The original dynasts
If you live in Delhi and have a nodding acquaintance with the socialising elite, it’s impossible not to run into the Scindias, so omnipotent is their presence in the capital. Madhavrao, whom I had the opportunity to interview on a few occasions during his stints as railway minister and civil aviation minister, combined his royal lineage with an impatient modesty to get things moving along but was not shy of the silver doodahs and royal paraphernalia with which he surrounded himself — indeed, the Scindias have never apologised for wanting to live well in spite of political careers in which endorsing khadi or saffron seems to be an overwhelming concern for most. Vasundhara Raje’s tenures as chief minister of Rajasthan and Yashodhara Raje’s stints in the central and Madhya Pradesh governments have not kept them entirely away from the capital’s party circuit where they come across as feisty and fun. Add Madhavrao’s son Jyotiraditya and daughter Chitrangada, married to Jammu and Kashmir royal and politician Vikramaditya Singh, to the mix and you have a dynastic cocktail laced with incumbent forces such as Dushyant Singh (Vasundhara Raje’s son) and others in the family who make the Nehru-gandhi hierarchy appear like upstarts.
The Scindias have never been far removed from power or controversy — beginning with their refusal to lend support to Rani Lakshmibai and remain neutral during the 1857 rebellion — but their clout and wealth overcame historical hesitancies to earn them a place in independent India’s tryst with democracy. It seems extraordinary, therefore, that a book detailing the family’s political history should have taken so long coming. The House of Scindias promises to spill all — “political intrigue, palace conspiracies, cut-throat rivalry and an ugly, public feud, betrayals and property wars fought in courts, and siblings that do not look eye to eye” — a salacious thriller with regicide and internecine squabbles added to the mix.
It delivers all this, but with calibrated restraint. Author Rasheed Kidwai is too nuanced to include gossip or scandal for its own sake, even though the book suffers from having been written with secondary rather than primary sources of iformation. But he takes care to attribute every quote, thereby ensuring his own remove from washing the family’s dirty linen in public. And yet, there is no doubt that interest in the family runs high. Mr Kidwai addresses all these elements even though he does little to pique the reader’s curiosity beyond the already known.
Royal watchers would know that Gwalior — one of the few 21-gun salute kingdoms in British India — was miffed when a royal wedding with a Baroda princess was called off when the latter chose a relatively minor but dashing royal from Coochbehar for a beau. Ironic, therefore, that a rapprochement between the Bharatiya Janata Party and dissident Congress MP Jyotiraditya Scindia should have been brought about by a Baroda clansman.
Since the book does not set out to be irreverent but a political history of the family, it runs the gamut from the grand matriarch Vijaya Raje Scindia to her grandson Jyotiraditya, and the saga and chasm that separated them in their lifetime. The Rajmata’s sense of aggrieved nationalism in the face of Indira Gandhi’s imposition of Emergency and her subsequent incarceration in jail — she almost escaped to Nepal where her son had found a safe refuge with his in-laws, before deciding to return to face the autocratic prime minister Indira Gandhi’s wrath — sets the stage for estrangement from her son, Madhavrao, who joined the Congress, setting up mother and son as foes, politically as well as in life.
This is when things began to get more potent. Madhavrao’s sisters Vasundhara Raje and Yashodhara Raje sided with their mother; (two others remained outside politics, though one committed suicide following her marriage to a Tripura royal, while Usha Raje’s daughter Devayani became the unwitting trigger that led to the tragic massacre of the Nepal royal family); the Rajmata relying increasingly on her adviser, a “Rasputin”-like figure, the enigmatic and mysterious and eventually controlling and manipulative Sambhaji Angre; and fights over property spilled into the public, especially following the Rajmata’s death when two contrary wills surfaced, laying the way for legal disputes worth crores of rupees over estates estimated to be worth ~400 billion. Those cases await a legal solution that rests on a case of primogeniture.
If Mr Kidwai takes the trouble to distance himself from the scurrilous, his caution is at times surprising. What exactly was Vijaya Raje’s role in the demolition of Babri Masjid? An entire chapter on Vasundhara Raje reads like a laundry list of her government’s schemes in Jaipur. Jyotiraditya’s migration from an impotent Congress to the BJP, while detailed, does not provide a journalistic overview other than a nod to ghar wapasi that might have pleased his grandmother. His aunts’ muted reactions lend themselves less to suggestions of rapprochement as much as of incumbent competition. His father was denied a chance at prime ministership by a flying accident; now, will Jyotiraditya aspire to it, or will he have to fight off his aunts and cousins for the prize? Is joining the BJP going to be his fatal flaw? Watch out for a sequel.