 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. To our new episode of a program which we normally do it in Hindi, Itihaas Ke Panne Meri Nazaz Se. But this time we'll be doing it in English. So it is going to be pages from history. The perspective is mine. There is rarely a public lecture or a speech in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi or any of his Bharti Janta Party leaders, whenever they deliver, they always attack opposition parties for being dynastic. It almost appears that the BJP is not at all a dynastic party and that it is only the opposition parties which have political dynasties running in it. But is this correct? It certainly is not a very correct picture because dynasties do not mean a party which is actually managed or which has dynastic elements within it does not mean only the leadership is in suppression. The point is that is what are there enough lawmakers who are part of what we call political families or are they eyes of political families? If we actually go by that, then we find that within the Bharti Janta Party, there is a huge proportion of lawmakers, members of the Lok Sabha and of Rajesh Sabha. No studies have really been done except for the Lok Sabha by scholars and today we will be actually joined by a very important scholar, Roma Kaleva, who has done a PhD on dynasties and democracy in contemporary India at Empirical Study 1952 to 2015. He submitted his PhD in 2018 and is currently at the Hong Kong City University where he teaches Asian affairs. He is a historian and he is focused essentially on Indian history and looked at political dynasties in India right up to the 16th Lok Sabha which is 20th 2014 to 2019 that period. So we will primarily be talking with Roma about political dynasties in India, whether the BJP's claim of not being a dynastic party in fact the union home minister Amit Shah claims that one of the major achievements of the BJP is that they have finished political dynasties from India. The truth however is something slightly different. For instance, if you look at the central council of ministers, there are at least five ministers who are eyes of political families in the cabinet as well as within the minister of states. It is not just only in politics where you find the dominance of the political dynasties. Very recently reports have also appeared that the Board of Cricket Council of India at least one third of them holding important positions come from people who are either from political families or who are part of creating families. The general secretary of the BCCI Mr. Jay Shah, he is the son of Amit Shah. Likewise, I can actually re-laut several names. You have Arun Dhumbal who is the treasurer, he is the brother of Anurag Thakur, a cabinet minister who is also the son of a former chief minister of the BJP of Himachal Pradesh. So you understand how deep dynasties are running. You also have the son of Jyote Raditya Sindhya who is now a treasurer of the Gwalior Cricket Committee. Now, Jyote Raditya Sindhya's father, Madhura Sindhya was also at one point the president of the BCCI. So dynasties and BJP runs very deep. There is a long tradition to it. Talking about it is going to be Roma Kaleva who has actually spent several months while he was doing his PhD here. So welcome to the program and thank you very much for coming and joining us here at a fairly short notice. What we definitely must begin trying to understand from you is that what is a dynastic party? Would we say that as some scholars say that it is only those parties where the leadership is domestically inherited like for instance the Congress party you know where you have the Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi or Akhilesh Yadav who is taken over from his father. Likewise, several other parties like DMK, Ship Sena, you can keep on citing one political party after another. Or would you say that even the BJP where the top leadership the president, the prime ministers may not be succession principle but definitely a large number of lawmakers, members of the Lok Sabha, members of the Rajya Sabha and now members of legislative assemblies and legislative councils across India. A large number of them are from political parties. Thanks for having me, Lananjan. It's very good to be here with you today. I agree that it's a very good question to ask whether the BJP which claims never to have been a dynastic party because of a lack of a dynastic succession at the top is by and large playing on terms here. I like to divide dynastic parties into dynastic leadership parties and dynastic membership parties. And you can easily do a double entry table where you would have parties with, for example, a dynastic leadership and a dynastic membership. And that would be, for example, the DINC. The Congress Party has had, of course, since 1929, says Jaal Almeru followed his father, Motil Almeru, the head of DINC, a long succession, of course, of members of the Gandhi family at the helm. And that's why, of course, the BJP likes to claim that they are doing a fantastic job at ridding idea from dynastic parties because of the loss that they've inflicted upon the Congress Party. There are, however, parties that haven't had a dynastic leadership, but I've had dynastic membership, a large proportion of their Lok Sabha members coming from a political dynasties, and that, of course, is exactly where the BJP found itself. There's never been a succession at the top of the BJP from within a same family, but by most accounts today in the Lok Sabha about 20 to 25% of its members, BJP, a member of the Lok Sabha, are from political dynasties. It seems very difficult to say that the party that is one in four of its MPs from a political family is not dynastic in any way. So it's a bit playing on terms. Yeah, I think that's, it's very interesting, your thesis, if I was to inform our viewers a bit, it actually looks at Indian politics through various phases, you divided into different phases. And what we definitely find, your basic findings are that prior to 1989, which definitely is possibly a very important watershed year in the development of Indian electoral and political history of India. 