Opinion Dynastic politics, sons and nephews – why reinvention may be more important than family ties
Leaders like Bal Thackeray, Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad represented a new wave of politics that often required aggressive, ruthless and/or cynical politicking, but should their successors — who enter the political arena with privilege — continue in the same vein?
This article focuses on one salient phenomenon that illuminates the vexed question of continuity and generational change in Indian politics: The spectre of nephews. From L to R- Ajit Pawar, Raj Thackeray, Akash Anand. (Express Photo) In the last 10 years, there has been a lot of chatter on parivaarvad – a political formation ostensibly beholden only to families and not to a coherent ideology. Equating family-run parties to an ism, however, misses out several nuances that are crucial to understand this central pillar of Indian politics. The BJP sets its politics, clearly delineated by the Sangh Parivar ideology, against the alleged ideological vacuum of parties that are deemed “dynastic”. The Sangh’s civilisational project is, in many ways, pitted against a society where kinship and community ties triumph over all else.
The BJP’s candidate lists for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections continued to reflect the dominance of kinship ties. The subsequent results have shown that political descendants across party ranks — including Rahul Gandhi, Bansuri Swaraj, Supriya Sule, Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, Chirag Paswan, etc. — have won handsomely. This article, however, focuses on one salient phenomenon that illuminates the vexed question of continuity and generational change in Indian politics: The spectre of nephews.
Let us start with the OG nephew, Raj Thackeray, the one-time political heir and nephew of Bal Thackeray, who extended “unconditional support” to the BJP this year. Despite successive electoral losses, Raj has managed to stay relevant since parting ways with Shiv Sena in 2006 when he lost the succession dispute to his cousin Uddhav. He was one of the first promoters of Narendra Modi as a prime ministerial candidate, but, in 2019, caught attention again with his innovative rallies that sought to expose the Modi government’s lies. His chequered journey represents both the fragility of political legacy and its resilience — an instructive lesson for the real and proverbial nephews of 2024 elections.
Ajit Pawar, who took away his uncle Sharad Pawar’s party name and symbol apart from audaciously using the latter’s photos in campaigns against the poor man’s new party, has faced the biggest setback. While it is unclear if he would return home as the heir, his electoral drubbing must have held a feeling of déjà vu for Maharashtra. If Raj inherited his uncle’s combative personality, Uddhav anticipated the future political course that would require a more congenial leadership – something his party senior Sanjay Raut has hinted at in his interviews. Ajit Pawar is similarly rumoured to have inherited Pawar Sr’s capacity for cynical political manoeuvres, but, saturated as Maharashtra appears to be with cynical politicking, the electorate might have connected more with Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule’s projected image as an earnest and liberal politician.
Another plausible “loser” is the one who disappeared along the way. After a few “edgy” speeches as BSP’s new national coordinator, Akash Anand was unceremoniously sacked. Party supremo and aunt, Mayawati, may well have saved him from being associated with the BSP’s rout, but she also suggested that Anand lacked “full maturity” – something he has presumably gained in the intervening months since he has now been reinstated. Political maturity is also a plausible explanation for her decision to bide her time and be back for the next stage of Dalit assertion as Sudha Pai has argued. But the victories of Chandrasekhar Azad — whom Anand had flippantly dismissed in an interview — and Sanjana Jatav, Awadesh Prasad, Varsha Gaikwad among others proves that Dalit identity politics may not only survive this period of Sangh dominance, it could even thrive as a legitimate ideological opposition — helping the cautious and conservative dynastic parties sharpen their own political messaging.
This is not to say that “politics as usual” has been quashed. The RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav, who defied expectations with a poor show, has been subjected to post-facto criticism of “arrogantly” handling seat-sharing arrangements even as Nitish Kumar’s brutally cynical calculations paid off. His confident body language temporarily deflated, Tejashwi may need to think about what his parents and his adoptive chacha — the one without a successor — can still teach him about realpolitik even as he remains steadfast in some of his ideological convictions.
The biggest winner in the nephew ring is Abhishek Banerjee, who has now firmly consolidated power as Mamata Bannerjee’s successor in West Bengal. The TMC’s moment of glory might preclude any need for self-reflection that plague the other nephews currently. What kind of future leadership does the state seek from a party that has successfully cultivated women as an electoral constituency? The highest and lowest point of Abishek’s campaign was the sting operation that sought to “expose” the allegations of sexual assaults in Sandeshkhali as a lie. The party, which has not exactly distinguished itself for its sensitivity when dealing with sexual assault cases in the past, had also left its MP Mahua Moitra to deal with a barrage of misogynistic attacks on her own. And yet, can a male leader manage to lead a party closely identified with women’s interests with similar attitudes, that is, business as usual? Mamata, having faced plenty of misogyny throughout her career, had, after all, earned her stripes, so to speak.
What the nephews’ journeys reveal – apart from mirroring patriarchal conceptions of kinship and inheritance – is a precarious balance between continuity and generational change. Leaders like Bal Thackeray, Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad represented a new wave of politics that often required aggressive, ruthless and/or cynical politicking, but should their successors — who enter the political arena with privilege — continue in the same vein?
Inheritance of power requires reinvention. Rahul Gandhi’s embodiment of humility and grace is, for instance, also a political necessity. In 2024, voters rewarded both kins with softer, progressive images and firebrand debutantes like Azad. The results would, at least partly, suggest that heirs cannot simply emulate their forebears since their journeys have not been the same. If they still think succession is an inevitable and a natural progression, they may well have to wait till they gain full maturity.
Srinivasan is a kinship anthropologist and author of Courting Desire: Litigating for Love in North India
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