WHERE MONEY TALKS
Indians of my age and milieu studied European history at school. We learnt that the Bourbons never forgot or forgave, that the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire, and that the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas made advantageous marriages. So, it’s with a sense of déjà vu that we find politics at home revolving round the Nehru-Gandhis, the Abdullahs, the Patnaiks and — centre stage and in the spotlight — the Yadavs.
Historians and social anthropologists claim friendship and family have always held special meaning in India. It’s not nepotism, they say. The bonds of kith and kin are rooted in social values and moral compulsions that were universal in ancient times but which only we have faithfully preserved, treasuring what the West has lost.
When England’s Queen Mary Tudor asked the Emperor Charles V who she should marry, Charles replied he loved no one more than his son. So it was the son, Philip of Spain, she dutifully wed. While such loyalty would be unthinkable in contemporary Europe, a veteran Indian politician accused of pushing his son, is believed to have retorted vigorously, “If I don’t push my son, whose son should I push? Yours?”
As the exchange between Mary and Charles demonstrated, marriage is the great cement for alliances and allegiances. This is an avenue the not-so-young Rahul Gandhi doesn’t appear to have explored as yet. Others have.
When Lalu Prasad’s daughter married Mulayam Singh Yadav’s grandnephew, she didn’t only bring a dowry of votes; she altered the power equation in netaji’s family.
Battling kinsmen to save his job, the hardpressed Akhilesh Yadav might ponder that matters could have been different if only Lalu Prasad had been his father’s samandhi. This could easily have been arranged in more expansive times. While Henry VIII divorced or decapitated wives who outlived their usefulness, law and custom permitted Indians merely to add to their number.
But a raft of legislation to enforce Westernstyle modernity has elevated constitutional democracy above people’s democracy. That is one more misguided innovation that Hindutva’s stout champions must tackle to realise the Ramrajya (not that poor Ram sought a plethora of spouses) of their dreams.
Indian women could inherit power long before the Hindu Code Bill made it mandatory for property. But a triumphantly riding Mamata Banerjee is an un-Indian phenomenon for, unlike Raziya Sultan, who succeeded a doting father, she hasn’t inherited from anyone.
Sonia Gandhi is more the archetypal Indian female for she derived her rulership claim from her husband although her elevation was really the handiwork of obsequious Congress courtiers, who may have been counting the shekels they could amass.
Disdaining inheritance, aggressively democratic Americans boast that every American mother has the right to hope her son will day occupy the White House like Napoleon saying every French soldier carried a field marshal’s baton in his knapsack. But when it comes to foreigners, Americans can be as ingratiatingly snobbish as any old-world society hostess.
Thus, Ronald Reagan knew — or had been told — that the best way to Indira Gandhi’s heart was to compare the Nehrus with the Boston Brahmin Adams clan which had provided America with statesmen, scholars and two presidents.
“Lord Bolingbroke’s description of the Adams family is equally appropriate for your family’s contribution to India,” he flattered her in 1982. “They are the guardian angels of the country they inhabit, studious to avert the most distant evil and to procure peace, plenty, and the greatest of human blessings, liberty.” It was the kind of thing that she loved to hear.
When Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria since 1971, fell ill in 1983, his younger brother, Rifat, seemed likely to take over, anticipating Cuba where Raoul Castro succeeded the legendary Fidel. But Assad recovered, exiled Rifat, and continued for nearly 17 years more, grooming his eldest son, Bassel, to take over.
When Bassel died in a car crash, he summoned —shades of the Nehru-Gandhi tragedy — Bashar, who was studying dentistry in London, to be groomed instead.
It’s forgotten that even Oliver Cromwell, the great democrat who had Charles I beheaded, also anointed his son to succeed him as Lord Protector. It wasn’t Richard Cromwell’s fault that — again recalling the Nehru-Gandhis — he wasn’t up to the mark. A dynastic scion shouldn’t be penalised for his birth. But he must not exceed the level of his limitations.
Both the country and the democracy benefited when realising his inadequacy, Richard Cromwell stepped down and quietly faded away.