Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The best survey was conducted by Patrick French, an author and historian, when he was
istics cruncher, Arun Kaul. They found that, led by the Gandhis, more than a third of the
ally all the MPs (not just Congress) aged under 30, and more than two-thirds of those under
40, were from hereditary political families, whereas less than 10 per cent of MPs over the
age of 70 were dynastic. He classified 27 MPs as 'hyper-hereditary', including 19 from the
Congress, meaning those who had multiple family connections and several family mem-
bers with political careers.
Regional state-based parties had a higher incidence of hereditary MPs than national
parties. All five MPs from Uttar Pradesh's Rashtriya Lok Dal Party (National People's
Party) had family links, including Ajit Singh, the party leader and son of Charan Singh,
who was briefly (1979-80) prime minister. This was also true of six out of 14 MPs belong-
ing to the Orissa-based Biju Janata Dal led by Naveen Patnaik and three MPs from Jammu
and Kashmir's National Conference headed by Farooq and Omar Abdullah.
Seven out of nine MPs from the Maharashtra-based Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)
- founded and led by Sharad Pawar, a powerful national and regional politician who split
from the main Congress party in 1999 over Sonia Gandhi's emerging role - hailed from
political families. Only one MP from the NCP did not have a politically significant family
background. Pawar's acolyte, Praful Patel, is one of the country's richest MPs.
Although it did not figure in French's research, the DMK in the southern state of Tamil
Nadu, has a complex web of family and business relationships, rivalries and intrigues. The
network is headed by the state's veteran former chief minister M. Karunanidhi, one of
whose sons, M.K. Stalin, has been mayor of Chennai, a state government minister, and
then deputy chief minister between 1996 and 2011. Karunanidhi's nephew, the late Mura-
soli Maran, and one of Maran's sons, Dayanidhi Maran, have both been MPs and central
government ministers in recent years. Murasoli had developed close political links in Delhi
feud, and textiles minister, a post from which he resigned in 2011 over telecom corruption
scandals.
Dayanidhi was succeeded in 2007 by A. Raja, a DMK MP who was at the centre of the
2011 telecom scandal and was closely linked with Karunanidhi's daughter, Kanimozhi, a
member of the Rajya Sabha. Both Raja and Kanimozhi were imprisoned in February 2011
(Raja for six months and Kanimozhi for 15 months). Tamil Nadu's other main political
party, the state-based All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) has had a
different sort of dynastic succession based on the film industry's massive popularity - its
