The Family Way

Why political dynasties succeed in India

While dynastic politics in India is most strongly associated with the Congress and the Gandhi family, other parties and families engage in it too. The BJP leader and current home minister Rajnath Singh (left), for instance, has been followed into politics by his son Pankaj (centre), who has twice served as the party’s general secretary in Uttar Pradesh. subhankar chakraborty / hindustan times / getty images
01 September, 2016

When India attained independence 69 years ago, it broke free from two kinds of dynastic rule. It severed ties with the British crown, and it integrated more than 500 princely states into the Indian union. But over the decades, another form of dynastic rule emerged in the country: that of elected political dynasties. The best known of these dynasties is the Nehru-Gandhi family, which dominated the prime ministership and the leadership of the Congress party after Independence.

But looking only at the Congress can obscure the fact that political dynasties, in different forms and to different degrees, exist in a number of political parties in India. Some of these dynasties are at the helm of their parties, among them the Karunanidhi family of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the Yadavs of the Samajwadi Party, and the Badals of the Akali Dal. But many other families are found burrowed within parties, dominating units at the local level, or occupying positions in party organisations. They are less well known, but no less important. So, to fully examine the extent to which Indian politics is dynastic, we have to look beyond the Congress and the highest echelons of other parties.

I began to examine this question in 2009, when I started collecting data on the family backgrounds of Lok Sabha MPs in the twenty-first century (in the 2004, 2009 and 2014 parliaments) in collaboration with fellow political scientists Anjali Bohlken and Simon Chauchard. We defined a dynastic politician as one who had a family member precede them in electoral politics. This included family members holding positions in directly elected political bodies such as the Lok Sabha or the Vidhan Sabha, indirectly elected bodies such as the Rajya Sabha, and in political parties, as office-bearers or electoral candidates. Using this definition, we began tracing the family backgrounds of MPs by reading national and regional newspapers, memoirs and biographies, Lok Sabha Who’s Whos, previously published work on political parties, and the returns published by the Election Commission of India. Some of this research culminated in my recently published edited volume, Democratic Dynasties. The data and arguments cited in this essay appear in that book, and in joint work with Bohlken that appears in a separate statistical paper.

Our data showed that in the 2014 Lok Sabha, 22 percent of MPs have a dynastic background. The data also provide a clearer picture of the dynastic tendencies of different parties. If we look at the larger political parties—those with at least ten seats in the 2014 parliament—the Congress is, as we would expect, the most dynastic: 48 percent of its current MPs have a dynastic background. And if we pool the data on Congress MPs across the twenty-first century parliaments, the Congress remains the most dynastic of the larger political parties.

The Bharatiya Janata Party is often described as a non-dynastic party. But that’s just not true—though it is, indeed, true that the BJP is less dynastic than the Congress. The BJP’s prime minister and president are not from political families, and only 15 percent of its current MPs are dynastic, compared to the Congress’s 48 percent. But the BJP controls the majority of seats in parliament, and it, not the Congress, currently has the largest number of dynastic MPs.

Further, many of those who have held prominent positions in the BJP in the past have had family members follow them into politics. This includes the BJP’s previous prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who has had several family members, including a niece, Karuna Shukla, and a nephew, Anoop Mishra, follow him into electoral politics. Shukla is a former BJP MP who later joined the Congress, and Mishra is a BJP MP from Madhya Pradesh. The current home minister and the party’s former president, Rajnath Singh, was followed into politics by his son Pankaj Singh, who has twice served as the general secretary of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh And a large number of previous or serving BJP chief ministers have also orchestrated the entry of their children or other family members into politics. This includes Kalyan Singh, Vasundhara Raje, Raman Singh, Prem Kumar Dhumal, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Sahib Singh Verma, BS Yeddyurappa, Babulal Gaur and Sunderlal Patwa.

Why are dynasties so common across parties? One argument is that they are a product of India’s unique cultural values. The former BBC journalist Mark Tully, for example, has argued that “It is India’s strong family traditions, so different to the nuclear families in the West, that justify dynasts in the eyes 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.”

But a look at the facts shows that India is hardly unique. There is now a wealth of data on dynasticism in modern-day democratically elected legislatures that shows how India lies in the middle of the spectrum of democracies for which comparable data are available. This spectrum is bounded at one extreme by the Philippines, in which 50 percent of all congresspersons in 2007 followed a relative into elected office, and at the other by Canada, in which 3 percent of the House of Commons in 2011 was dynastic. Japan, Iceland and Ireland, in which between a third and a fourth of elected legislators in 2009 were dynastic, occupy the middle, along with India. Belgium, Israel, the United States and Norway, in which the proportion of dynastic legislators ranged between 6 and 11 percent over a comparable time period, are at the lower end. If dynastic politics is alive and well in many modern democracies, including several in the West, each distinct in their cultural features, it can hardly be attributed to India’s cultural peculiarities.

A second argument is that dynasties exist in Indian politics because voters prefer them. But the data, at least when it comes to parliament, don’t support this claim either. The principal survey to ask voters about their preferences for dynasties nationwide, conducted by the scholars Milan Vaishnav, Devesh Kapur and Neelanjan Sircar in the 2014 elections, found that 46 percent of voters preferred candidates from political families. That still left 54 percent who did not believe dynastic representation was preferable. And the constituencies from which dynastic MPs are elected, and the nature of political competition in these constituencies, suggests that this is hardly a stable preference: only 5 percent of India’s parliamentary constituencies have been continuously represented by a dynastic MP between 2004 and 2014. Otherwise, the same constituencies often switch from a dynastic to a non-dynastic MP and back again. Another way of putting it is to say that dynastic MPs routinely lose to non-dynastic candidates. So it would be hard to claim that voters in India have some strong and stable preference for dynasties.

