parties may privilege dynasts because family connections can strengthen a party’s organization at the local level. A large literature in Indian politics has emphasized the importance of local connections and local knowledge in mobilizing electoral support and winning elections (e.g. Brass 1965, Weiner 1967, Robinson 1988, Dunning and Nilekani 2013). MPs who have had political experience serving in local and state government would typically have been able to develop these local capacities. Yet, MPs who have had family members serving in politics before them would also have been likely to inherit the local connections and knowledge built by their family members. Indeed, political heirs can capitalize on the local trust, knowledge and connections established by their predecessors and parties can rely on families as a source of organizational continuity. These advantages that families provide in substituting for or supplementing a party’s local organization may explain why family ties can often serve as a substitute for political experience at lower levels of government. We may expect that parties that are organizationally weak would be particularly likely to benefit from nominating individuals with family ties in politics, especially those with powerful family connections. Yet, even parties that are better organized at the national level may have localities in which they have not been able to develop a permanent and strong presence. And even where they have a strong local presence, the national leaders of the party may derive additional benefit from local knowledge and connections that an MP brings either via her own previous experience in state or local politics or via her family connections. Thus, family connections can not only serve as a powerful substitute for local experience and can even provide benefits to parties over and above local experience. While the prevalence of dynastic politicians in India is often seen as evidence of simple nepotism within parties, a closer look at the evidence may reveal that family ties may actually serve a useful function within the organizational constraints that Indian parties typically face. 6

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that when it comes to achieving a position in the Lok Sabha family connections can be used as a substitute for gaining political experience at lower levels of government. It has also highlighted, however, that the nature of dynastic tie plays an important role in shaping when and how dynastic ties will substitute for political experience. It has shown, for example, that dynastic MPs who are members of subaltern groups – particularly those

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who are Muslim or hail from a Scheduled Caste or Tribe – do not have the same advantages as dynasts from other groups in terms of being able to bypass lower levels of government. Omar Abdullah, a Muslim, is a prominent exception to the rule. Similarly, the highest level at which an MP’s family member has gained experience also plays a role. For MPs whose parents were MPs before them, their dynastic connections may have been powerful enough to serve as a substitute for political experience at lower levels of government. But for MPs such as Jitendra Singh Malik of Haryana, whose father was an MLA who never made it into the Lok Sabha, political experience in local government may have been a necessary step toward achieving a position at the national level despite his dynastic ties. These findings provide us with important clues about why and how dynastic ties can confer advantages on politicians. For example, the data suggest that the advantages of dynastic ties might be specific to a certain level of government but that the closeness of a family connection does not play a consistent role in shaping this “dynastic advantage.” What do these patterns suggest about the relative importance of name recognition versus connections in determining why dynasty serves as a substitute for political experience? Looking into these patterns with types of data and analysis is a fruitful avenue for further research. Given the findings in this chapter, however, it is interesting to ask how the future of dynastic politics could be shaped by two key institutions that underpin India’s democracy – institutions of local self-government and political parties. First, the findings offer suggestive clues as to how the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments have shaped, and will shape, the phenomenon of dynasty in Indian politics. Since dynastic MPs were less likely to have served at the panchayat or municipal level than non-dynastic MPs, we may reach the optimistic conclusion that local institutions could open up an avenue for entry into national politics that is disproportionately free from dynastic influence. However, this optimism must be tempered by the fact that, as our data show, local government is a very rare pathway to national parliament for dynastic as well as non-dynastic MPs. The vast majority of MPs in our dataset have, in fact, never served in local government. It is possible however that the upward mobility from local to national government would be improved when, or if, local government institutions across India are significantly strengthened. The findings in this chapter also shed light on the role of party institutions in shaping the role of dynastic ties in Indian politics. If we are concerned simply about the prevalence of dynastic ties in Indian politics, then we should be most concerned about parties with an organizational structure similar to the Congress, which has become well-known for its prevalence of dynastic MPs. However, if we are concerned about what dynastic ties mean for equality of

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opportunity, then we should be no more concerned about the Congress than about parties that are relatively better organized, such as the BJP or the CPI-M. At the same time, the variation across Indian parties in the degree of centralization and internal democracy is limited. Thus, the question remains as to whether and how the role of dynastic ties will be changed if Indian parties across the board were to become more internally democratic – for example, by holding competitive party-wide primaries to select candidates for legislative elections. Existing research on primaries outside the Indian context has suggested, on the one hand, that these primaries could produce better quality candidates (Carey and Polga-Hecimovich 2006). Indeed, if primary voters are less susceptible to being influenced to nominate the relatives of sitting politicians than are party leaders, this may mean that primaries could result in fewer dynastic MPs who are politically inexperienced. Yet, other research has suggested that the introduction of primaries in “patronage polities” where policy positions matter less, may allow party leaders to select nominees for parliament who have support among local party members and bring their own campaign funds (Ichino and Nathan 2013). Thus, if dynasts are wealthier and have stronger local organizational capacity than other politicians, this research would suggest that dynasts – even those who lack political experience – would continue to be a feature of the Indian political landscape even if competitive legislative primaries were to be introduced. REFERENCES Bhandare, Namita. 2009. “Omar Abdullah: A New Son Over the Valley,” Live Mint, January 9. www.livemint.com/2009/01/09220810/Omar-Abdullah-a-new-sonover.html. Brass, Paul R. 1965. Factional Politics in an Indian State: The Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carey, John M. and John Polga-Hecimovich. 2006. “Primary elections and candidate strength in Latin America.” Journal of Politics 68.3: 530–543. Chandra, Kanchan and Wamiq Umaira. 2011. “India’s Democratic Dynasties.” Seminar, 622: 14–21. Chandra, Kanchan, Anjali Bohlken, and Simon Chauchard. 2014. “Dataset on Dynasticism in the Indian Parliament.” Chhibber, Pradeep. 2013. “Dynastic parties: Organization, Finance and Impact.” Party Politics, 19(2): 277–95. Cohen, Gerald A. 1989. “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” Ethics, 99: 906–44. Dahl, Robert. A. 1998. On Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2006. On Political Equality. New Haven: Yale University Press. DeSouza, Peter R., Sanjay Kumar, and Sandeep Shastri, 2009. Indian Youth in a Transforming World: Attitudes and Perceptions. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Dunning, Thad and Janhavi Nilekani. 2013. “Ethnic Quotas and Political Mobilization: Caste, Parties, and Distribution in Indian Village Councils”. American Political Science Review, 107 (1): 35–56.