1989 is the time when the BJP actually makes and marks a very significant presence within the national politics prior to that from the year 1980 that it was formed. It was not a very important political party. It just had about two members of parliament between 1984 and 89. In its previous uptar at the Jansang, it also did not do very well except in 1967 when it won a fairly large number of seats. So we have had these periods where the majority of you established through your empirical study that the major number of ires of political families came from the Congress. But after 1989, the situation started changing. Even though politics in India took a dramatically different turn from 1989, first we had the Long Coalition era and then from 2014, we have seen, I do not know whether this is a permanent, but the era of one again once again, single party dominance. But yes, dynastism has continued even after 1989. The number of the percentage of the Congress who have ires from political families might have gone down, but the others have come up. You and your PhD have established that in the 16th Lok Sabha, the BJP had as many as nearly 45% of the total number of dynastical members of the Lok Sabha at that time. So we find that despite the BJP saying that it is a party with a difference, why in large would you say that they have continued with the same political culture? I will come to the new phase now that where previously they were building only the Hindu right-wing families and their leaderships and their next generations. But now they even started looking outside. We'll look at that phenomenon a bit later. But post 1989, the BJP's character, what were your main findings? There's a clear divide before and after 1989. One of which is the kind of political dynasties that they've had. It's important to understand that historically there's been a by and large two sources of political dynasties in India after independence and that used to be on the one hand the former princes, princely families that entered politics after the absorption of their states within the Indian Union and on the other hand former freedom fighters for the freedom fighters and their families. And of course, once again, the example of the Nehru Gandhi's come to mind. Jaula Nehru for all of his for his incredible legacy during his lifetime was known as Motila Nehru's son, first and foremost. And so those two categories of dynast, princes on the one hand, former freedom fighters on the other hand, dominate by and large the period until 1989. And I argue even after that. What's interesting is that prior to 1989, there were political dynasties within Hindu within Hindu right parties, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Jansang, but overwhelmingly they were former princes. And in my studies, I define all former princes as as dynast as political heirs, even if they were the first in their family to be elected because they are the descendants of divinely anointed kings. And obviously your family names and family hands ancestry matters a lot when you are elected and when you're a former prince. And so the difference I think between before 1989 after 1989, within the dynastic contingent of the BJP is that by and large, many more non princely dynast get elected after 1989. The proportion of former princes within the BJP dynastic contingent declines dramatically as basically the the sons, the daughters, the spouses, et cetera, et cetera, nieces and nephews in the cases of BJP leaders who did not have children start getting elected. So I think that there's a generational element here too that changes the demographic makeup of those dynasties for the BJP. You know, I just want to add, you know, basically for the benefit of our viewers, you know, you were talking about the Hindu right and the dynasts from there, you know, coming from princely backgrounds, you know, there are two political dynasties which I very specifically wish to refer to because they are of a slightly different kind, you know, in the sense that the first one, you know, is the dynasty of the Sindhya's. Now it started basically with Rajmata Vijay Rajesh Sindhya, you know, she was the dowry queen, you know, originally when the Congress wanted somebody from the Sindhya family to become a member of parliament, the offer was made to her husband, but he was not interested in entering politics. It eventually was Rajmata who became a member of parliament. And then she was initially with the Swatantar Party. And then, you know, there was a period when she was halfway into Swatantar Party and as well as within the Jansang, you know, that is how it came in. Then you had her son, you know, who came but did not initially starting with the Jansang, but then thereafter made the transition to the Congress because during emergency it suited him to be with the Congress and he continued with the Congress for the rest of his life except that period in the 1990s when he went on the other side and then after his death, you know, his son Jyotir Aditya Sindhya, he entered politics and continued to be in the Congress till definitely for reasons, you know, that there wasn't really much to be had while continuing in the Congress. He very recently, you know, just a couple of years ago he switched over to the BJP. So you have had that family, you know, where you have had the grandmother starting, now you have the fourth generation as I was talking in the cricket board of the cricket committee of Kualya state and I am sure that he is going to rise higher in the cricketing hierarchy and then eventually get into politics once Jyotir Aditya thinks that it is time to pass on the baton to his son. The other family which is also very interesting is not a family within the, you know, in the biological sense of the word, it is spiritual family. You have the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Aditya Nath who initially started with the BJP but he is the head of the Gorakh Dhammat in Gorakhpur. His predecessor, his spiritual father, if I can actually use the word, was, you