The best explanation for the presence of dynasties in Indian politics, we argue, comes from the role played by political parties. India’s political parties habitually give dynastic contenders a leg-up in the ticket allocation process. In the 2014 parliamentary elections, for example, all parties, taken together, renominated 75 percent of their dynastic MPs, compared to only 65 percent of their non-dynastic MPs. This is a consistent preference: they showed a similar favouritism in the 2009 elections.

Parties favour dynastic candidates as a way to ensure loyalty. They have few formal measures they can rely on to ensure cohesiveness in their local units. Existing anti-defection laws in India punish elected MPs for crossing the floor after an election, but do not protect local party units before or after an election. Party constitutions also rarely impose penalties for defection. Some parties, such as the BJP, the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), have ideologies that can help foster cohesion in their local units, but there is substantial variation even within these parties in the extent to which their local units are ideologically indoctrinated. Consequently, parties are constantly fearful about the likelihood of rebellion in their local units, especially against their chosen candidates.

When parties use dynasty as the principle of ticket allocation, the likelihood of rebellion is not eliminated, but it is reduced. As one former MP, whose family ties bagged him a Congress nomination for a parliamentary election when he was under 30 years old, told me, “The biggest criterion was that this family will not ditch party under any condition. When I got this ticket, it was a big thing for me. I never imagined I would contest the Lok Sabha. It was a huge election for a first timer.” In nominating him, the party was not responding to any obvious cues about electoral performance. His father had been an MLA, but never an MP, and so even the candidate was unsure about how he would fare in a parliamentary contest. He was a political unknown. But, as he noted, loyalty was the party’s paramount concern in nominating him.

The Congress has been frank about its reliance on factors other than prospects of victory in allotting tickets. In a 2015 declaration, it noted that “Winnability alone should not be the benchmark for deciding nominees of the party during elections. Rather, a balance is required between loyalty and winnability.” The BJP has not made such an explicit statement, but its actions have spoken clearly. In the 2014 election campaign, despite its stated opposition to dynastic politics, it renominated all but one of its locally rooted dynasties—that is, dynastic MPs who had been preceded by family members in the same constituency. These included, for example, GM Siddeshwara, whose father, G Mallikarjunappa, was an MP from the same constituency in Karnataka; or Anurag Singh Thakur, an MP from Himachal Pradesh, whose father, Prem Kumar Dhumal, was also a several-term MP from the same seat. Such local dynasties, even when not well known on the national or international stage, could significantly affect the BJP’s prospects in their home constituencies. Consequently, the BJP could not afford to alienate them, as it could more prominent, but less locally powerful, dynasties.

Once their party backs a dynastic candidate, voters often fall in line and follow the party preference. The majority of Indians, as the national election surveys conducted by Lokniti group at the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies have shown us, take party affiliation into account when deciding how to vote. In fact, candidates who run as independents rarely win in India, and no dynastic MP in the twenty-first century parliament has won as an independent. So when dynastic aspirants, even poorly performing ones, repeatedly get a party ticket, it eventually gives them a leg-up among voters. For example, in the 2014 parliamentary elections, Poonam Mahajan, the daughter of the deceased BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, was nominated by the BJP from the Mumbai North West constituency, even though she lost the 2009 assembly polls on a BJP ticket by a margin of over 26,000 votes. Mahajan went on to win the 2014 election.

The party-assisted entry of dynasties into the Indian political system has had effects that run in opposite directions. Perhaps most predictably, we found that it gives an unfair advantage to a host of MPs who are no better qualified than their non-dynastic counterparts according to some standard indicators, such as performance in parliament, or utilisation of their allotted development funds, or political experience. We also found that those who benefit most from this preference among parties are Hindu males from dominant castes. A dynastic system, thus, results in a double form of exclusion: it creates a birth-based ruling class, and, within that class, also amplifies the representation of dominant groups.

But, paradoxically, dynastic politics also has an inclusive effect. Specifically, we found a high incidence of family connections among MPs of some social categories that struggle to find representation in politics through normal channels: women, Muslims, backward castes and youth—none of whom have reservation in parliament. In this sense, dynastic ties in India appear to perform a similar function to quotas for members of under-represented social groups.

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, dynasticism has become an informal, second-best means of overcoming some of them.

To examine this, we compared the re-election rates of dynastic MPs and non-dynastic MPs from the same social groups. The lower down we went on the socio-economic ladder, the more dynastic ties made a difference in re-election. In the 2009 parliamentary elections, for example, dynastic MPs from forward castes were 1.3 times as likely to get re-elected as non-dynastic MPs from the same category. But dynastic MPs from backward castes were almost twice as likely to get re-elected as non-dynastic backward-caste MPs. Dynastic MPs from scheduled castes, and Muslim ones, also had a greater edge in re-election than dynastic MPs from forward castes. In the 2014 polls, re-election rates for all MPs dropped significantly compared to 2009, and dynastic MPs did not have an edge. But dynastic MPs from most subaltern groups were still slightly more likely to be re-elected than dynastic MPs from forward castes.

This suggests that dynastic ties matter more for subaltern rather than privileged groups, because they have less to work with. For forward-caste candidates, family ties are simply one among the portfolio of resources that can give a candidate an edge in winning elections in India. They also possess a greater share of other resources, including wealth, education, and powerful positions in the factional structures of India’s largest political parties. For subaltern candidates, however—who are, on average, less wealthy or well educated, who occupy subordinate positions in these factional structures, 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. In an unequal society, then, not having dynastic ties can itself serve as a form of inequality.


Kanchan Chandra Kanchan Chandra is a professor of politics at New York University. Her most recent book is an edited collection of essays, Democratic Dynasties.