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Dworkin, Ronald. 1981. “What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10: 283–345, reprinted in: R. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue. The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2000, pp.65–119. Farooqui, A. and E. Sridharan. 2014. Incumbency, internal processes and renomination in Indian parties. Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 52(1): 78–108 French, Patrick. 2011. “The Princely State of India.” Outlook Magazine, January 17. Gunalan, N. 1998 “Gandhis not the only family in Indian polls” Straits Times, February 21. Hart, Henry C. 1988. “Political leadership in India: dimensions and limits.” In: A. Kohli (ed.) India’s Democracy: An Analysis of Changing State–Society Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hindustan Times. 1998a. “New Emerges on the NC Horizon”, February 6. 1998b. “Farooq’s son bags Srinagar seat, BJP wins in Jammu”, March 10. Ichino, Nahomi and Noah L. Nathan. 2013. “Do Primaries Improve Electoral Performance? Clientelism and Intra-Party Conflict in Ghana.” American Journal of Political Science 57.2: 428–41. Kochanek, Stanley A. 1967. “Political recruitment in the Indian National Congress: The fourth general election.” Asian Survey 7.5: 292–304. Lok Sabha Who’s Who. Fourteenth and Fifteenth Lok Sabha Bio-Profiles. http:// 164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/lokprev.aspx. Manikandan, C. and Andrew Wyatt. 2014. “Elite formation within a political party: The case of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 52.1: 32–54. PRS Legislative Research, “MP Track”. Available from www.prsindia.org/index.php? name=mptracklok, Accessed on June 26th, 2011. Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, rev. ed. 1999. Robinson, Marguerite S. 1988. Local politics : The law of the Fishes : Development through political change in Medak District, Andhra Pradesh (South India). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Shivakumar, Girija. 2013. “India Is set to become the youngest country by 2020.” The Hindu, April 17. Spary, Carole. 2007. “Female Political Leadership in India.” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 45(3): 253–77. Weiner, Myron. 1967. Party-Building in a New Nation: The Indian National Congress. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolkowitz, Carol. 1987. “Controlling women’s access to political power: A case study in Andhra Pradesh, India.” In H. Afshar (ed.), Women, state and ideology: Studies from Africa and Asia. London: Macmillan.

Appendix

Dataset on dynasticism among Indian MPs 2004–14

Kanchan Chandra, Anjali Bohlken, and Simon Chauchard

1

Definition of dynastic ties

We say that an MP is dynastic if he or she is preceded by a family member who was active in politics. This is the key variable around which our dataset is organized. We distinguish MPs who have preceding family ties in politics from MPs who have family members following them in politics or family members for whom the order of entry is indeterminate. By the term “active in politics,” we mean (1) holding office in any elected political body, or (2) being nominated by a party as a candidate for election to any office, or (3) holding a formal position in the party organization (e.g. District President, Youth Chief). By “elected political body,” we mean a body that is directly or indirectly elected, including either house of the national parliament [Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha], either house of the state legislature [Vidhan Sabha, Vidhan Parishad] or any institution of local government [Zila, Block, or Gram Panchayat or Municipal Corporation]. An individual is not considered to be active in politics if they held appointed positions (e.g. Governor or District Collector), or if there are references to the person being politically active without references to office or candidature for elections (e.g. a “party member,” or “freedom fighter,” or “political activist”). If a family member ran for office as an independent candidate and lost, she is also not considered active in politics. We define a family as a set of individuals bound by ties based on blood or marriage. This is consistent with the definitions used in previous work, such as Smith (2012), who defines a “legacy candidate” as any candidate for national office who is related by blood or marriage (e.g. child, grandchild, sibling, spouse, son-in-law, or other such close relative) to a politician formerly or currently also holding national office, and Querubin (2010, 8), and Dal Bo, Dal Bo, and Snyder (2009, 118), who code for family ties based on relatives, broadly defined. There are subtle differences in the coding criteria for whether or not a legislator is dynastic used by the literature on the subject – no two works are identical. Since other datasets on dynastic politics do not use exactly the same 266

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criteria for dynastic ties, it is worthwhile to compare our criteria with theirs. Querubin’s (2010) coding of dynasties captures Congresspersons who had relatives in elected office broadly and not just Congress. But it does not include, as our coding does, family members who held indirectly elected positions, or party positions. Dal Bo, Dal Bo, and Snyder (2009) count as dynastic members of the US Congress whose relatives were also members of Congress before them, not members of Congress whose family members were active in some other arena of politics. Similarly, Van Coppenolle (2013) counts an MP as dynastic if she is preceded by a family member who also served as an MP. Smith (2012) refers to a “legacy candidate” as any candidate for national office who is related by blood or marriage (e.g. child, grandchild, sibling, spouse, son-in-law, or other such close relative) to a politician formerly or currently also holding national office. Our criteria are broader than these other sources. However, once we capture dynastic MPs, broadly defined, we disaggregate our coding by the specific political positions occupied by family members (see Section 3 in Chapter 1). 2

Coding procedure

We identify the MP’s father, mother, and spouse using the Lok Sabha Who’s Who, available online at http://loksabha.nic.in/. We then search a variety of online sources, including national and regional English language newspapers, election returns made available by the Election Commission of India, and news digests such as Factiva and Lexis-Nexis, for information on any political offices held by these three family members as well as relatives by blood or marriage who are not the MP’s father, mother, or spouse (these relatives are not named in the Lok Sabha Who’s Who but may also have preceded the family member in politics). The online sources we used included the following: Election returns made available by the Election Commission of India, which report the names of all previous MPs and MLAs; English language newspapers (both national and regional), including the Times of India, the Hindu, the Hindustan Times, the Deccan Chronicle, Deccan Herald, Telegraph, and so on; and the Factiva and Lexis-Nexis news digests. The main difficulty in this coding is matching the names of MPs and family members when there may be variation in how the same name is spelt because of a spelling error or because there are multiple phonetic equivalents or because family members use different last names or because of regional variations in the order of names. Some common variations that often indicate the same person include minor changes in spelling (e.g. Dinjee or Dinji), minor changes in vowel sounds (Dunu, Doonu), spaces between words (e.g. Mansukhbhai, Mansukh Bhai),

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the skipping of a middle name (e.g. Madhu Goud Kishtiah, Madhu Kishtiah), initials (Nand Kishore Yadav, N. K. Yadav), and so on. In order to determine whether minor variations indicate the same person or a different one, we did manual searches for the names of MPs and family members using all possible variations of the names. Often we were able make a match using additional information on constituency/state/party. For instance, if a Mr. Chandrashekhar Goud is associated with a constituency in 1999, and in the 1998 election the name associated with that constituency is C. Gowd, chances are that they are the same person. If they are from the same party in 1999 as 1998, in addition to running in the same constituency, then we can reasonably guess that they are the same person. We usually use these guesses to perform more targeted searches of news searches to confirm them. The coding was done manually. Since we may have missed locating information about some MPs whose family members were active in politics, it is likely to be an underestimate. But because the criteria we employ are transparent and systematic, it should be easy to locate and correct any errors, or at least estimate the likely scale and the direction of bias they introduce, if any, to the data analysis. 3

