No Room for Dissent in India's Dynasty Politics

No Room for Dissent in India's Dynasty Politics

In postcolonial, democratic India, the exercise of large-scale voting seems to have made no dent in the hardening of dynastic politics. Almost every party has taken on the practice of treating politics as a family business (the same, of course, is true for media, entertainment and business). The greatest attention is paid these days to the most egregious of the offenders, the Congress party, led in its current campaign by Rahul Gandhi, who can claim a political lineage going back four generations. But even the right-wing Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) – which touts as a contrast its leader, Narendra Modi, an apparently self-made man of humble origins (so much so that even whether he is married or not is subject, seemingly, to an unofficial secrets act) – has its own dynasts when it comes to other parliamentarians, while Modi's own success lies in pandering to the most hierarchical of instincts in the nation.

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