Talking Turkey
India can rightly claim credit for introducing US politicians at the presidential level to the art of family politics. There have been American political dynasties in the shape of the Bushes and the Clintons, but they have been amateurish. It is only with the advent of the Donald Trump presidency that the virtues of Indian family power are coming into play.
Indeed, there have been family dynasties at the federal state levels in India for a considerable time. The Shuklas of Madhya Pradesh come to mind, as does the Abdullah dynasty in Kashmir that has prospered. But the full flavour of family politics was realised with the coming to power of Indira Gandhi after the death of her father Jawaharlal Nehru. Whether the latter intended it to be so is still a matter of conjecture.
One has only to recall Indira proudly telling her partymen how her son Sanjay had stolen their (the elders’) thunder. No one was surprised because he had by then established himself as a man of substantial power after giving up trying to build a car. He was the gatekeeper and much more to his mother. And then he got killed in an air accident. As night follows day, his brother Rajiv, an airline pilot, succeeded him, and after his assassination, his wife Sonia took over after a period of mourning.
Take Mr Trump. It did not take him long to make his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a practising rabbi and construction tycoon, a senior official adviser, giving him such onerous duties as resolving the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio and other ticklish problems. Mr Trump’s daughter Ivanka was also made an adviser and given an office in the West Wing of the White House.
The President’s son, Donald Trump Junior, holding his father’s real estate empire, was a member of his father’s election campaign team, and has distinguished himself recently by revealing emails he had exchanged prior to meeting a Russian lawyer on the promise of her closeness to the Kremlin and revealing dirt on Mr Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. These revelations will now form part of the inquiry by a special prosecutor probing suspected Russian intervention in influencing the outcome of the US presidential election.
One does not know whether the news from Bihar has reached the White House, but Lalu Prasad Yadav has meanwhile climbed new heights in keeping alive family politics. He had previously distinguished himself by nominating his wife Rabri Devi, until then a housewife, as the state’s chief minister when he was debarred from holding office on corruption charges.
Mr Lalu Prasad fought the last Assembly election in league with the Janata Dal (United) as part of a grand coalition and won. Nitish Kumar, the JD(U) leader, was