Coding for additional attributes

In addition to the coding for dynastic MPs outlined above, we also code for the individual MP’s demographic characteristics, such as ethnicity, place of birth, and gender; characteristics related to his or her political history such as past political experience or renomination or party positions or connections with the party leadership; constituency characteristics such as how competitive it is, whether it is “reserved” for minority candidates, and whether its boundaries changed across parliaments, and whether the constituency boundaries changed across party and dynasty; party characteristics, such as whether the MP’s party is organized or centralized or has a dynastic leadership; and the characteristics of the MP’s dynastic ties, such as the age of the dynasty, whether or not it includes those in major positions, whether or not family members are concurrently in office, whether the MP is connected with the family of a party leader, whether or not it is locally embedded, and so on. These are original measures, constructed by us using primary data on party constitutions, memoirs, news archives, Lok Sabha Who’s Who, and where necessary GIS data in combination with the census and election returns. In addition, we merged the data with existing individual level data on the attributes available in candidate affidavits filed with the Election Commission of India since 2004, which include the MP’s age, wealth, and

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criminal background, and with existing datasets on their constituency-level and parliamentary performance. Taken together, this is the most comprehensive dataset on the attributes of Indian parliamentarians that we are aware of. Data on the criminal background of MPs was provided by Milan Vaishnav, and on GIS-based constituency matches for pre- and post-delimitation by Francesca Jensenius.

Index

“leadership” rule defined, 211 “plurality” rule defined, 211 73rd Amendment, 253, 264 74th constitutional amendments, 263 Abdullah, Farooq, 238 Abdullah, Omar, 238, 263 Abdullah, Sheikh. See Abdullah, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, Sheikh Mohammad, 238 Abdullahs, 1 Adhikari, Sisir, 36 Adhikari, Suvendu, 36 Adnan Farooqui, 117 Advani, L K, 162, 215, 243 affirmative action, 23, 28, 173, 175 Afghanistan, 144, 154–5, 167 age, 14–15, 24, 28, 30, 40, 50–1, 247, 249 AIADMK. See All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam AITC. See All India Trinamool Congress Ajmer, 71 All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), 111, 119, 123–4, 142, 211, 215 All India Congress Committee (AICC), 42, 152, 227–8, 236 All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, 212, 223 All India Trinamool Congress, 36 Alwar, 68 Ambareesh, 229 Amethi, 6, 30, 161 Andhra Pradesh, 23, 157, 163, 229 Argal, Ashok, 173–5, 182, 196, 201 Argal, Chhaviram, 173 aristocracies, 56 aristocracy, 12, 15, 48 aristocrat, 57 aristocratic families, 24 Asako, 2, 9, 52, 107, 134, 187 Assam United Democratic Front, 223

270

attendance in parliament, 9, 31 Aurangabad, 39 autocratic parties. See party organization Baba, K. C. Singh, 15 Babbar, Raj, 243 backward caste(s), 3, 5, 22–4, 27, 28, 49, 50, 146, 175, 207, 210, 211, 215, 218, 220–2, 224, 226, 229, 231, 232, 234, 235, 254. See also OBC and Backward Classes Backward Classes, 233 Backwardness, 84, 95, 101 Badal, Sukhbir Singh, 30, 43 Badals, 6 Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), 9, 110, 113, 121, 123, 127, 142, 210–11, 215, 221, 226, 232–4, 236–7 BSP, 197–8 Bailey, F. G., 66 BAMCEF, 110 Bamzai, 95 Bandaranaike, Sirimavo, 143 Banerjee and Somanathan, 86 Banerjee, Abhishek, 122 Banerjee, Mamata, 122, 157, 243 Bangladesh, 143–4, 154, 167, 170 Banias, 23 Bannerjee, A C (1951), 76 Bansgaon, 183 Bean plots, 95, 98 Belgium, 4 Bhandari, Sunder Singh, 162 Bharat, 95 Bharati, Uma, 163–4, 167 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 9, 15, 24, 26, 29, 38–42, 44–5, 54, 56, 83, 93, 109, 111, 116–18, 126, 131, 133, 138, 141–2, 145, 147–8, 151–2, 157, 159, 162–7, 172–4, 176, 185, 188, 190, 195, 196, 198, 203, 212, 215, 230, 241, 243, 260–1, 264–5 Bharatiya Lok Dal, 111

Index Bharatpur, 69 Bhavnani, Rikhil, 176 Bhil, 69 Bhind, 174 Bhutan, 3 Bhutto, Benazir, 143 Bihar, 29, 37, 39, 54, 106, 110, 117, 136, 157, 160, 183, 185 Biju Janata Dal, 111 Bikaner, 60, 64, 69–70 birth, 12, 47–8 Bissau, 77 Biswas, 84 BJD. See Biju Janata Dal BJS. See Jana Sangh Bohlken and Chandra 2014, 42 Bondurant, Joan V., 59 Bose, Ajoy, 189, 205 Brahmin, 211, 234 Brahmins, 23 brand, 42–3 Brass, Paul, 88, 97, 101, 103, 262–3 Britain, 56, 67, 82 BSP. See Bahujan Samaj Party Bundi, 62, 69, 76 bureaucracy, 32, 35, 37 bureaucrats, 37 business, 35, 37, 48, 56, 60, 101 cabinet, 1, 13–14 campaign, 18, 29–32 Campbell, Angus, 59 Canada, 4 candidate quality, 115, 127 candidate selection, 208, 218, 226 candidates, 15, 29–30, 32, 35–7, 39–44, 46, 48–9, 54 Capito, Shelley Moore, 150 Carey and Polga-Hecimovich 2006, 264 Carlevan, 83, 91, 102–3 Casey, Kimberly, 150 Central Election Committee, 226–7, 232 centralization. See party centralization Census of India, 85–7, 95, 97–8 Chakravarty, Bijoya, 163 Chandra and Umaira, 38, 48, 84, 259 Chandresh Kumari Katoch, 94 Chattopadhyay, Raghabendra, 164, 170 Chaudhury, Kiran, 30 Chaudhary, Dalbir Singh, 183 Chavan, Ashok Shankarrao, 1 Chavan, Shankarrao Bhavrao, 1 Cheema, Javid, and Naseer 2013, 56

