Dynasty and Idea of India

“Dynasty, a political tool in the hands of the ruling class, has become the catalyst for a new colonization of a country whose soul has already been deeply scarred by centuries of it”. This is perhaps the pithiest observation in “Durbar”, the newly published autobiographical account of well known journalist Tavleen Singh.
The purpose of this piece is not to review Tavleen’s well written book but more an attempt to understand how a dynasty in a democratic polity evolves over multiple generations and how such democracies become different from normative democracies.
The first generation dynast, who establishes the dynasty, in a nominally democratic polity, always has some leadership qualities in him or her. This is as much true of historical dynasties as it is true of our current ruling dynasty – the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Pandit Nehru, who established the Indian ruling dynasty, was not a man without merit. While history now judges most of the policies he implemented as Prime Minister in an unfair light, it would be a huge disservice to argue that he rose without any merit. In this, arguably, he was not different from how true democracies choose their leader – democracies are designed to ensure that the best and the brightest political talent in each generation rise to the top. In the greatest democracy on Earth, while Dwight Eisenhower became President of USA in 1952, Barrack Obama won a second term, 60 years later, in 2012. Eisenhower will perhaps go down in history as the greatest General ever. But that did not imply that his successive generations will continue to be regarded as the greatest too and claim the office of US President as their right. Each generation will have to compete with fellow citizens in an equal game and the best man or woman would win. Naturally then, Eisenhower’s children and grandchildren lived successful private lives while men and women from diverse families and backgrounds, but all of some competence, staked their claims in each