know, Mahant Avedya Nath and whose predecessor was Mahant Digvijay Nath, one of the persons who was instrumental in forcibly installing the idol inside the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya way back in December 1949. So this is a spiritual family which started from the Hindu Mahasabha and as you were saying that it was not just the Jansang but also people coming from the entire Hindu Rai. So that is something very important which we have to see. But now is the third phase within the BJP which we are seeing is that it is not just who came from the princely stage or from the spiritual families and also who were actually homegrown from within the Sam network but they are now beginning to look outside also and they are pushing into political dynasties of other parties. We can start actually reading out names, you know, one after another of the number of Congress families whose ais have been drawn into the BJP and they have been given nominations to contest elections. So how do you see that this congressization of the BJP and also the embrace of political dynasties of the Congress and other parties also within it? That's a multiple part question and it's a fascinating thing to say about all of this. Let me start at the end and work my way backwards. I think at the core of the issue of political dynasties in India rests the issue of trust or the lack of trust within Indian politics in general. I remember when I was when I was a master of students and I submitted my master's memoirs on political dynasties in Central India, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh which revolved a lot around the senior family of course. Massively important, massively powerful princely family in Madhya Pradesh. I tossed out in my master's memoir that clearly it was in large part because there were far less loyalty within Indian parties than in other than in other democracies. My typical example would be that in France or in the US if a politician on the left of the left wing of the ideological spectrum were to cross the aisle and join a right wing party, he would very often be criticised as a trader for the rest of his political life and it would be a major liability because the parties in such a system are quite far apart ideologically speaking. And that in the Indian political system just hopping from one party to the other has never been seen in the same light. It's never been seen as a major sin. And when I was a master student my supervisor basically asked me can you prove that? Can you prove that there's less loyalty within Indian politics than in other democracies? And at the time I couldn't and I was quite stunned because it seemed fairly obvious to me but I couldn't prove it. One of these things I did for my PhD research then was to try and prove that and I proved that I show that amongst all political families, founders of political families and heirs by and large half of them change party at least once in their political world. Half of all politicians that I've analysed for my study change party at a point or another and therefore I argued that to explain the strength of political dynasties in India and to explain the fact that lots of parties organise themselves around ruling family is at the core an issue of trust. If you can't trust your underlings that are elected with you in your party to stay with you if things turn bad it's a logical thing to actually invest in your family to give important titles to give important position to give important constituencies to members of your families because you're less likely to be betrayed by a member of your close family that you are by a complete stranger. And so that helps explain that helps explain I think why dynasties become so important in India. I think you know that in your PhD thesis you know you have I try to argue that that you've spoken about that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between dynasticism the dynasties and democracy that the feed on each other can you elaborate on that how does this happen and then also you know that do dynasties in any way threaten the democratic character of Indian politics? It's a complex relationship the relationship between democracy and dynasticism in India is a very complex one. Dynasticism is as old as Indian democracy or older the reason once again um that you had that you had dynasties right from the beginning right from the 1952 loaks above is in part because half of the dynastic phenomenon was former princes that already already held political power and the other was freedom fighters. The only politicians in the land in 1952 were either freedom fighters or princes and the fight for independence had been going on for 50 to 70 years by that point meaning that entire families of freedom fighters had developed had fought as families so and they had an estimate claimed to be part of of the law making process in independence. Absolutely you can't deny the political genius and impact of someone like like Jaulal Nehru he was his father's son but he was also one of the most important leaders of the of the Indian freedom struggle so that's one thing and and I always like to make the point that Indian politics did not sort of devolve slowly over time into dynasticism it started like that the very first politicians in the land were the former princes and families of freedom fighters so it started right from the beginning right do you understand that I think is yes. BJP also started that way you know the Jansang at that time you point in your thesis you know even in the first house even though they won very few number of seats you know 52 onwards you know the very few seats at one they used to have a fair amount of people who were eyes of political families. And so to link that back to the issue of trust in politics because the fight against the British was the only fight that mattered at the beginning everyone was gathered within the the Indian National Congress and there was lots of ideological disagreement within the Indian National Congress which means that all of the parties that would come that would oppose the Congress