271 Chhattigsarh, 91, 117 Chhibber, Pradeep, 2, 107, 115–17, 159, 176, 188, 259 Chidambaram, P., 250 Chief Minister, 1, 14–15, 25, 29–30, 35, 56, 83, 229, 232, 237 chief ministers, 13 Choudhry, Shruti, 161 Chowdhury, R K, 233 Christie, Ian, 67 Churchill, Winston, 70 civil society, 107, 115 clientelism, 95, 101 Clinton, Hillary, 30 coalition, 48–9 co-ethnic dynasties, 208–10, 218, 221, 223 Cohen, Gerald, 239 communal, 79 communalism, 80 Communist Party of India, 40, 111, 116–18, 127, 211, 222 Communist Party of India (Marxist), 40, 105–6, 108, 116–18, 127, 211 Communist(s), 60, 212, 230 companies, 129–30 competition, 41, 48 competitiveness, 49 concurrent ties, 181 Congress, 136, 141–3, 145, 147, 149–52, 155, 157, 160, 162, 164–6, 170–1, 241, 245, 247, 260–1, 263, See also Indian National Congress constituencies, 7, 13, 18, 32, 39, 45–6, 49 Constitution of India, 23, 28, 155–6, 171 contestation, 35, 49 Corbridge and Harriss, 83 corruption, 34 cow slaughter, 74 CPI, See Communist Party of India CPI-M, 241, 260, 264, See also Communist Party of India (Marxist) criminal indictment, 30 culture, 5–7, 12, 131, 133–4 Dahl, Robert, 239 Dal Bo, Dal Bo, and Snyder, 2, 4, 10, 52, 107, 135, 143, 170, 266–7 dalit, 36, 176, 183, 188–9, 197, See also scheduled caste(s) (SC) Darjeeling, 93 de Kirchner, Cristina Fernandez, 120, 143, 149 debates in parliament, 31 decentralization. See party decentralization defection, 38–40 defectors, 134

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Delhi (New Delhi), 89, 129–30, 136, 148, 163, 165–6, 169–70 Delimitation, 86 Delimitation Commission Act, 174 democratic dynasties, 1, 12, 24 Democratic Party, 107 descent-based identities, 208 Devi, Rabri, 136 Dhebar, U. N., 61 Dholpur, 56, 69 Dhumals, 1 Dikshit, Sheila, 136, 165 Dikshit, Uma Shankar, 136 district administration, 32 DMK, 245, See also Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam dominance, 24 dominant groups, 241 Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, 42, 110–11, 117, 123, 226 DS-4, 110 Duflo, Esther, 164, 169 Dungarpur, 60, 69 Dunning and Nilekani 2013, 262 Dunning, Thad, 176, 201–2 Dushkin, Lelah, 176, 194 Dushyant Singh, See Scindia family Dworkin, Ronald, 239 dynastic advantage, 9, 240–1, 255, 263 dynastic candidates, 107–8, 125, 133 dynastic class average age, 25 characteristics, 24–9 ethnic profile, 27–9 gender composition, 27 party affiliation, 25–6 regional background, 26 royal background, 24 dynastic MP defined, 13–15, 39 Dynastic politicians, 84–5, 87, 89, 94–5, 97–8, 102 dynastic politics, 141 Dynastic politics, 83, 103 dynastic succession. See leadership succession dynastic ties, 136–7, 140, 142–3, 147, 149, 159–60, 163–5, 167 dynasticism, 137, 143, 145, 149, 170, 175–7, 179, 184, 186–8, 190, 197, 200–2, 204 Dynasticism, 84–5, 88, 92, 103, See also dynasticism dynasties 84–5, 87, 94–5, 101–3 concurrent, 25, 35–6 important, 25 local roots, 25

locally rooted, 37–8, 44 Nehru-Gandhi, 147, 149, 161–2 old regime, 7 political, 136, 147 related to party leader, 25 sequential, 36 Eastern India, 89 Economic growth, 84–5 education, 30, 47, 50, 84–5, 87, 98, 102, 241, 249–50 Election Commission of India, 174 elections 83, 85, 90, 94, 101–2, 137, 143, 147–51, 155–7, 159, 161, 164–5, 167, 169, 171–2, 236 Emergency, 111 emoluments, 34 employment, 34 employment “crisis”, 57 Erdman, Howard L, 57 ethnic, 13, 22, 24, 27–8, 41, 173, 197 definition, 210 ethnic category, 208, 210–12, 218, 226, 228 ethnic dominance, 211–12 ethnic group, 208, 211 ethnic identity, 211 ethnic identity, group or category, defined, 13 ethnic inclusion, 208, 210 ethnic outsider dynasties, 208, 210, 219, 221, 223 ethnic parties, 197, 208 ethnic platform, 208 ethnic plurality, 212 ethnically divided democracies, 208 ethnicity, 4, 210, 212 distinguished from family, 4–5 exclusion, 3, 5, 9, 12, 47–8 experience, 30, 32, 42–3, 47, 50 Fackler, Martin, 150 factional, 5, 9, 41, 50, 120, 149 factional leaders, 187 factionalism, 120 faction(s), 4, 41, 120, 126, 209, 225–6, 228–31, 234 family, 238–42, 245, 253, 255, 257–8, 262–3 definition, 13 family connections, 238–40, 242, 257, 262 family values, 30 Farooqui and Sridharan 2014, 37, 245 Feinstein, Brian, 2, 43, 150, 187 female, 253, 259 feudal, 58, 61, 64, 68–9, 71–2, 74, 78, 83–5, 95, 101–2 Fisher, Margaret W., 59 Forward Bloc, 117

Index forward castes, 3, 9, 27–8, 50, 146, 175, 207–35, 240, 252, 254 forward-caste dominated parties, 210, 212, 215 forward-caste-led parties, 225 Frankel and Rao, 28 French, Patrick, xviii, 242 Fukai, Shigeko, 150, 170 Fukui, Haruhiro, 150, 170 Gadkari, Nitin, 162, 215 Galanter, Marc, 176, 194, 198 Ganderbal, 1 Gandhi family, 189, See also Nehru-Gandhis Gandhi, Indira, 29, 136, 142–3, 147, 159, 184, See also Nehru Gandhis Gandhi, Maneka, 161, 165, 171, See also Nehru-Gandhis Gandhi, Maneka, See Nehru-Gandhi family Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 74, 137 Gandhi, Priyanka, 147, 149, See also Nehru-Gandhis Gandhi, Rahul, 137, 161, 166, 171, 227, 235, 242, See also Nehru-Gandhis Gandhi, Rajiv, 136, 148, 184, See also Nehru-Gandhis Gandhi, Sonia, 136, 142–3, 147–9, 152, 159, 161, 165, 171–2, See also Nehru-Gandhis Gandhi, Varun, 161, See also Nehru-Gandhis Ganganagar, 69 Gash, Norman, 65 gender, 21, 142–3, 150, 157, 165, 167 female politicians, 143, 155 male politicians, 138, 143, 155 general constituency, 189–90 General seat, 175, 181, 189–90, 197, See also Open seat; General seat Ghana, 3 GIS, 85–6 Gogois, 1 Gonda district, 88 Gopal Jayal, Niraja, 176, 194–5 Gowda and Sridharan, 43 Grimes, Alison Lundergan, 150 gross state domestic product, 129 GSDP, See gross state domestic product Gujarat, 186, 229 Gujjar, 229 Guna, 56 Gwalior, 15 Habakkuk, H. J., 71 Hagan, Kay, 150 Hamirpur, 1 Hart 1988, 239

