A contagious disease called dynasty

India is a democracy, but sadly it is a dynastic democracy. The common man’s voice has been systematically ignored. An increasing number of political leaders’ sons, daughters and wives are jumping into the fray in order to retain their hold over their fiefdoms.

In the forthcoming civic polls, personal assistants and siblings of political leaders are endeavouring to get party tickets. Sitting Congress MP Eknath Gaikwad’s daughter Varsha Gaikwad is a state minister. Now, Gaikwad’s son wants to contest the corporation elections. If he wins, then the Gaikwad family’s writ will run from Dilli (Parliament) to gulli (corporation). This is just one case in point.

Dynastic politics is a contagious disease fast spreading to all political parties. Those initially opposed to dynastic politics are now part of the tradition, including the Shiv Sena and Left parties.

We really can’t blame the likes of Gaikwad for lobbying for his daughter and son, because he belongs to the Congress party, which is synonymous to the Gandhi family. We should not be surprised if one day the family decides to rename the 150-year-old party as the Gandhi party (Not after the Mahatma, of course). Dr BR Ambedkar was against dynastic politics and he categorically warned that the day the dynastic politics sets roots in India, democracy will shrink and it will become nothing but a dictatorship.

Those who lobby for tickets for their sons and daughters defend it by saying that while they can only give them a chance to contest elections, it is the people who are the final authority. If the people want to reject them, they wouldn’t vote for them.

But the truth is that over time, politicians have fine tuned the winning formula like a mathematical equation, where if you follow certain steps, you will invariably arrive at the right answer. Once a person gets elected, s/he starts a couple of schools/colleges, invests money in property, even becomes a developer, and starts white collar corporate-style businesses where all the black money gets whitened in systematic manner. This black-turned-white money is then used during elections. The sad part is that the gullible voter easily succumbs to this trap. Along the way, politicians also establish a chain of command from the village to the tehsil level and ensure that this chain is always financially dependent on them. This chain gets activated during election time — its job is to bribe the voters and make sure they vote for the continuation of the dynasty. So, winning from any constituency in any election has become a cakewalk for the dynasties.

Over the last decade, many citizen candidates contest elections at various levels with full vigour. But they hardly taste electoral success expect in isolated cases like that of Raju Shetty or the outgoing BMC corporator Adolf D’Souza. The simple reason, they do not have the ‘winning formula.’