Rahul Read Free Page B

has happened, thousands of small towns and villages of India are yet to break out of this mindset.
    Political dynasties, however, are not the same as royal dynasties which demand unquestioning acceptance from the people. While there is no denying that political dynasties stand in conflict with the principles of democracy, it is equally important to acknowledge that they do not, and cannot, negate the foundation on which a democracy is built. The dynast does get the initial advantage which comes with the family name and the goodwill which the earlier generation of leaders from the family may have acquired. But, once voted into power, he has to prove himself worthy of people’s trust even if he is allowed more concessions than a first-generation politician would be granted. Yet, for the dynast to be rejected by the people, he would have to do a great deal of wrong in public perception. While there are examples of the voter turning his back on powerful and charismatic dynasts, India’s political history also shows that the Indian electorate is more forgiving of their mistakes. Indira’s example is a case in point.
    The politician who displayed shades of dictatorship by imposing Emergency when she felt that her position in the government was being threatened was ousted from office in the next election. Even then, it took the excesses of Emergency and a powerful political movement led by Jai Prakash Narayan (JP) to overthrow her. More than fifty Congress leaders defected to JP’s side and an even greater number wanted Indira replaced. The day she lost, India celebrated the way it had on the eve of Independence. But, less than three years later, in 1980, the same electorate which had rejoiced over her defeat with fireworks and drumbeats voted her back to power with a thumping majority. The Congress won 353 of the 529 seats.
    Rahul’s father, Rajiv, is another example of how Indian voters are quite capable of pulling the carpet from under any politician’s feet, exercising the power which ultimately rests with them: the power of the ballot. If Rajiv was elected with a sweeping majority because the people’s sympathies lay with him after the brutal assassination of his mother, he was also shunted out fast when the same people felt betrayed by the dynast whose ‘Mr Clean’ image had taken a beating after a series of scandals in the government.
    On more than one occasion, Rahul has said that he cannot deny the fact that he is a dynast and that his great-grandfather, his grandmother and his father were all prime ministers of India. Speaking to students at Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand in 2008, he said:
If I had not come from my family, I wouldn’t be here. You can enter the system either through family or friends or money. Without family, friends or money, you cannot enter the system. My father was in politics. My grandmother and great-grandfather were in politics. So, it was easy for me to enter politics. This is a problem. I am a symptom of this problem. I want to change it.
    Right from his early days in politics, Rahul has admitted that that is the point he is trying to make. But, that has not prevented him from invoking his family and making statements like: ‘I belong to a family which has never moved backwards, which has never gone back on its words. You know that when any member of my family has decided to do anything, he does it.’ He said this during a roadshow in Uttar Pradesh in April 2007. The irony of a dynast speaking against dynastic politics and striving to democratize his party by putting meritocracy above everything else hasn’t gone unregistered. Neither has the realization that what he has set out to do, or claims to have set out to do, is a tall order. Within the Congress, dynasty lurks in every corner. Its roots run deep; perhaps deeper than Rahul Gandhi is willing to admit.
    Apart from its most prized dynast, the Party has scores of second- or third-generation politicians who have been given