273 Haryana, 30, 126, 148, 160, 183, 246, 263 Hazari, Maneshwar, 183 Hazaribagh, 1, 29 hereditary occupation, 131 hierarchy, 23, 30, 32 Himachal Pradesh, 94 Hindaun, 62 Hindu, 3, 9, 23, 27, 48, 54, 212, 235–6 Hindu Code, 75, 79 Hindu Mahasabha, 60, 63, 74 Hinduism, 131 Horowitz, Donald, 208 House of Lords, 4, 56 Iceland, 4 Ichino and Nathan 2013, 264 INC. See Indian National Congress inclusion, 3, 5, 9, 12, 23, 51, 208, 210, 234 Incumbency advantage, 150 incumbents, 37, 43 independents, 46, 57, 60, 63, 225 Indian National Congress, 1, 9, 15, 24, 26, 29, 35, 39–42, 45, 48, 51, 54, 56–8, 60–4, 66, 68–70, 76–8, 80, 84, 88, 105–6, 108– 11, 114, 117, 123–6, 131, 133, 210, 212, 215, 226–7, 229, 235–7, 265 Congress, 176, 184–5, 188, 195, 199 INC, 174, 184, 190, 194, 197–9, 203 indigenous, 24 institutionalist, 5, 12 institutions, 12 internal democracy, 264 intraparty advancement, 199 intra-party democracy, 202, 205 intra-party elections, 199 intra-party politics, 209–10, 224, 234 Irani, Smriti, 160, 172 Ireland, 4 Israel, 4 Iyer, Lakshmi, 91, 103 Jaffrelot and Kumar 2009, 28–9, 207 Jaffrelot, Christophe, 83, 88, 196 jagir, 66, 76–7 jagirdars, 7, 15, 24, 56–7, 60, 62, 64–5, 67–8, 70–2, 74–8, 81 Jaipur, 56, 58–9, 62, 69, 73, 75, 77–8 Jaisalmer, 59 Jaitley, Arun, 148 Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, 223, 239 Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party, 223 Jan Sangh, 60, 63, 74–5, 79–80, 109, 111, 162, 173

274

Index

Janata Dal, 110–11 Janata Dal (Secular), 110–11 Janata Dal (United), 39, 110, 120, 123–4, 166 Janata Party, 110–11 Japan, 3–4 Jat Sikhs, 23 Jats, 23, 69 Jayal, Niraja Gopal, 25, 28–9, 176, 207 Jayalalitha, 119, 138, 142, 211 JD. See Janata Dal JD(S). See Janata Dal (Secular) JD(U). See Janata Dal (United) Jeffrey, Craig, 35 Jharkhand, 117, 186 Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, 29, 186, 222 JMM, 186, 188 Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik), 223 Jodhpur, 59–61, 64–5, 67–71, 75, 77, 94 joint families, 131 Jordan, 144 Joshi, Murli Manohar, 162 Joshi, Subhadra, 160 Kadapa, 1 Kaliabor, 1 Kammas, 23 Kangra, 94 Karnataka, 110, 136, 147, 151, 227–9, 236 Bellary, 147 Karunanidhi family, 189 Karunanidhi, M, 42, 226 Kashmir, 238 Kaur, Preneet, 161 Kaushal, Swaraj, 148 Kerala, 157 Key, V. O., 59 Khan, Mohammad Azam, 231 Kharge, Mallikarjun, 195 Khetri, Raja of, 77 Khurana, Madan Lal, 162 Khurshid, Salman, 250 kickbacks, 34 kinship, 4 Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party, 63 Kochanek, Stanley, 245 Koirala, Sushila, 143 Kotah, 68–9, 65, 76–7 Kriplani, Sucheta, 161 Krishikar Lok Party, 60, 63 Krishnamurthi, J, 162 Kshatriya Mahasabha, 71–3, 75–6 Kshatriyas, 23 Kumar, Meira, 35, 142, 161, 184–7, 195 Kumar, Narender, 176, 194 Kumar, Nitish, 29, 39

Kumar, Sanjay, 196 Kumaratunga, Chandrika, 143 Kumari, Selja, 183 Kurmis, 232 Kymlicka, Will, 4 labour, 34 labour force, 34 Lakshadweep, 24, 185 Lal, Bansi, 30 land, 33 land owners, 37 landlords, 66 Landrieu, Mary, 150 Laxman, Bangaru, 162, 197 leadership succession, 108, 116, 119–22, 125, 134 dynastic succession, 108, 115, 119–20, 122–4 non-dynastic succession, 108, 113, 119, 121–4 legislature national, 141 state, 140, 142, 150–2, 154–7, 159, 161, 163–5, 167–9, 195 legitimacy, 119, 174, 200 Lesotho, 3 Levy, Harold, 75 liberalization, 33 Lijphart 1977, 208 literacy, 59 LJP. See Lok Jan Shakti Party local, 30, 44 local organization, 262 local self-government, 263 locally rooted dynasties, 37–8, 44, 116 Lok Janshakti Party, 106, 111, 131, 215, 221 Lok Sabha, 85, 87, 94–5, 142–3, 145, 148, 151, 153, 155, 161, 170, 238–9, 242, 244, 246–9, 251, 253–5, 257–8, 260, 262 lower castes, 110 loyalty, 38, 42, 120 Madhepura, 36 Madhya Bharat, 72 Madhya Pradesh, 56, 91, 93, 102, 117, 149, 156, 162, 164, 173, 186, 196 Madras, 61 Mahajan, Poonam, 42 Mahajan, Pramod, 5, 42, 148, 162 maharaja, 60–1, 64–5, 68–70, 76–7 Maharaja of Bundi, 76 Maharaja of Dholpur, 56 Maharaja of Gwalior, 56 maharajas, 57, 60, 64, 69, 77, See also princely rulers

