Heir today

Family is about compromise. Political families, thus, seek political compromises. The travails of the Shiromani Akali Dal in Punjab — once viewed by many, including itself, as the Sikh panth organised for elections and now little more than a fief of the powerful Badal family — illustrate this vividly. Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal is the past: an old-style patriarch, looking out for those he believes he represents, cutting deals on their behalf with the powers-that-be, the last of the generation of those who married the interests of the privileged class they sprang from with an unreconstructed socialist mental structure. Manpreet Badal is the future: unabashedly about his wealth and background, yet willing and determined to frame policy questions in terms of trade-offs and economic sustainability.

Thus it is not completely awful news that Manpreet Badal is not letting the fact that his attempts at reform are continually thwarted by his uncle’s statist instincts cause an internal crisis in his party. Presumably, he has thought this through, and knows the future is his. Punjab’s subsidies are unsustainable: he is merely doing his the job he was picked for — to sound rational about Punjab’s economy — by restating what the numbers say. That he is willing to combine this with patient political spadework in attempting to develop, among individual legislators, an understanding of the benefits that will accrue from a rationalisation of Punjab’s utilities, means that he also understands that reform of this nature needs political management of the sort at which Parkash Badal has always been so good.

Manpreet may have had to retreat, but it is a tactical withdrawal. This is how change comes to ossified parties like the Akalis, to calcified polities like Punjab’s. Younger people put their ideas forward, and respectfully manoeuvre themselves out of the way while the ideas are discussed. The ideological faultlines are different in different parties — every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way — but the conversations that lead to change have to be had.