in the in the 60s in the 70s all came out of of the National Congress right the founder of the Jansang was a cabinet in it was a cabinet minister in Nehru's first cabinet. The issue of trust therefore gets explained once again there right if all of your if you're of your the new opposition parties are all coming from the Indian National Congress all coming from your own party from your own fold switching parties never seen as a terrible terrible thing and therefore you have very little trust in in in members of your party who are not members of your family and you mentioned the senior family which is which is interesting because they have this they have this sort of opposite opposite path Dharajmata Vijay Raji senior very likely was more ideologically in sync with the Hindu Mahasabha when she was basically co-opted by the Congress party. The Congress party does this thing in the 1950s particularly around 1957 of co-opting the former princes and one of the reasons they do that is because the areas where they're weakest and where the Hindu right is the strongest is former princes so that's very clear in that's very clear in Madhya Pradesh where the only two seats that they don't pick up in at the time Madhya Bharat and they get picked up by the Hindu Mahasabha are actually part of the former Gwalior state exactly former Gwalior princes state and so that's how Dharajmata gets co-opted but she's not a very good ideological fit and then she basically breaks off and joins the Jansang and her son does the opposite Madhavrava Sindhya is a fascinating character too starts being recruited by his mother within the Jansang and then later on I think he doesn't it doesn't he's not a very good ideological fit and decides to first become an independent and then join yeah he also he also wants to be full foul of Indira Gandhi during emergency that is the time when he actually crossed over from the Jansang to the congress hold it happened during the emergency that that period so it is basically a matter of convenience now what we are finding is you know as I come to the concluding part of our discussion is that there is we have seen that after 1989 the BJP has a fairly large number of hires of political families who are lawmakers we at least have some empirical data thanks to you of the Lok Sabha right up till the 16th Lok Sabha despite that the BJP in its campaigns and in its speeches has a very righteous way of presenting the others as being dynastic and itself as a non-dynastic political party now how you know honest is such a portrayal according to you and to what extent how do you think or rather you know let me ask you know do you think that dynastics hires of political families are actually a reality who are never going to go away from Indian politics that's incredibly difficult to say of course what we can see from the American case for example is that with time the dynasties have declined there are lots of there are lots of dynasties within the US Congress and with time they decline in numbers it's difficult to say where we at in India's in India's path of course I will say that for the for the BJP the reason they can still argue of course that they're not a dynastic party is as long as they don't have a dynastic succession at the top they can they can still pretend they can still hide the fact that 20 to 25 percent of their members of parliament are actually from political dynasties the other thing that I'll say and that answers part of your last question that you asked me about co-opting other other dynasties from other parties yeah is that by and large the BJP does that at sort of like important leaders the latest sindia is a is a fantastic is a fantastic pick for the BJP but by and large the rise of dynasties within their rank is homegrown they they take deserters the effectors once in a while but most of the effect most of the numbers of their dynastic parliament are are homegrown and by and large the proportion of dynasties that they have in comparison to their MPs it sort of it sort of remains remains constants I think what you saw with the congress over the past over the past few over the past few looks of us is that um they basically most of the seed that they're one were won by dynasties so the progression of dynasties amongst congress MPs kept rising in the 2020 tense it's not quite the case with the BJP because they've got they're winning so much more seats of course that they managed to dilute a little bit those homegrown dynasties that they have and they don't seem to be necessarily using dynasties first and foremost to to win they're just they're just the rise of more dynasties within the BJP simply tracks with the rise of of BJP MPs in general so no what you say it definitely does you know make sense you know that maybe the BJP is not as much dynastic as the congress or as some of the regional parties were but we then also have to factor the fact it's less of deliberate strategy it's less of a deliberate strategy that it was with a congress I think yeah possible but then we also have to take into account that a large number of the allies of the BJP are also run completely on the dynastic principle in fact even their leadership is on the matter of succession so BJP really cannot insulate itself of having cut out dynasticism and dynastic politics it definitely you know plays ball with dynastic politics as much as any other political party has done but definitely because it requires a certain you know point to to pin down the congress especially and a few other parties that is why it keeps on referring to dynasties but actually you know empirical studies like yours and by a few other scholars definitely does establish that the BJP's claim of being a non-dynastic party is absolutely not true thank you Roma for coming and joining me on this program. My pleasure. It's a very important subject on which we normally get only a one-sided view led by the BJP and thank you for coming and pointing out the other nuanced aspects of this entire issue a very important issue in Indian politics thank you so much once again bye bye. My pleasure Niranjan.