Index maharajpramukh, 70 Maharani Gayatri Devi, 57 Maharashtra, 1, 128, 160 Mahavir, Bhai, 162 Mahila Congress, 160 Mahila Morcha, 160, 163, 172 male, 5 Malhotra, Inder, 2 Malik, Jitendra Singh, 246, 263 Mandawa, 77 Mane, Suresh, 233 Mangalore, 165 Manikandan, C. and Andrew Wyatt (2014), 13, 42, 176, 194, 245 Marandi, Babulal, 223 Marandi, Nunulal, 223 Mararashtra, 23 Marathas, 23 Marginal workers, 97–8, 102 Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, 111 Marwar, 65 Masuda, 66 Maurya, Swami Prasad, 233 Mayawati, 138, 142, 185, 188–9, 197–9, 211, 226, 232–3, 236 McDonagh, Eileen, 150, 169 McMillan, Alistair, 176, 194, 199 MDMK. See Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Meghalaya, 185 Member of Parliament (MP), 84–5, 87, 89, 94–5, 97–8, 102, 239–43, 245–7, 249–51, 253–6, 258–60, 262–5 Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), 1, 14, 36, 60, 62, 64, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 77, 78, 246, 248, 257, 263, 267 Mendelsohn, Oliver, 176, 194, 199–200 Mendoza, Ronald, 2 Menon, V. P., 60 MGR. See Ramachandran, M. G. minister, 14, 29, 35, 37, 39 Mirdha, Jyoti, 161 Mishra, Satish Chandra, 233 Mishra, Satish Kumar, 234 Mizoram, 148 MLALADS, 33 Modernization theory, 84, 101 Modi, Narendra, 29, 162, 164, 196 monarchs, 57 Morena, 173–4 Morocco, 3 Mountbatten, 70 MPLADs, 31, 33 Mukherjee, Abhijit, 36 Mukherjee, Pranab, 36

275 Mukherji, S. P., 74 multi-ethnic, 208 Munde, Gopinath, 5 Muslim, 3, 5, 9, 23, 24, 27–8, 49–50, 74–5, 145–6, 168, 175, 189, 197, 207–35, 240, 251–4, 263 Muslim dominated parties, 215, 223, 224 Muslim dynasties, 223 Muslim League, 223 Muslim MPs, 207, 215, 218, 223, 234 Myanmar, 143–4 Nadar, Kamaraj, 61 Naga Peoples Front, 223 Nagaland, 223 Naidu, Chandrababu, 41 Naidu, Manjula, 151 Naidu, Venkaiah, 148, 157, 215 Naiks, 1 name recognition, 243, 256, 263 Namier, Sir Lewis, 65, 67 Nanda, Kiran Moy, 231 Nanded, 1 Narayana, G., 176, 194, 198, 206 National Conference, 238, See also Jammu and Kashmir National Conference National Loktantrik Party, 223 national parties, 126–7 Nationalist Congress Party, 111, 131, 136 Nawalgarh, 77 Nazira, 51 NCP. See Nationalist Congress Party NDA, 189 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 24, 61, 69, 80, 142, 159–61 Nehru, Motilal, 160–1 Nehru-Gandhi family, 105, 109 Indira Gandhi, 20, 109, 136, 142–3, 147, 159, 184 Maneka Gandhi, 109, 161, 165, 171 Priyanka Gandhi, 147, 149 Rajiv Gandhi, 136, 148, 184 Rahul Gandhi, 137, 161, 166, 171, 228, 235, 243 Sonia Gandhi, 105, 136, 142–3, 147–9, 152, 159, 161, 165, 171–2 Varun Gandhi, 109, 161 Nehru-Gandhis, 1–2, 13, 15, 29, 84, 236 Nepal, 143–4, 154, 167 nepotism, 39, 44, 241, 262 Netherlands, 3 network ties, 42–3 new parties, See party age Niger, 144 Nilekani, Janhavi, 176, 201–2 Nitish Kumar, 120

276

Index

nomination, 209, 229–30 Non-dynastic politicians, 85, 87, 89, 94, 97–8, 101 North India, 102 north-central India, 89, 92, 131 northeast India, 131 North-Eastern India, 89 northwest India, 19, 89, 92, 131 Norway, 4 NREGA, 33 Nunn, Michelle, 150 old parties. See party age old regime, 56–9, 61, 64, 70–1, 76–8, 266 old-regime dynasties, 56–7 organized parties. See party organization Orissa, 66, 81 Other Backward Classes (OBCs), 156 Pakistan, 56, 75, 79, 143–4, 154, 167, 172 panchayat, 71, 234, 257, 263 Panchayati Raj, 245 panchayats, 13, 156, 164, 169, 172 Panda, Baijayant Jay, 84 Pande, Rohini, 176, 202 Pandit, Vijay Lakshmi, 160 Park and Tinker 1959, 75 Parliament, 136, 141–3, 148, 153, 155, 159–61, 166, 168, 170, 172 Lower House, 144, 154, 169 Parliamentary constituencies (PCs), 84–6, 90, 93, 95, 97–8, 102 parties autocratic leadership, 8 biases, 141, 153, 169 dynastic leadership, 8, 13, 15, 44 organizational weakness, 3, 8, 12, 38, 44, 107, 241, 259, 262 structures, 139, 149, 151, 166 party age, 8, 24, 108, 122, 125, 133 founding date, 109–11 new parties, 106, 108–12, 121, 123, 134 old parties, 108–12, 123, 134 splinter parties, 109–12 party centralization, 120 party decentralization, 117 party diversity, 187, 203 party formation, 49 party nomination, 107, 109, 114–15, 119–20, 238, 245, see also ticket allocation and renomination party organization, 15, 107, 113–19, 122, 124–6, 133, 187–8, 190, 199, 202, 240, 243, 248, 259 autocratic parties, 107–8, 114–17, 119, 123–4 democratic parties, 114

