hereditary?
Arun sent me an unusually excited email while he was looking at this question: “Your hunch was spot on: as age decreases (i.e. as one moves from older to younger MPs), it may be noted that incidence of ‘family politics’ increases! Just ran the analysis—such a nice, perfect little linear trend. Researcher’s delight!”
I asked him to produce a simple graph of the perfect linear trend. This was a shocking result. Every MP in the Lok Sabha under the age of thirty had in effect inherited a seat, and more than two thirds of the sixty-six MPs aged forty or under were HMPs. In addition, this new wave of Indian lawmakers would have a decade’s advantage in politics over their peers, since the average MP who had benefited from family politics was almost ten years younger than those who had arrived with “no significant family background.” In the Congress party, the situation was yet more extreme: every Congress MP under the age of thirty-five was an HMP. If the trend continued, it was possible that most members of the Indian Parliament would be there by heredity alone, and the nation would be back to where it had started before the freedom struggle, with rule by a hereditary monarch and assorted Indian princelings.
Percentage of hereditary MPs by age
Already, the tendency to turn politics into a family business was being emulated across northern India at state level, with legislators nominating children and spouses. There was no reason to believe it was not also spreading to the districts. Nepotism was written into the working of democracy, as it was in other areas of Indian life, ranging from medicine and the legal profession to the media and the film industry. An advert for an investment website encapsulated this attitude, which was that even if you were self-made you would do your best to dispense patronage if you made it to the top: beside a photograph of an ambitious young man was the line: “I don’t have an influential uncle. But I will be one someday.” The Bollywood movie
Luck by Chance
—about young actors who try to make it on merit rather than on family connections—itself starred Farhan Akhtar and Konkona Sen Sharma, the children of famous parents.
Looking at Arun’s analysis more closely, the difference between olderand younger MPs was marked. For those over fifty, the proportion with a father or relative in politics was not unreasonable, at 17.9 percent. But when you looked at those aged fifty or under, this increased by more than two and a half times to nearly half, or 47.2 percent. I checked some of the people involved, and the news was not reassuring. Of the thirty-eight youngest MPs, thirty-three had arrived with the help of mummy-daddy. Of the remaining five, one was Meenakshi Natrajan, the biochem graduate who had been hand-picked by Rahul Gandhi, three appeared to be self-made politicians who had made it up the ranks of the BJP, BSP and CPI(M) respectively, and the fifth was a Lucknow University mafioso who had been taken on board by Mayawati: he was a “history-sheeter”—meaning numerous criminal charge-sheets had been laid against him—who had been involved in shootouts and charged four times under the Gangsters Act. 36
I asked Arun for another chart. Looking only at the Congress MPs, how hereditary were they, by age? Here, the curve was more dramatic and it concealed an even more worrying phenomenon, which was that the tentacles of extended families were now winding themselves ever more tightly around India’s body politic. While compiling the main list of MPs, I had noticed that a few seemed to be more than simply the sons or daughters of a politician—rather, their links spread in several directions at once, making them not just hereditary but “hyperhereditary.” So Preneet Kaur, for example, was the daughter of a senior bureaucrat and daughter-in-law of a former maharaja, and her husband, mother-in-law and two brothers-in-law were either former ministers or
Arun sent me an unusually excited email while he was looking at this question: “Your hunch was spot on: as age decreases (i.e. as one moves from older to younger MPs), it may be noted that incidence of ‘family politics’ increases! Just ran the analysis—such a nice, perfect little linear trend. Researcher’s delight!”
I asked him to produce a simple graph of the perfect linear trend. This was a shocking result. Every MP in the Lok Sabha under the age of thirty had in effect inherited a seat, and more than two thirds of the sixty-six MPs aged forty or under were HMPs. In addition, this new wave of Indian lawmakers would have a decade’s advantage in politics over their peers, since the average MP who had benefited from family politics was almost ten years younger than those who had arrived with “no significant family background.” In the Congress party, the situation was yet more extreme: every Congress MP under the age of thirty-five was an HMP. If the trend continued, it was possible that most members of the Indian Parliament would be there by heredity alone, and the nation would be back to where it had started before the freedom struggle, with rule by a hereditary monarch and assorted Indian princelings.
Percentage of hereditary MPs by age
Already, the tendency to turn politics into a family business was being emulated across northern India at state level, with legislators nominating children and spouses. There was no reason to believe it was not also spreading to the districts. Nepotism was written into the working of democracy, as it was in other areas of Indian life, ranging from medicine and the legal profession to the media and the film industry. An advert for an investment website encapsulated this attitude, which was that even if you were self-made you would do your best to dispense patronage if you made it to the top: beside a photograph of an ambitious young man was the line: “I don’t have an influential uncle. But I will be one someday.” The Bollywood movie
Luck by Chance
—about young actors who try to make it on merit rather than on family connections—itself starred Farhan Akhtar and Konkona Sen Sharma, the children of famous parents.
Looking at Arun’s analysis more closely, the difference between olderand younger MPs was marked. For those over fifty, the proportion with a father or relative in politics was not unreasonable, at 17.9 percent. But when you looked at those aged fifty or under, this increased by more than two and a half times to nearly half, or 47.2 percent. I checked some of the people involved, and the news was not reassuring. Of the thirty-eight youngest MPs, thirty-three had arrived with the help of mummy-daddy. Of the remaining five, one was Meenakshi Natrajan, the biochem graduate who had been hand-picked by Rahul Gandhi, three appeared to be self-made politicians who had made it up the ranks of the BJP, BSP and CPI(M) respectively, and the fifth was a Lucknow University mafioso who had been taken on board by Mayawati: he was a “history-sheeter”—meaning numerous criminal charge-sheets had been laid against him—who had been involved in shootouts and charged four times under the Gangsters Act. 36
I asked Arun for another chart. Looking only at the Congress MPs, how hereditary were they, by age? Here, the curve was more dramatic and it concealed an even more worrying phenomenon, which was that the tentacles of extended families were now winding themselves ever more tightly around India’s body politic. While compiling the main list of MPs, I had noticed that a few seemed to be more than simply the sons or daughters of a politician—rather, their links spread in several directions at once, making them not just hereditary but “hyperhereditary.” So Preneet Kaur, for example, was the daughter of a senior bureaucrat and daughter-in-law of a former maharaja, and her husband, mother-in-law and two brothers-in-law were either former ministers or
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