Bharat Bhushan on the peculiar dynastic politics of India and Pakistan
Asif Ali Zardari says that he wants to be Pakistan’s “Sonia” if the Pakistan Peoples’ Party is voted to power in the coming elections. He told the Sunday Times in an interview: “If our party wins in February’s elections, I will not take a cabinet post but will act like Sonia Gandhi, as an advisory figure without a seat in Parliament.”
Zardari and Sonia Gandhi are in effect “outsiders” who do not carry the family charisma. Zardari’s desire to not assume direct power is comparable to the choice that Sonia Gandhi made in 1990. She had waited for eight years before she took control of the Congress Party and a full nine years after her husband’s assassination before she contested a parliamentary election.
Zardari wants to recast himself in the role of an elder statesman because like Sonia he married into a political family and does not carry the dynastic charisma. On top of that, his image is of “Mr. Ten Percent” — his misuse of government property and machinery during his wife’s prime ministership is legendary. It will take a long time for him to redeem himself.
He is in no position, therefore, to take over the leadership of the PPP when the party is in election mode. Making a virtue out of necessity, therefore, he has projected the acceptable face of Makhdoom Amin Fahim as the party’s prime ministerial candidate.After Rajiv’s assassination, Sonia Gandhi also could not have gone headlong into politics. Her children were young and in no position to take over the Congress Party. She, therefore, chose the mild-mannered P V Narasimha Rao as Rajiv’s successor dismissing the claims of two other contenders — Sharad Pawar and Arjun Singh.
At that point Sonia had no choice but to choose an advisory role for herself. That is the only role that Zardari can hope to emulate. However, that role did not work very well for the Congress or for Sonia Gandhi. It is unlikely to work for Zardari either.
Sonia’s backroom role worked very well till mid-1993 with Prime Minister Rao running to her for every major decision. However, after defeating a no-confidence vote against his government in July 1993 he came into his own and decided to cut the apron strings.
This eventually led to a split in the Congress with loyalists forming the Tiwari Congress in 1995. In September that year, Sitaram Kesri was appointed Congress president by Rao. However, in less than two months the wily Kesri shifted allegiance to Sonia Gandhi — paving the way for the loyalists to return to the fold.
The Sonia-Rao tensions showed that the advisory role that Zardari seeks to emulate in fact is unworkable. The chair also makes the man. The next time around the Congress was in a position to participate in a government was in 2004. Once again for a variety of reasons never made public Sonia Gandhi did not want to lead from the front. At the same time, however, she did not want to repeat the mistake she had made 14 years earlier.Another experiment, therefore, was attempted — that of appointing a CEO and designating him Prime Minister. By choosing a loyalist “outsider” who would find it difficult to win support at the hustings, it was virtually ensured that his freedom to act and sources of legitimacy would always be drastically limited. The model has worked pretty well with no challenge possible to the family’s supremacy.
Such convoluted leadership succession has become necessary in India because most political parties have become extensions of single individuals or families and, therefore, completely de-institutionalised. The only exceptions are the communist parties and the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party. This is also the case in Pakistan. There too only the avowedly Islamic parties are free of the stranglehold of families.
It is this reality which poses peculiar problems of leadership succession.
In the Indian case, not only the Congress but the Samajwadi Party, the Akali Dal, the DMK, the Nationalist Congress Party, the Telugu Desam, the Biju Janata Dal, the Shiv Sena, the AIADMK, the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) and the parties of the Haryana patriarchs, Devi Lal and Bhajan Lal, also do not have any organisational structure to speak of. These are family run election machines with three primary characteristics.
One, the family acquires enormous public equity because of association with certain populist slogans or programmes of social transformation. These could be associated with promises to remove poverty, providing equitable development, protecting regional pride, protecting the interests of farmers, minorities or specific castes. An individual challenger cannot hope to enter politics with similar initial equity.
Two, these parties do not have institutionalised democratic structures which would allow challenges to be mounted and alternative leadership to come up. Yet they do have a skeletal structure put together with the sole aim of protecting the public equity of the family. Their local units are like franchise operations. The sole competitive political activity in these parties is for becoming a franchisee — hence the emphasis on loyalty and sycophancy. The franchisees also replicate the dynastic structure in their local domain.
Three, these parties exercise centralised control over collection and disbursal of funds. Of the entry level barriers to active participation in democratic politics in South Asia the biggest hurdle is of funding elections. This the family run parties control effectively.
They build up large war chests by being the sole effective facilitator between the governments they run off and on and those who seek service or concessions from the State. The largesse the State can distribute in our societies is huge and therefore the critical importance of the facilitators.
The peculiar nature of the family-run parties, therefore, requires that they prevent the emergence of any challenger. Challengers eat into the pie and threaten the political future of the family.
Should the leading family member be removed from the scene, some other family member is drafted to fill the gap. Thus in the extreme, a son, a daughter, a wife or a consort becomes the next leader in the case of emergency succession forced by assassinations and deaths or in the case of minor exigencies another family member becomes a proxy leader.The examples of direct dynastic succession are many but consider how proxy leadership also stays within the family. Rabri Devi, for example, became the proxy chief minister when Lalu Prasad was removed on corruption charges; when Kamal Nath could not contest Chhindwara because his name figured in the “hawala” case, his wife stood in for him, and when Ajit Jogi met with an accident in the middle of an election campaign, his wife took charge of the election — there are examples galore of this phenomenon.
The problem that martyrdom or emergency succession poses is one of transferring the dynastic charisma to the next leader. The PPP’s problem is that the obvious inheritor of that dynastic charisma is Bilawal Bhutto Zardari; hence, the arrangement that the elder Zardari has worked out for himself. His desire to emulate Sonia Gandhi is not to seek legitimacy but a reflection on the structure of political parties in the subcontinent and the nature of succession in them.
