sarcastic Posted May 11, 2011 Posted May 11, 2011 An excellent Political research article illustrating the current state of political hierarchies in INDIA. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?269931 I am posting the final portion of the article giving some interesting numbers. Now we could ask the question: how hereditary is Indian politics? How did the 545 MPs in the 15th Lok Sabha enter politics? • No Significant Family Background 255 • Family 156 • Student politics 47 • Business 35 • RSS 18 • Inducted 16 • Trade union 10 • Royal family 7 • Maoist commander 1 Initially, it appeared that heredity was not the most important aspect in Indian politics, in that ‘Family’ was not at the top of the list of routes to Parliament. In total, 28.6 per cent of MPs had a hereditary connection. ‘No significant family background’ covered nearly half of all MPs, which meant they had found their way to Parliament by a similar mixture of idealistic and weaselly routes as lawmakers in any representative democracy. ‘Business’ covered everybody from chief executives who were joining public service to members of a land or mining mafia who needed political clout. ‘Inducted’ usually meant the MP was a famous actor, but it could mean someone who had done well abroad and was returning home, or even in one case a commando in Rajiv Gandhi’s security cordon who had been parachuted into politics. ‘Royal family’ meant an old princely family which had retained its influence—another form of family politics, but not what we were looking at in this study. The Maoist commander came in a category all of his own (I had considered listing him under ‘Business’). Kidwai gave me his potted biography: “Baitha Kameshwar cleared his matriculation examination in 1975, and then decided against college and headed for the jungles to join the People’s War Group instead. He has rewards on his head from three state governments and has been labelled as a ‘dreaded Maoist commander’. He won the election while in custody at Rohtas district jail without campaigning in person. He faces 46 criminal cases, ranging from murder and extortion to carrying out explosive acts.†Lately, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) had disclaimed Kameshwar as a rogue operative. Second question: Which political party was the most hereditary? (Or, what percentage of a party’s MPs had reached the Lok Sabha through a family link—excluding parties with fewer than five MPs?) • RLD 100 per cent (5 out of 5) • NCP 77.8 per cent (7 out of 9) • BJD 42.9 per cent (6 out of 14) • INC 37.5 per cent (78 out of 208) • BSP 33.3 per cent (7 out of 21) • DMK 33.3 per cent (6 out of 18) • SP 27.3 per cent (6 out of 22) • CPI(M) 25 per cent (4 out of 16) • JD(U) 20 per cent (4 out of 20) • BJP 19 per cent (22 out of 116) • AITC 15.8 per cent (3 out of 19) • Shiv Sena 9.1 per cent (1 out of 11) • AIADMK 0 per cent (0 out of 9) • TDP 0 per cent (0 out of 6) The RLD ranked first, with all its MPs being hereditary. The runner-up was the NCP, a splinter from the Congress party, with seven hereditary MPs (including Agatha Sangma). The BJD at 42.9 per cent came third. Had Jaganmohan Reddy not insisted on being made CM immediately after his father YSR’s death in a chopper crash, he might have eventually got the post—and stayed in the Congress. Game lost Jaganmohan Reddy pays homage to YSR The results for these parties were statistically insignificant, since they had so few Lok Sabha seats. At the opposite end of the scale, two parties did not have a single MP from a hereditary background, but the TDP had only six MPs, while the AIADMK had nine; its leader, Jayalalitha, expected strict loyalty and promoted cronies, but had not taken the family route. The Shiv Sena on 9.1 per cent had eleven MPs, but was itself run by one (increasingly fractious) family, the Thackerays. In the middle of the table came Mayawati’s BSP: a full third of her MPs were hereditary, although in every case they were not Dalits, but had been brought in from one of the communities she was seeking to woo for the party, such as Muslims or Brahmins. The most important result concerned the two largest parties in India, the BJP and the INC, or Indian National Congress. Since they had 324 MPs between them, the sample survey was large enough to be genuinely revealing. Only 19 per cent of the BJP’s people were HMPS, which helped to explain the party’s appeal to the Hindu middle classes across swathes of middle India: they knew that more than four-fifths of the party’s MPs had ascended by other means, rather than descending from on high, which made them seem more representative and regular. An additional 11.2 per cent of BJP MPs came to politics through a background in the RSS, which for true believers in Hindutva was a family in itself. When the corpulent Nitin Gadkari became president of the BJP in 2009, he described himself as a “simple worker†who had reached the top by his own effort. “This can happen only in the BJP,†he said. “The BJP is not like other political parties where dynasty rules. My father was not the prime minister of the country.†What, then, of Congress? 37.5 per cent of its MPs had reached the Lok Sabha through a family connection. This was almost twice as many as its principal rival, but it was not a fatal statistic. The Congress leadership could still argue that more than 60 per cent of its MPs had arrived on some alternative merit—through student politics, business or simply personal ability and ambition. The third question: was this a regional issue? Were some states more hereditary than others? Here, the results were diverse. Family politics was at its strongest in Punjab, Delhi and Haryana. After that, there was a significant drop. Apart from Andhra Pradesh, all the southern states had 75 per cent or more of their MPs from a non-hereditary background. Generally the newer states, such as Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, which were only formed in 2000, were less nepotistic, presumably because family politics did not have enough time to become entrenched. In the same vein, MPs who came from seats reserved for scheduled castes or tribes were statistically less likely to be from a family with a political background, although not by much. The answer to my fourth question was inevitable, given the way in which Indian politics works. Were women MPs more likely to have reached their position through a family link? Yes: 69.5 per cent of women MPs fell into the family politics column. The exceptions were powerful self-made women leaders like Mayawati, Jayalalitha and Mamata Banerjee, whose extraordinary success was not often replicated