organized parties, 105, 108, 113–18, 121, 123–4 party size, 125–7, 134 Pasi, 233 Paswan, Kamlesh, 183, 188 Paswan, Ram Vilas, 184 Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai, 70 paths to power, 239 Patil, Bhaskar Rao, 1 patronage, 24 Pattali Makkal Katchi, 123 Pawar, Sharad, 36, 136, 243 performance, 30, 32, 42–3, 45, 47 performance in parliament, 31 Philippines, 4, 84, 107 Piliavsky, Anastasia, 6 Pilot, Rajesh, 229 Pilot, Sachin, 229 PMK, See Pattali Makkal Katchi police, 34–6 political competition, 200, 204 political equality, 239 political experience, 239–42, 244–6, 248–50, 252–4, 256–7, 259, 261–4 political family, 102–3, 139, 142, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 163, 166, 168, 260, 263 political resources, 239 Poverty, 84, 97–8, 101–2 pracharaks, 162 Prada, Jaya, 243 Pradesh Congress Committee, 61, 227 preceding dynastic ties, 181, 201, 242, 247, 249 preference for dynastic candidates, 115, 119–22 President’s rule, 62 primaries, 264 Prime Minister, 12, 15, 25, 29, 37, 53, 61, 69 Prime Ministership, 1 princely rulers, 7, 24, See also royal families princely states, 12, 71, 90, 102 princes, 58, 61, 64, 66, 68–70, 77 private sector, 129–30 Punjab, 23, 69, 84, 160 Querubin, 2 questions in parliament, 12, 31, 33, 45 quotas, 3, 28, 154–5, 164, 167, 169 Raja Kalyan Singh of Bhinai, 79 Raja of Khetri, 69, 77 Raja of Mankapur, 88, 97 Rajasthan, 56–9, 61–3, 66–8, 70–3, 75–81, 83, 90, 93, 156, 161–2, 165, 228–9, 236

Index Rajasthan’s State Peoples’ Freedom movement, 57 Raje, Vasundhara, 162–3 Raje, Yashodara, 162 Rajiv Gandhi. See Nehru-Gandhi family Rajpramukh, 69–70 Rajput, 58, 60, 62, 64, 67–8, 71–81 Rajput Mahasabha, 62 Rajya Sabha, 142, 148, 151, 155, 161, 244 Ram Rajya Parishad, 60, 63, 73–7, 79 Ram, Jagjivan, 35, 142, 161, 184–5 Ram, Kanshi, 110, 142, 189, 198, 200 Ramachandran, M.G., 119, 142 Ramachandran, Janaki, 119 Ranjan, Ranjeet, 36 Rao, K. Chandrasekhar, 105, 110 Rao Inderjit Singh, 102 rape, 160, 165–7, 170–1 Rashtra Sevika Samiti, 148, 163 Rashtriya Janata Dal, 39, 106, 111, 118, 121, 123, 131, 226 Rashtriya Lok Dal, 111 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 147 Rawal of Nawalgarh, 77 Rawls, John, 239 Reconstruction, 107 Reddy, Y. S. Jagan Mohan, 40 Reddy family, 189 Reddy, Jagan, 229 Reddy, Kiran Kumar, 229 Reddys, 1, 23 region, 18 regional parties, 126–7, 134 regional variation in dynasticism, 26, 125, 134 religion, 13, 23–4, 74, 95, 187, 210 religious, 22, 24, 28, 57, 73, 75, 79, 101, 138, 167, 175 renomination, 37, 43–4, 46, 218 See also party nomination and ticket allocation Republican Party, 107 Republican Party of India, 111 Republican Party of India (Ambedkar), 221 reservation(s), 21, 28, 140, 145, 151, 154–6, 164, 167–9, 174–6, 188, 190, 194, 200–1, 203 reserved constituency, 174–5, 184, 190, 200–1, see also reservation(s) reserved seat, 175, 177, 180, 190, 196–200 for women, 137, 142–3, 145, 153–6, 165, 167–8 reserved categories, 176, 194 returns to office, 3, 12, 33, 175, 186, 202. See also state Revolutionary Socialist Party, 117, 222 Rewari dynasty, 102

277 Rio, Neiphu, 223 Rio, Zhaleo, 223 Rithambara, Sadhvi, 163 RJD. See Rashtriya Janata Dal RLD. See Rashtriya Lok Dal Robinson 1988, 262 Roopnagar, 70 Rootedness, 88, 94, 101 Rossi, 2 Royal dynastic politicians, 87, 89, 94–5, 97–8 royal family or families, 83, 85, 88, 90, 93, 97–8, 101–2. See also princely rulers Royal non-dynastic politicians, 87, 89, 97–8 RPI. See Republican Party of India RSP. See Revolutionary Socialist Party RSS, 243 Rude, George, 67 rural, 34, 46, 85, 87, 95, 97, 101–2 rural elites, 56 sadhvis, 163 Saifai, 1 Saikia, Debabrata, 29–30, 51 Saikia, Hiteshwar, 29 Samajwadi Kranti Dal, 232 Samajwadi Party, 9, 111, 128, 210, 215, 226, 230–1, 235–6 Sangh Parivar, 163 Sanghvi, Vir, 48 Sangma, Agatha, 185 Sangma, P. A., 185 sarpanch patis, 168–9 Sasaram, 185 Satta, 136 Sayeed, Hamdullah, 185 Sayeed, P. M., 185 SC, See scheduled castes scheduled caste(s), 3, 8, 21–4, 27, 28, 35, 50, 142, 145, 173, 176, 195, 198–9, 202–3, 210, 211, 213–22, 224, 226, 229, 231, 233–4, 262–3 scheduled categories, 175, 190, 194, 199, 201 ST, See scheduled tribe scheduled tribe(s), 3, 8, 22, 23, 27–8, 50, 146, 156, 173, 176, 198–9, 202–3, 207–35, 263 Scindia family, 39, 56, 83, 88, 94, 109 Singh, Dushyant, 56, 109 Scindia, Jyotiraditya, 15, 56, 109 Scindia, Jyotiraditiya, 88. See also Scindia family Scindia, Madhavrao, 15, 109 Scindia, Madhavrao. See Scindia family Scindia, Vasundhara Raje, 15, 56, 88, 109

278

Index

Scindia family (cont.) Scindia, Vijaya Raje, 15, 109, 162–3 Scindia, Yashodhara Raje, 56, 109 Sehgal, Anuradha, 136 self employment, 34 self-employed, 34 Shah, Amit, 196, 215 Sharief, C K Jaffer, 229 Sharma, Brij Sunder, 62 Shekhawati, 77 Shinde, Sushil Kumar, 165, 195, 197 Shiromani Akali Dal, 30, 166, 212 Shiv Sena, 118, 121, 123, 128 Shri Ram Sena, 165 Shukla, Karuna, 163 Shukla, Rajesh, 187, 198 Siddique, Naseemuddin, 233–4 Sidhu, Navjot, 243 Singh, Ajit, 48 Singh, Dushyant, See Scindia family Singh, Ganga, 69 Singh Hanwant, 94 Singh, Jaswant, 64, 75 Singh, Jodh, 65 Singh, Madan of Danta, 75 Singh, Manmohan, 137 Singh, Raghubir of Jaoli, 75 Singh, Raghuraj Pratap, 138 Singh, Rajnath, 152, 162, 215 Singh, Tavleen, 2 Singh, Thakur Ayuwan, 64, 75 Singh, Thakur Narayan, 66 Singh, Jaswant, 93 Sinha, Jayant, 29–30 Sinha, Mridula, 163 Sinha, Shatrughan, 243 Sinha, Tarkeshwari, 160 Sinha, Yashwant, 29 Sinhas, 1 Sithraman, Nirmala, 163 skill, 30, 32, 42–3 small parties, 112, 117, 123–4, 126 Smith, Daniel, xviii, xix, 2 social movements, 141, 163, 166 Ayodhya, 141, 163–4, 167 anti-colonial nationalist, 141, 166 JP Narayan, 141, 148 swadeshi, 148 women’s, 153 socialist parties, 110–11 Socialists, 60, 63, 66 Sonepat, 246 Sonia Gandhi, See Nehru-Gandhi family Soren, Basant, 223 Soren, Durga, 223

