Report
on Democratic Dynasties
On 5 August 2016, Seminar co-hosted, with Cambridge University Press and Lokniti-CSDS, a panel discussion on Democratic Dynasties (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The book, edited by Kanchan Chandra, is a collection of essays on the relationship between dynasty and democracy based on data on India’s twenty-first century parliaments. It develops themes first explored in an issue of Seminar magazine devoted to dynastic politics in South Asia (June 2011).
The panel was moderated by the biographer and historian, Patrick French. The panelists were Niraja Jayal, Professor of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Salman Khurshid, former Union Minister of External Affairs, Jayant Sinha, Minister of State for Civil Aviation, and Kanchan Chandra, Professor of Politics at New York University.
Chandra opened the discussion by arguing that dynasticism in the Indian Parliament is a product of favouritism by parties in the ticket allocation process and that it has mixed effects on democracy, amplifying exclusion by creating a birth-based ruling class composed disproportionately of forward caste males, but also serving as a channel of entry for some under-represented social groups – women, Muslims, backward castes and young – who might otherwise have been even more poorly represented.
Khurshid argued that dynasticism in India was produced, not just by the preference of parties or voters for dynasties, but by pressure from party workers. Sinha argued that the voters are the deciding factor in sending dynastic candidates to Parliament and the process by which they select candidates is rational and meritocratic. Parties simply select those candidates that they think are most likely to win. Jayal argued that notwithstanding the collateral benefits of dynasty in enabling some forms of inclusion, ‘to the extent that dynastic politics closes off doors to citizens who may be passionately motivated to public service and might have the ability and the competence to do so but do not possess that dynastic calling card, it definitely diminishes our democracy.’
An edited account of their remarks follows. The full discussion can be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYTZ3S4gWGQ
Kanchan Chandra: I’ll start by just saying a little about the title of the book, Democratic Dynasties, and what we mean by that. We define a dynastic MP as an MP who has a family member who preceded him or her in politics. One of the interesting things we found is that most dynasties in the Indian context – and this goes outside Parliament too – are of very recent democratic vintage, typically created after 1960. Royal families are only about 3% of the Indian Parliament on average, and former royal families are only about 10% of India’s dynastic class. And so really what we have in this case are dynasties that have sprung up through the democratic process and that is one reason why we label this phenomenon ‘democratic dynasties’.
In India, about a quarter of MPs in the twenty-first century have been dynastic: 20% in 2004, 30% in 2009 and 22% in 2014. This places India in the middle of the spectrum of the countries for which we have data; the Philippines, where about 50% of the legislators hail from dynastic backgrounds, is at one end and Canada, with about 3% in 2011, is at the other.
The central argument the book makes is that dynasticism in the Indian Parliament is a product of favouritism by parties in the ticket allocation process, rather than a preference, cultural or otherwise, for dynasticism among voters. In particular, it is the product of a ticket allocation process that is informal, centralized, and with no clear criteria for candidate selection. That process ends up producing a consistent favouritism for dynastic candidates across political parties. There is, however, a difference in degree. Currently 48% of the Congress party MPs are dynastic. With the BJP it is 15%. But dynastic politics in India is not just a Congress phenomenon. It is pervasive across parties.
Why would parties favour dynastic candidates, even parties whose ideologies or leadership actually lead them to oppose dynastic politics? We argue in the book that it is a question of loyalty. In a situation where parties are organizationally weak, one is deeply concerned about the cohesiveness of local level units, or local defections, and the use of family ties as a principle of ticket allocation allows the party leadership to circumvent those concerns about loyalty.
This favouritism is not linked to the superior qualifications of dynastic candidates. If one includes any measure of qualification or performance, including performance in Parliament, constituency level service, political experience, among others, one cannot link party favouritism for dynastic politics to their qualifications on average, although there may be individual exceptions.
So what we really have is a case where the accident of birth has become a qualification in itself. And that is one form of violation which does create a politics of exclusion. One of the ways in which it does this is by amplification of upper class dominance. There is already an over-representation of upper castes in the Indian Parliament – 43% of the current Indian Parliament is forward caste – and dynasty amplyies that dominance: 54% of the dynastic class in 2014 was from the forward castes. So, there is an amplification of exclusion.
But, there is a twist. There are also ways in which dynastic politics furthers inclusion, particularly for subaltern groups who do not have quotas – Muslims, for example, or women, or backward castes or, and though I would not call this a subaltern group exactly, young people. When one has a situation in which the political system is closed in many ways to these groups, dynastic politics allows a channel for entry. So one ends up with a paradoxical relationship with both inclusion and exclusion at the same time.
Salman Khurshid: I have five minutes to talk about something that has gone on for centuries. Frankly, as far as I see, the most interesting thing about this book is the statistics provided.