in the middle ranks of political parties. What the figures show is that all MPs below age 30 years are from political families. When the information about all the MPs was coming in, I had been struck by how many of the older ones had risen from a grassroots background—people such as 78-year-old Danapal Venugopal, a respected and modest man who had started out in a block-level panchayat in Tamil Nadu and served five consecutive terms in Parliament. The tradition of seats being passed within families seemed more recent. To an extent, this was inevitable: it was not until the 1960s that there would have been significant numbers of MPs dying or coming up for retirement. So any MP aged 70 or over (our benchmark date for age-related calculations was January 1, 2010) who had started out in national politics at a relatively young age was unlikely to have had a parent in Parliament. So my fifth question was: Is politics in India becoming more hereditary? Kaul sent me an unusually excited e-mail 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 30 had in effect inherited a seat, and more than two-thirds of the 66 MPs aged 40 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 10 years younger than those who had arrived with ‘No Significant Family Background’. In the Congress, the situation was yet more extreme: every Congress MP under the age of 35 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. 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 Kaul’s analysis more closely, the difference between older and younger MPs was marked. For those over 50, the proportion with a father or relative in politics was not unreasonable, at 17.9 per cent. But when you looked at those aged 50 or under, this increased by more than two and a half times to nearly half, or 47.2 per cent. I checked some of the people involved, and the news was not reassuring. Of the 38 youngest MPs, 33 had arrived with the help of mummy-daddy. Of the remaining five, one was Meenakshi Natarajan, the biochem graduate who had been hand-picked by Rahul, 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-sheeterâ€â€”meaning numerous criminal chargesheets had been laid against him—who had been involved in shootouts and charged four times under the Gangsters Act. The BJP has only three hyperhereditary MPs, whereas the Congress has nineteen. I asked Kaul 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 senior politicians. In other cases, the links were more nebulous and might connect to close family members at a lower level, for instance in a state assembly. I asked Kaul to look at the MPs who had multiple family links. He responded, “The problem is the sample size: it is 27. As a rule, one does not consider stats run on sample sizes less than 30 to have any statistical meaning.†I promised to bear this in mind, and not to look at the data in percentage terms. The 27 hyperhereditary MPs were concentrated in certain states: Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab in particular. Again, their age distinguished them. The average age of an MP with no significant family background was 58; for a hereditary MP it was 48 and for a hyperhereditary MP it was 46. They were identifiable, unsurprisingly, by their party. The BJP had only three hyperhereditaries—and two were Maneka and Varun Gandhi. The Congress party had 78 hereditary MPs, of whom 19 were hyperhereditary. In some cases they had combined their political takeover with a successful business, like Dr Gaddam Vivekanand, a prominent and wealthy asbestos manufacturer from Andhra Pradesh whose father and brother were politicians. One other aspect concerned me: the possible effect of the 108th Constitution Amendment, passed by the upper house of the Indian Parliament in 2010 to reserve 33 per cent of seats in national and state-elected bodies for women. This had been a much-disputed bill, with supporters saying it would give women essential national representation, and opponents saying it would disadvantage other groups—Muslims in particular—who did not have reserved seats. The driving force behind the change in the law was Sonia, who announced: “It was my husband Rajiv Gandhi’s vision and promise.†But in the light of ‘family politics’, would this change in the law—which might have been genuinely influential had it taken place a few decades earlier—do anything other than entrench the power of existing political families, when wives and daughters were nominated for the reserved seats? The exact implementation and details of this change were not yet clear, but it seemed inevitable that at India’s next general election the number of hereditary women MPs in the Lok Sabha would rise. Going by present trends, more than 100 extra hereditary women MPs might be elected. This was a conservative estimate: if prominent MPs like Sonia Gandhi were to run in unreserved seats, and male MPs who were obliged to step down were to hand over their seats to their wives or daughters, the number of hereditary women MPs in the next Lok Sabha could cross 150. The Congress presently had 208 MPs, of whom 23 were women. This was the same as average, 11 per cent. So far so low; now comes the difference: 19 out of the 23 Congress women MPs were hereditary (and of these, four were hyperhereditary). This left only four Congress women MPs who appeared to have reached Parliament on their own merit: Meenakshi Natarajan, Annu Tandon, and two other stalwarts. Who were they? Dr Girija Vyas, the president of the National Commission for Women, and Chandresh Kumari Katoch, who turned out to be hereditary by another measure, being the daughter of Hanwant Singh, the maharaja of Jodhpur. The Indian republic was founded on the truth that power should not be handed over by the colonial rulers to the princes. India’s next general election was likely to return not a Lok Sabha, a house of the people, but a Vansh Sabha, a house of dynasty. Nehru, Patel, V.P. Menon and others went to enormous lengths to make sure heredity was knocked aside as a criterion for rule, and to ensure the 554 princely states were absorbed into a modern and democratic nation. The Indian Constitution was based on the principle that sovereignty was derived from the people. Comments welcome!!!!!
Sachin=GOD Posted May 11, 2011 Posted May 11, 2011 What the figures show is that all MPs below age 30 years are from political families. this is the most worrying part.
Stuge Posted May 11, 2011 Posted May 11, 2011 I seriously believe one should be at-least graduate to become politican .At present its like any tom dick and harry can become one and loot the general masses .
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