Soren, Hemant, 186–7, 223 Soren, Rupi, 186 Soren, Shibu, 29, 186, 223 South India, 19, 26, 89 SP. See Samajwadi Party Spary, Carole, 240 splinter parties, See party age Sridharan, E., 117 Sri Lanka, 143–4 ST. See scheduled tribes state, 107, 129 discretion, 33–4, 44 dominance, 33 patronage, 24 returns to office, 3, 12, 33 State Assembly Constituencies (ACs), 86 subaltern, 23, 28, 41, 48, 50–1, 241, 251, 254, 262 subaltern-dominated parties, 209–10, 212, 215, 218–20, 223 subaltern ethnic categories, 208 subaltern groups, 3, 9, 23, 28, 48, 51, 207, 209, 215–16, 223–5, 234–5 subaltern representation, 209 subaltern-caste dynasties, 209 subalternity, 24 subalternization, 207, 209, 215 success. See party success succession. See leadership succession Sule, Supriya, 36, 136, 166 Supaul, 36 supply of dynastic candidates, 107–9, 113, 119, 125, 133 Surajgarh, 77 Suryanarayan, Pavithra, 117 Suu Kyi, Aung San, 143 Swami Karpatriji, 73, 80 Swaraj, Sushma, 138, 147–9, 152, 165, 167, 172 Swatantra Party, 57 Sweden, 3 Syria, 144 Tamil Nadu, 142 Taylor, Charles, 4 TDP. See Telugu Desam Party Telangana, 105 Telangana Rashtra Samithi, 105–6, 108, 110, 113, 121, 123, 212 telecom, 34 Telugu Desam, 41 Telugu Desam Party, 110, 121, 123 Thachil, Tariq, 40, 101, 104 Thackeray family, 189 Thailand, 3 Thakre, Kusabhau, 162

Index thakur(s), 64, 67, 69, 72–3, 76 Thakur Bhim Singh, 77 Thakur Devi Singh, 77 Thakur Raghubir Singh, 77 Thane, 1 Tharoor, Shashi, 243, 250 Ticket allocation, 32, 37–41, 48, 173–4, 180, 184, 186–7, 190, 196, 201, 204, 209–10, 224–7, 230, 232, 234, See also party nomination and renomination tokenism, 195 Trinamool Congress, 111, 122, 124–5 Tripura, 157 TRS. See Telangana Rashtra Samithi Tully, Mark, 5, 84 twice-born castes, 23 Udaipur, 69–70, 75, 77 Uganda, 3 underemployment, 35 under-representation, 194–5 unemployed, 34 unemployment, 35 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 144 United Kingdom, 3 United Nations (UN), 151 United States (US), 4, 107, 150, 155 unorganized parties. See party organization UPA, 183, 185, 189 upper caste, 41 Urban, 87, 95, 97, 102 Urbanization, 84–5 Uttar Pradesh (UP), 14, 23, 35, 48, 88, 117, 128, 138, 149, 156, 160–1, 183–4, 197, 231–2 Uttarakhand, 117 Vaishnav, Kapur and Sircar 2014, 6, 44 Vajpayee, Atal Behari, 37, 162–3, 197 Van Coppenolle, Brenda, 2, 268 Vasundhara Raje, 83, 88, 93, See also Scindia family Velasco Carlos, 6, 33 Verma, Arvind, 37 Verma, Beni Prasad, 232 Verma, Rakesh, 232 vertical mobilization, 6, 32, 57, 68, 80–1 Vicziany, Marika, 173, 199–200 Vidhan Sabha, 246 Vidhuthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, 221 Vijaya Raje Scindia. See Scindia family voters, 2–4, 6–7, 13, 30, 32, 44–6, 51, 57, 59, 61, 64, 66–8, 70, 80, 83–5, 98, 101–2,

279 104, 173, 185, 189, 197, 200, 223, 225, 229, 233 Vyas, Jay Narayan, 60–1, 65, 67 Walter Krit Hitkarni Sabha, 72 wealth, 30, 42–3, 48, 50, 129–30, 134 Weiner, Myron, 75, 82, 262 West Bengal, 116, 131, 136 West India, 19, 26, 89 winnability, 42, 187 Wolkowitz, Carol, 245 women, 3, 9, 21, 27, 41, 49–51, 240, 245, 251–4, 259, 265 activism, 141, 164–5 dynastic, 139, 145, 159, 164, 170 Indian, 136–7, 143, 151 Members of Parliament (MPs), 137, 139, 142–3, 145, 151–2, 155, 159–60, 164–8 Muslim, 145, 168 paradox of low representation and high dynasticism, 8 parliamentarians, 137, 151 politicians, 136, 138, 143, 150–1, 155 under-representation in parties, 8 Women’s Reservation Bill, 154 Wyatt, Andrew, 30, 117, 174, 176 Yadav, Yogendra, 207 Yadav family, 36, 231–2 Yadav, Akhilesh, 35, 231–2 Yadav, Ankur, 232 Yadav, Dimple, 35 Yadav, Laloo Prasad, 136, 226 Yadav, Mulayam Singh, 14, 35, 48, 226, 230, 232 Yadav, Pappu, 36 Yadav, Premlata, 232 Yadav, Ram Gopal, 231 Yadav, Sharad, 120, 166 Yadav, Shiv Pal, 231 Yadav, Shivpal, 232 Yadav, Tej Pratap, 36 Yadavs, 1, 14 youth, 3, 30, 41, 49–50, 249 YSR Congress, 41, 111 YSRCP. See YSR Congress Zambia, 4 zamindar(s), 24, 56, 84 zamindari, 12 zamindars, 24, 56 Zhimomi, Khekiho, 223 Zia, Khaleda, 143, 155