Why Hillary Clinton vs Jeb Bush in 2016 isn't a validation of dynastic politics
Congressmen and women can't stop smiling. "Did you read," one said gleefully, "even in the United States they've gone back to dynasty?"
He was referring to the likelihood of a US presidential contest in November 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Hillary of course is the wife of the former two-term US President Bill Clinton (1993-2001). Jeb is the younger brother of former President George W Bush (2001-09) and the son of another former president, George H Bush (1989-93).
So, are political dynasties back? Not quite. The Clinton-Bush face-off, if it does take place, will prove the exact opposite. But the superficial atmospherics of a Clinton and a Bush fighting a US presidential election have seduced many into believing not only that dynastic politics is back in the world's most powerful and egalitarian democracy but that dynastic politics is actually good for democracy.
The Economist was among those thus seduced. In a recent cover story on dynasty, it wrote breathlessly (and inaccurately): "In politics the Clintons and the Bushes hardly count as exceptions." In India, the Congress and other family-led parties are equally excited. "It's Rahul's time now," they say. "If America can justify a second Clinton and a third Bush as president, why can't India justify a fourth Nehru-Gandhi as prime minister?"
Mani Shankar Aiyar, the Congress' Rajya Sabha MP whose unshakeable loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family would embarrass a lesser man, has already anointed Rahul Gandhi as prime minister in 2019. Speaking in Kumbakonam on May 3, he declared: "The Congress will win the next Lok Sabha elections and Rahul Gandhi will become the next prime minister."
The Economist is wrong: Dynastic politics is bad, not good, for democracy. Delighted Congressmen too are wrong. The putative Bush-Clinton presidential contest is not an endorsement of dynastic politics. Here's why.
The first president of the United States, George Washington, took office in 1789. Since then, in 226 years and through forty-four US presidents, only thrice has a single family produced more than one US president: John Adams (1797-1801) and his son John Quincy Adams (1825-29); William Harrison (who died in office after serving for just a month in 1841) and his grandson Benjamin Harrison (1889-93); and, of course, most recently the two George Bushes - exceptions who prove the centuries-old rule in American politics: dynasties don't work. (Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt are often cited as examples of successful US dynasts in the 20th century - but they were only fifth cousins.)
The candidacies of Republican Jeb Bush and Democrat Hillary Clinton will demonstrate the opposite of what dynastophiles imagine: In the US, the world's most egalitarian democracy, dynasty does not succeed and has not succeeded for more than 200 years.
Only six per cent of US senators come from political families. In Britain, less than ten percent of the new House of Commons has previously had a family member in politics. There is no Churchill dynasty. In France, there is no de Gaulle dynasty. In Germany, there is no Adenauer dynasty. The Kennedys are a storied example of dynasty's fading appeal. There has been no Kennedy president after JFK. Ted Kennedy made one presidential attempt in the 1980 election - but lost to Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries. Anti-dynasty sentiment in the US is so strong that President John Kennedy's daughter Caroline was denied a bid for a New York senate seat by the Democrats. (That's like Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra being denied a Congress ticket from Rae Bareli.)
In India there are of course many dynasties. All of them look to Hillary and Jeb for their raison d'etre. It started with the Nehru-Gandhis in the 1960s. The infection spread. Soon there was a Pawar dynasty, a Karunanidhi dynasty, a Thackeray dynasty, a Badal dynasty, an Abdullah dynasty, a Mufti dynasty, a Yadav dynasty. The infection is now a full-blown epidemic.
Why are political dynasties bad for democracy? Because they narrow electoral choice instead of widening it - as a healthy, vibrant democracy should. The result: Forced to choose between incompetent dynasts, corrupt dynasts and rogue dynasts in a typical constituency, voters are left with a Hobson's choice. Whoever they vote for is connected with one powerful family or another. The preponderance of MPs with criminal records - around 30 per cent across parties - shows how badly such a feudal, dynastic political ecosystem has served India. It leads to corruption and chronic misgovernance and creates a system of entitlement.
Look at the Congress front bench in the Lok Sabha: Rahul Gandhi, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, Deepender Hooda. Not one of them would have got where he is without his surname. As Jamini Bhagwati, the RBI chair professor at Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), wrote on the origin of political dynasty in the Congress: "Commentaries that trace independent India's economic development often use the expression Nehru-(Indira) Gandhi legacy and suggest that the Congress was always synonymous with this family. This does great injustice to the Congress leaders of the freedom struggle who held senior positions in central and state governments post-1947."
The BJP is not immune either. Anurag Thakur, son of the former chief minister of Himachal Pradesh, Prem Kumar Dhumal, is just one example. Varun Gandhi is another. But of the BJP's 282 MPs, very few are dynasts in stark contrast to the rest.
The ecosystem of entitlement that dynasty builds around it is an iron wall. It's tough to break through and get in. Once in, you become beholden to the privilege and pelf inside. As an outsider, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was aware of this iron wall within Lutyens' Delhi. He was determined to demolish it. But there was always the danger that he would be co-opted by it. There are those in the BJP, founding members of the Lutyens' iron wall, who would like the ecosystem of entitlement to stay that way. Elections come and go. Out-of-power UPA minister-lawyers make in legal practice as much money as they did in government. Their counterparts in the BJP have noted this and will do the same - in or out of government.
It is these elements in the government the prime minister must beware of. They may not be dynasts themselves but their sympathies lie with those who are. The Lutyens' ecosystem, like reinforced concrete, is difficult to crack open. Outsiders either get converted or stay out. Can Prime Minister Modi break this iron wall of privilege? He must or it will co-opt him. A second term will then slip away from his grasp.
It will take four more years to fix the scorched-earth economy left behind by the UPA's decade in power. The last thing Modi needs is the economy purring smoothly in 2019 at a growth rate of nine per cent but the Lutyens' ecosystem conspiring to ensure he doesn't get a second term by winning the perception battle. The Congress, in this greatest irony of all, will then inherit in 2019 a robust economy that it itself so badly damaged in 2004-14.
The Lutyens' ecosystem has powerful friends: Foreign-funded NGOs who prefer pliable prime ministers. Foreign envoys intervene in matters that are not their business. And an unholy cabal of assorted power brokers, who've fed off the Congress largesse for so long that they've become a part of this incestuous ecosystem, are cogs in this treacherous wheel.
A common thread unites them: self-interest. National interest is an idealistic concept, unworthy of attention from the Lutyens' nouveau elite, most of whom have clambered up the socioeconomic ladder in the past two decades and value above all else their new-found status which provides them access and privilege.
The prime minister will complete a year in office next Tuesday (May 26). He has four more years to break the deadlock the ecosystem of entitlement and dynasty has on India. It is a deadlock that has kept India backward and poor for six decades. If Modi fails to break it, it will be business as usual in 2019.