Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
gress and of politics. The party has been out of power for only about thirteen years since the
country's independence in 1947. Members of the dynasty have headed the party for all but
nine years and have provided three prime ministers - Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira and Rajiv
Gandhi - plus Sonia Gandhi, who is the undisputed chairperson of the United Progressive
Alliance (UPA) coalition elected in 2004 and 2009.
This raises various questions:
•
Have successive members of the Gandhi family sought to perpetuate the dynasty,
or has its survival been dictated more by events?
•
Has the family been good, or not, for India since it began to wield influence in In-
dia's struggle for freedom from British rule nearly a century ago, and has it slowed
down the country's development?
•
Can such a dynasty continue to perpetuate itself at a time when people's instinctive
loyalties to long-established icons are changing and they become more aspirational
and better educated, demanding economic development, not sops?
•
Are the Nehru-Gandhis the only people who can hold the Congress party together
and enable it to win general elections?
The Dynasty Begins
Jawaharlal Nehru's father, Motilal, a patrician Hindu Pandit and prominent lawyer whose
family came from Kashmir, was active in India's freedom movement and in the Indian
National Congress in the 1910s. He linked up with Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma)
Gandhi, India's leading independence campaigner, and also brought Jawaharlal into polit-
ics. Gandhi spotted Jawaharlal Nehru as a budding young political leader around
1918-1920 and ensured that he became India's first prime minister in 1947. (None of Ma-
hatma Gandhi's descendents have claimed a stake in politics, though a civil servant grand-
son, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, became High Commissioner in Sri Lanka and later Governor of
West Bengal from 2004 to 2009.)
A later coincidence helped promote the name of the modern dynasty. Indira Nehru mar-
ried Feroze Gandhi, a young Parsi political activist, whose family name was spelt Gandhy
(though some members of the family deny this).
Sunil Khilnani, a historian who has been working on a biography of Nehru, has written
that the change of spelling was done at Nehru's suggestion to hide Feroze's Parsi origin.
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Whatever the reason, it gave the family an association with the stronger brand name that
still causes helpful confusion today. No one knows how many of the poor, who have in-
stinctively voted Congress in past general elections, believe that the Gandhis are descend-