But a point that I guess gets missed out when one is looking only at democratic dynasties in public life, that is in politics, is that one could have compared what is happening in other sections of our society – what is happening in law, in media, in Bollywood, in many other fields, is that there is a direct connection of the present generation of successful people with predecessors from their own families, whether one is a TV anchor, or a successful lawyer or a judge. Right now if one, for instance, looks at Supreme Court judges, one will find that many of them are the progeny of judges.
Of course, there is a larger explanation of how and why this happens. Even in industry, I think that the control of industry and business in our country is vastly different from the manner in which it is controlled, run and organized in Europe or the United States of America. Family controlled, not just family owned, but family controlled businesses is what one gets to see. Similarly, take the field of culture. There are many notable traditional families who are associated with culture in our country. Or writers. Look at any field and one finds that there is a hand down from generation to generation.
Why does this happen? I believe this is because, and I can’t validate the thesis immediately, we never had a real revolution in our country as China did. Instead, we morphed Indian feudalism into Indian democracy. So it is not just simple Indian democracy that we have: there are very clear signals and signs of feudalism everywhere. And that, of course, is further strengthened by the fact that we have not really relieved ourselves of the stranglehold of the caste system, which has now been introduced beyond caste into religion.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, my contention, from the ground and from the field, is that dynasties are forced upon us. One fact that often goes unnoticed is that there are no part-time political workers in India. In the United States of America, in contrast, people come out for a year or a year and a half, elect a President and go back to their jobs. The next time there is a presidential election, at best only a very small number of those supporters will come back to be active workers for the presidential campaign.
In India, even thirty years after one has seen someone for the first time in an election, he is still there when elections are announced and turns up very faithfully and diligently to do the work he did thirty years back. And for him, if you (the candidate) disappear and your family disappears or your children disappear, he does not know where to go. So, if he is loyal to the family and/or to the party, he is also loyal to a set-up which is really part of modern democratic feudalism.
And this is where I think it begins – with the need and the determination and desire of the worker to ensure that he has somebody who symbolizes the presence of the family, the person, the visage, the personality that he has associated himself with. Essentially, it is a reflection of the way the political worker seeks to ensure social mobility.
Of course, changes are now taking place. New people are emerging as are new political parties, and so one sees the faces of new people who have not earlier been in public life. But just how quickly these new parties also assimilate people from older parties who have been part of a dynastic culture is writ large for anyone to see. So the answer to the riddle is really bottom-up; political dynasties and democratic dynasties happen because the ground level person has not broken away from feudalism; that is my impression.
Jayant Sinha: If we are talking about Indian democracy and dynasties, I think my position will be very different from what Khurshid Sahab has said. I believe that in our country the will of the people is paramount, and that what happens reflects the will of the people (hamare desh mein janta janardan hai, to jo janadesh aata hai, jo janata chahati hai, vahi hota hai).
India is a great democracy, which through the numbers is able to churn through dynastic factors, competence, ideology. It is able to process all of that and through that great churning select candidates. And we, of course, as the whole world acknowledges, run the most extraordinary elections that have been witnessed anywhere.
My own experience, speaking from the ground level, is that we have moved well past the feudalism that Khurshid Sahab refers to. And in that sense, I think people make rational decisions in terms of whom they select as their winning candidates. And because people are making rational decisions as they are churning through all these factors, the parties are in turn responding in kind when selecting candidates. My own experience, though limited, is that parties select those candidates that they think are most likely to win.
If the process of selection is itself meritocratic, open and fair, the allocation of tickets takes all relevant factors into account. Parties thus select those candidates who are most likely to win because ultimately they are best able to serve the electorate in the best possible way. That, I think, is really the great churning of the democratic process in India.
There is in fact a vast difference between dynasty and legacy. And the difference is that those who come into public life following a dynastic succession are typically much younger, less experienced, have not necessarily led a professional life where they have proven themselves, demonstrated that they can get things done, that they have the ability to be capable of executing difficult tasks and under great pressure, and so on. Then there are the people who come into public life because there is a legacy, as in Khurshid Sahab’s case, where there is a family which for many generations has been serving the country. One can serve the country in many ways, including through electoral politics. Though my father has been in electoral politics, but generations of my family have been of service to this country through the civil services and various other ways. If one is born into a family with those values and a legacy of service to the nation, then it is a choice that one confronts as an individual as well, which is whether or not to embrace that legacy. And each of us can embrace that legacy in different ways.
My brother, for instance, runs a very successful company – creating jobs, providing renewable energy to India. I think that is a very noble thing to do, a great way to serve the nation. I am doing it in my own small though different way as well. But I believe that all of us with a legacy of service have to confront these choices and decide how best to take this legacy of service to the nation forward and that is what I am trying to do.
