Dynasties in disarray as political families clash over power

THE proliferation of kinship groups passing off as political parties in the provinces after drawing political capital and deriving legitimacy from the castes they represent inevitably gets entangled in chaotic family rivalries. The dogfights are triggered by succession issues or ownership of turfs.The succession mess is almost always caused when the primogeniture norm comes into play and the eldest family member, preferably a male, is anointed as the heir apparent to a party's current head.Unless there is no choice, like in the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar), which in its original unified form would have chosen Pawar's daughter and sole child Supriya Sule as the next in line.The inevitability ended when the patriarch's nephew, Ajit Pawar, rebelled against his uncle and floated his own party, which has been more successful than the initial NCP by adopting clever strategies and building on Ajit's political base at the grassroots.There are exceptions to the norm, and when the oldest child is passed over for another member, disorder usually prevails. Lalu Prasad Yadav, president of the RJD, in his wisdom picked his younger son Tejashwi Yadav over the older one, Tej Pratap, to become his legatee. Tej was born after six daughters and is said to be a favourite of Lalu's wife Rabri Devi.However, Lalu's intuition led him to Tejashwi because he was convinced that Tej was not politically inclined and was too immersed in religion. He was known to play pranks on his father's colleagues when Lalu was the Bihar CM.Lalu had underestimated Tej's political aspirations. Seeing Tejashwi's soaring ambition under Lalu's tutelage, Tej flexed his political inclination and swung a ticket for himself from the RJD in the 2015 Assembly elections. The RJD, with the JD(U), returned to power. Nitish Kumar became CM and Tejashwi, his deputy. Interestingly, the mercurial Tej, who won his seat, also wangled a ministry with Rabri Devi's help and began leveraging his clout in the government.But the government lasted two years. Out of power, the family arranged Tej's marriage with Aishwarya, who comes from a powerful Yadav family. The marriage was supposed to salvage Tej's public reputation but it fell apart. Tejashwi was on a firm footing in the RJD as were two of his sisters, Misa and Rohini, who forayed in politics in the Lok Sabha polls.The outlier in the RJD, Tej continued to embarrass the clan and kept himself in the news. The last straw was when Tej posted a picture, informing his family and friends of his "long-term relationship" with Anushka Yadav, the sister of Akash Yadav, a Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party member.The upshots were many. Lalu expelled Tej from the RJD and dumped him from the family, Akash was thrown out of his party while Tej's ex father-in-law Chandrika Rai, a former RJD leader, is expected to contest this year's Assembly polls on a JD(U) ticket, giving the scene the soap operatic veneer associated with southern politics. However, it created a headache for Lalu and Tejashwi, especially when speculation is rife that Tej might join the BJP-led NDA before the elections.From the east to the south. Southern politics stands at the intersection of families, larger-than-life leaders (or those aspiring for an exalted status) and at times cinema, all of which make for a combustible cocktail quite alien to northern mainstream politics.The DMK, Tamil Nadu's ruling party, has evolved a power-sharing model under CM MK Stalin that has brought about a sense of order to the otherwise strife-ridden family left behind by the patriarch, M Karunanidhi. Astutely, Stalin has confined himself to Tamil Nadu where he dug roots in uncharted terrain. His rivals are his brother MK Alagiri, who is older, and his sister Kanimozhi Karunanidhi.Like Lalu, Karunanidhi preferred Stalin to Alagiri, a factor that greatly helped Stalin's rise as the successor. Alagiri, a former union minister, tried hard to appropriate the areas south of Madurai and not allow Stalin to set foot. Although he earned his spurs winning byelections, the limited success did not help him outsmart Stalin, who had the rank-and-file with him. Alagiri was eventually thrown out of the party, but without the pandemonium and histrionics witnessed when political rivalries play out in Tamil Nadu.As for Kanimozhi, now an MP from Thoothukkudi, Stalin manipulated the power dynamics at work to ensure that she remained in Delhi —first as a Rajya Sabha and now a Lok Sabha MP — and projected the DMK's viewpoint on issues and networked with the INDIA bloc. Kanimozhi is comfortable in Delhi's power circuits and led one of the five delegations tasked to hard sell India's version of Operation Sindoor abroad.This is the model that K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR), Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leader and now Opposition leader in the Telangana Assembly, and YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) president and former Andhra Pradesh CM, would love to emulate. However, their family women are shooting the sky with the same focus as the males, KT Rama Rao and Jagan. K Kavitha and YS Sharmila are not shrinking violets.Presently, the BRS is in the throes of a crisis instigated by KCR's daughter Kavitha, a feisty politician. In an allegedly leaked missive to her father KCR, she took on her brother Rama Rao. Without naming him, she charged him with initiating efforts to merge the BRS with the BJP. She tangentially criticised KCR's silence on the BJP at a public meeting on April 27. Rama Rao is the BRS's working president and Kavitha criticised him for not mobilising the cadre at the grassroots like KCR used to.Amid rumours that KCR had braced himself to serve a show-case notice to his daughter, asking why she flouted party discipline, she reminded her father that the Centre had incarcerated her for six months for her alleged complicity in the Delhi liquor scam.Jagan's overwhelming desire to claim his late father's political legacy all to himself, ignoring his sister Sharmila's claim, led Sharmila to the Congress although she and Jagan had parted bitterly from the Gandhis after the death of their father YS Rajasekhara Reddy in 2009. Blessed by their mother Vijayamma, the siblings floated their own party. Sharmila spared no effort to keep the party going when Jagan was in jail.The tables swiftly turned when he became the CM in 2019. Sharmila was left in the cold. The only difference between her plight and Kavitha's is that she has her mother's unequivocal support as the "unfairly treated child".Gender solidarity here?Radhika Ramaseshan is a senior journalist.

Dynasties in disarray as political families clash over power

From RJD in Bihar to DMK in Tamil Nadu to BRS in Telangana, the succession mess is creating political turmoil across states

Radhika Ramaseshan

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