The argument between dynasty and democracy recalls the 1962 Jaipur election when voters sent Maharani Gayatri Devi to the Lok Sabha with the biggest landslide - 1,92,909 votes out of 2,46,516 - the world had ever witnessed. The likes of M. Venkaiah Naidu, Arun Jaitley and other vociferous apostles of democracy would have been hard put to find a more resounding democratic victory. Yet, who could have been more dynastic than the daughter of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, granddaughter of the Gaekwad of Baroda and wife of the Maharaja of Jaipur?
What happened in Burdwan that same year was even more spectacular. Maharani Radharani Mahtab of Burdwan wrested the Vidhan Sabha seat for the Congress from the revolutionary and legendary Benoy Krishna Chowdhury, a former member of the Jugantar group then representing the undivided Communist Party of India. Chowdhury had won Burdwan in 1951 and 1957, defeating on the first occasion no less a personage than the resplendent Maharajadhiraja Sir Uday Chand Mahtab Bahadur of Burdwan himself. But Chowdhury lagged behind the Maharaja's wife 11 years later with only 31.07 per cent of the vote against her 67.42 per cent. Anxious to campaign for her colleague, the indomitable Manikuntala Sen, social worker, revolutionary and legislator, and then still a CPI activist, found herself rebuffed. "Our own cadres said with folded hands 'Not this time, Monidi. Not against our Maharani!'" she recalled afterwards.
When the Maharani died a year later, the constituency moved back to the Left. Reinstated, Chowdhury was credited with Operation Barga which benefited around 1.7 million sharecroppers as well as with the distribution of about a million acres to 2.4 million landless labourers. He was a percipient man of conscience, reportedly remarking in 1995 when Jyoti Basu was chief minister and he the second man in the Left Front regime, "This is a government of contractors, by contractors and for contractors." The Left Front has gone but not those contractors. Power perpetuates itself, and contractors, businessmen and industrialists are the crutches that prop up many of India's democratic politicians. That was a bitter truth Burdwan voters must have realized in the decade between rejecting Uday Chand Mahtab and welcoming his wife.
No one who understands history or is honest about the roots of power would dare to contradict Rahul Gandhi's claim that dynasty and democracy dominate both politics and business. The corruption and inefficiency Jawhar Sircar recently described in these columns is part of the price the public must pay for what Adlai Stevenson III, the former Illinois senator, once called India's "representative government". He refused to dignify it with the description of democracy which was something Americans enjoyed. Even that assessment was made long before West Bengal's unique one-woman democracy, before a monastery functionary was foisted on Uttar Pradesh, and before a prime minister in a monstrous parody of a royal turban strutted on the ramparts of the Red Fort.
India is a land of monarchical leaders, whether in politics or business. Some see the experience and traditions that go with heredity as advantages in both fields of endeavour. Others realize there can be no objection to dynasty per se so long as it does not suppress or restrict competition and so long as the dynastic element is not a candidate's only - or even main - qualification. Yet others intone the meaningless mantra of democracy because that is the fashion in the West. Genuflecting to convention, the American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, wrote in 1947, "As a democracy the United States ought presumably to be able to dispense with dynastic families," and went on to prove it didn't. Nor will it ever. The Boston Consulting Group calculates that families own or control 33 per cent of companies in the land of the brave and the home of the free whose political life resonates with such well-worn names as Roosevelt, Kennedy and Bush.
Thirty-five years after Schlesinger, Ronald Reagan welcomed Indira Gandhi to Washington by comparing the Nehrus with the Boston Brahmin Adamses who had provided the US with statesmen, scholars and two presidents. "Lord Bolingbroke's description of the Adams family is equally appropriate for your family's contribution to India," he declared. "They are the guardian angels of the country they inhabit, studious to avert the most distant evil and to procure peace, plenty, and the greatest of human blessings, liberty." Rahul's grandmother must have warmed to the flattery. In the most democratic of aristocracies and most aristocratic of democracies across the Atlantic, where the prime minister is battling for her political life, 57 of the 650 members of the last Parliament were related to current or former MPs.
Britain's abundance of self-made and black and brown politicians also demonstrates that what matters most is not who wins but who is entitled to compete in a fair race. Democracy is by definition the will of the people, but no one has the right to order that mythic and mysterious entity - the people whose sacred name is invoked to justify so many excesses - to choose according to their own understanding of lessons they imbibed at second hand from our colonial masters when John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and other antique tomes were compulsory in every curriculum. If those principles were sacrosanct, voters in Jaipur and Burdwan were clearly anti-democratic in choosing dynastic candidates they trusted.
Ideally, perhaps, political dynasties should have faded out when ordinary people got the vote. In theory everyone should be judged on their individual merits rather than family connections or brand names. But just as monotonous repetition of the phrase "Digital India" has absolutely no impact on the bullock-cart performance of India Post, equality of opportunity, which is the antithesis of dynastic privilege, becomes a meaningless slogan when there is no equality of education, housing, health, medicine, employment or income. Behavioural patterns that are taken for granted in the industrialized West and which our stale politicians parrot unthinkingly lose their relevance for a people who strikingly returned to the obscurantist past in the 2014 Lok Sabha election.
The New York Times once calculated that the son of a US governor is 6,000 times more likely than the average American male baby-boomer to become a governor himself; the son of a senator is 8,500 times more likely to become a senator. India's large and burgeoning population does not mean the elite has expanded or that the concentration of power and wealth passes the muster of legitimacy. Last November's catastrophic demonetization exposed what a tiny group - even calling it a group may be an exaggeration - calls all the shots in a country that prides itself on being the world's biggest democracy.
Democratic dictators are a global phenomenon. Syria's Bashar al-Assad was summoned from England to be groomed after his elder brother died in a car crash. Kim Jong-un succeeded his father. Xi Jinping is the leading "princeling", as children of Communist Party grandees are called in China. The dividing line isn't always clear. Alec Douglas Home evoked an image of Siamese twins when, tired of Harold Wilson's jibes about him as "the 14th Earl of Home", he snapped, "I suppose Mr Wilson is the 14th Mr Wilson." Nor can everyone who has greatness thrust on him hang on to it, witness Oliver Cromwell's son, Richard, nicknamed "Tumbledown Dick" and "Queen Dick", who was never formally deposed as the second Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, or arrested, but allowed to fade away after nine uneasy months in the palace of Whitehall.
Only those who are jealous of Rahul Gandhi's inheritance blame him for it. But he must build on that legacy to earn and enjoy the nation's trust. As Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew advised many years ago, name-recognition is his biggest asset. He must be careful not to squander it.