Niraja Jayal: I am going to pull the discussion back to the academic register. I will first offer three reasons why everyone should read this book and then raise a couple of questions that the book provokes us to think about and probe further. There is so little scholarly literature on dynastic politics anywhere and this is the first full-length book treatment of this phenomenon and a very rigorous treatment at that.
The first is that it complicates, if not unsettles, our standard normative assumptions about dynasty and its anti-democratic qualities. It suggests that paradoxically enough dynasty can provide avenues of representation to groups which otherwise might not have got representation and thus can actually further the inclusion of disadvantaged groups. In other words, it identifies what one might call some of the collateral political benefits of dynasties.
Amrita Basu’s paper makes a strong case, perhaps too strong, that dynastic politics has brought women into legislatures in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. And similarly for young people. The book tells us, and this is a fascinating fact, that the 16th Lok Sabha is India’s oldest Parliament but that its younger MPs are disproportionately dynastic. The reason: it is much easier to persuade ageing upper caste patriarchs to step down to make way for their own progeny than to make way for promising young talent which happens not to be related to them by kinship. But other than women and the young, I think that the claim of the inclusive effect of dynasticism, that Kanchan Chandra makes in a moderate way and Simon Chauchard rather more strongly, is much weaker for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Muslims. And, as Anjali Bohlken writes, not all dynasties are created equal.
A second reason. The book provides us with an incredibly rich range of data on dynasties in India. It covers, and I will just bullet point this, degrees of dynasticism in the last three Lok Sabhas, how successful dynasties are in terms of victory, their margins of victory, their likelihood of getting renominated or re-elected and variations across these three elections in terms of age, gender, social and religious background, all regions, all political parties. So, in terms of data this book is a veritable feast.
Finally, and most importantly, the book essays an interesting explanation for dynasties in Indian democracy and Kanchan only mentioned one-half of it. The argument actually has two parts – the enormous returns associated with state office, and the weak organization of political parties. Together, to my mind, they constitute a convincing explanation for the larger picture, even if some exceptions remain.
And though the exceptions may be statistically insignificant, it is obvious that they are intriguing because many of them occupy significant leadership positions. Their presence cannot be explained in terms of just those two factors, at least not the first. Of course, it is the case that the old regime dynasties about which the Rudolphs have written so charmingly in this book have given way to a new type of political aristocracy which is the creation of our democracy. But one wonders if some of the post-feudal political dynasties which we have, and though Salman Khurshid is referring to them all as democratic feudals, they are really post-feudals. We need an explanation which is not centred on the seductions of discretionary state power and material returns attached to that, not power and pelf so to speak, but instead draws on the enormous social and cultural capital that these individuals already possess. So might the explanation also lie in the symbolic rather than material aspects of state power: fame, glory and ideals of public service? I know we are cynical about these ideals but is this not a phenomenon that somehow bears some similarity to political families in other countries like the United States as well?
This takes me to two questions that I think this book provokes, the first about the possible relationship between dynasty and plutocracy. We have been told that the 16th Lok Sabha is the richest Lok Sabha ever and also that the wealthiest MP is a dynast. It is not unknown for plutocracy to be smuggled into the democratic shell. But is democracy as a project being suborned to plutocracy and might there be a convergence between these two?
Second, even if dynasty is not entirely convergent with plutocracy, our normative discomfort with dynasty is grounded in what is, I would insist, a fundamentally worthy principle, which is the equal right of every citizen to have the opportunity to participate in politics on equal terms. Anything less is a deep denial of the principle of political equality which cannot simply be about the right to vote. So, to the extent that dynastic politics closes off doors to citizens who may be passionately motivated towards public service, and might have the ability and the competence to do so but do not possess that dynastic calling card, it definitely diminishes our democracy.
*
A vigorous discussion followed, between the panelists and with members of the audience on the role of voters in promoting dynasticism relative to the role of parties, on how voters choose between multiple candidates from the same dynasty, and on the role of money. There was also debate on the effects of dynasticism on Indian democracy: on whether and how dynasticism imposes barriers on new entrants, on whether it is changing the sociological composition of Parliament, on the role of dynasticism in fostering inclusion for women compared to other groups and, quite apart from inclusion and exclusion, how dynasticism influences the quality of democratic representation in India. A recurring theme throughout the discussions was the relationship between culture and dynasticism in India. The panel concluded with the observation that while culture cannot be seen as a ‘cause’ of dynastic politics, there is a very interesting interactive relationship between dynasticism and culture. Cultural norms, in particular patriarchal cultural norms, have produced a preponderance of men in political dynasties in India. But dynastic politics in turn has also begun to change family dynamics and, in particular, gender roles within political families, as well as notions of what constitutes a family.
