Asian Window

Ramachandra Guha in the Telegraph:

When Sanjay died in an air crash in 1980, Indira Gandhi immediately drafted her other son into the Congress. When she was herself killed in October 1984, this son, Rajiv, was sworn in as prime minister. One of his first acts was to bring his old schoolfriends into politics. Like his mother, he could not bring himself to trust his own partymen. While promoting his friends, he behaved arrogantly towards senior leaders of the Congress, and towards senior bureaucrats. At least one chief minister and one foreign secretary were sacked at impromptu press conferences. Meanwhile, his friends from outside politics gave him the most disastrous advice, persuading him to open the locks in Ayodhya and to upturn the Supreme Court’s judgement in the Shah Bano case.

Jawaharlal Nehru did not hope or desire that his daughter should succeed him as prime minister – a fact that is not as widely known as it should be. On the other hand, Indira Gandhi worked to make first Sanjay and then Rajiv her political successor. Sonia Gandhi has followed her mother-in-law scrupulously in this respect, for she has likewise ensured that her own son would head the party, and, perhaps in time, the government. The example set by India’s greatest political party has been followed by many lesser ones. Had Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi not acted in this fashion, perhaps Bal Thackeray, Parkash Singh Badal, M. Karunanidhi and Mulayam Singh Yadav would not so brazenly have treated their own political parties as family firms. More:

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