Dynasty politics is like poison ivy for India
Will the Congress party's gamble of launching Priyanka Gandhi in Uttar Pradesh pay off or backfire?
More importantly, does the move serve democracy or damage it? Empirical studies show dynasty begets poverty. The most successful countries in the world are those that have long rejected dynastic politics.
Subsidy
Look first at the empirical evidence. Researchers at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) Policy Center in Manila set out to test the "casual" relationship between dynastic politics and poverty in the Philippines. Their findings are significant.
As I noted in an op-ed, the AIM Policy Centre found that constituencies in the Philippines with dynastic candidates were 26 per cent poorer than those with non-dynastic candidates.
Nearly 68 per cent of national legislators in the Philippines parliament are dynasts. In sharp contrast, only six per cent of senators in the United States Congress are dynasts.
The per capita income of the Philippines (a former US colony) and the US are respectively $3,000 and $55,000. In India, according to the author
Patrick French, 28 per cent of MPs across party lines in the 2009-2014 Lok Sabha were hereditary.
Worryingly, 38 per cent of the Congress's Lok Sabha MPs were dynasts (compared to 19 per cent of the BJP's). But low per capita income is not the only reason for the high incidence of hereditary politicians in a country.
The AIM Policy Center researchers say that Asia's sociocultural mores favour political dynasties. In contrast, Anglo-Saxon and Gallic countries like Britain, Germany and France (and their colonial derivatives - the US, Canada and Australia) have a culture of egalitarianism.
One of the ways political dynasts hold sway over a poor, feudal electorate is by appeasing it with subsidies.
A recent study by Krishnamurthy Subramanian and Abhishek Bharadwaj found dynasty damages democracy subtly but cruelly. "It's a legacy of retaining power through reckless populism," they wrote.
"The numbers depict a key narrative: Building a mountain of subsidies without worrying about its disastrous economic consequences."
Like poison ivy, dynasty spreads its tentacles slowly, inexorably, till it tightens its grip over its unsuspecting victims, many immersed in poverty and a feudal culture. The consequences go beyond economic damage.
As researchers at the Manila Policy Center discovered, there is a chicken-and-egg relationship between dynasty and poverty.
Liability
If India wants to create a just, prosperous society, we need to break this vicious cycle. Recent examples in the United States and Britain are educative.
Despite his storied family, Jeb Bush was dumped by Republican voters at the early stages of the primaries.
Hillary Clinton, another famous political name, finally won a bruising yearlong battle with the hitherto unknown Bernie Sanders to become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
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| Hillary's surname rings loud in the "unfavourability" ratings in the opinion polls. (Reuters) |
But the Clinton name is proving a liability, not an asset, in America's egalitarian politics. She is regarded as untrustworthy by a majority of the American electorate. Her "unfavourability" ratings in opinion polls are almost a bad as Donald Trump's.
Clinton was publicly branded last week as "very careless" by James Comey, the upright FBI director who spent ten minutes telling the assembled American and international media that Hillary "lied" in at least four of her public statements over the past year.
Surname
In Britain, dynasty receives scant respect. The last British family to produce more than one prime minister was over 200 years ago (William Pitt "The Elder" in 1766-68 and William Pitt "The Younger" in 1804-06).
Virtually the entire "younger" generation of Congress politicians are dynasts: Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, Milind Deora, Jitin Prasada and Deepender Hooda.
Even in the BJP, dynasty pops its head up every now and again though Prime Minister Narendra Modi is vehemently opposed to it. Varun Gandhi, apart from being pretentious and self-regarding, has a surname he fancies.
But if he thought that would give him a dynastic short cut to power, as it did cousin Rahul Gandhi in the Congress, he chose the wrong party.
The bottomline? Political dynasties flourish in poor, feudal societies. The malnutrition and poverty in dynast-led constituencies like Amethi, Rae Bareli, Sultanpur and Guna tell their own story.
In non-feudal societies, the incumbent dynast in these underdeveloped constituencies would have been voted out of power years ago.
Instead we will see the spectacle of a bevy of dynasts led by Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi descending on Uttar Pradesh as if it were their birthright.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)