Harmful power concentration

Personality- or family-based parties prevent strong alliances

The drama over the resignation of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Sharad Pawar as president of the party has highlighted a structural flaw in political parties in India. Barring the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a handful of others, most parties in the world’s largest democracy tend to be predicated on authoritarian structures dominated either by one leader or one family. Mr Pawar, 82, is reportedly seeking to avoid a split in the party and has forwarded the claims of his daughter, Supriya Sule, to take over in preference to his ambitious nephew Ajit Pawar. The NCP is the largest Opposition party in Maharashtra, and this destabilising controversy involves an intra-family power struggle in an electorally significant state ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections. In Karnataka, where Assembly elections are due on May 10, the electorate is witnessing an unseemly battle within the Janata Dal (S), a family enterprise presided over by former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda, 90, over a pocket borough.

Family domination of political parties — such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu, where the son of the founder is now chief minister; the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar; and the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh — is a reflection of a significant weakness of democratic politics and that is the ever larger amounts of funding required to launch a candidate. Promoting a family member, especially for political parties with limited access to funds, is considered a cost-effective way of expanding. Though this strategy may work for the leader concerned, family succession in politics runs the risk of excluding genuine talent and precipitating disruptive internal splits, as the latest NCP saga shows. The plight of the Congress is also a case in point.

Yet longevity remains an open question for a handful of dominant local parties promoted by single politicians, such as the Trinamool Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party, or the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). In all of these, the line of succession is unclear, although each party has talented politicians in its ranks. In the Trinamool’s case, Mamata Banerjee’s effort to project her nephew, who is yet to demonstrate political talent, has been questioned. Mayawati’s BSP appears to have foundered in the absence of a clear successor, and political inheritors of the late Jayalalithaa’s All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam are yet to find their feet. In Odisha, the fortunes of the Biju Janata Dal after Naveen Patnaik, 76, scion of the party he founded as a breakaway from the Janata Dal, remain opaque. The Aam Aadmi Party, with its abundance of talent and absence of family politics, remains the sole test case among Opposition parties of the possibilities of non-dynastic parties.

The principal problem with the domination of family-run political parties is that they preclude the possibility of forging lasting Opposition alliances to take on the dominance of a ruling party. Competing egos and dynastic dynamics inevitably impede the creation of a coherent and credible platform unlike the Janata Party, which defeated Indira Gandhi after the Emergency. A strong Opposition is as much an urgent necessity for the health of democracy in India today as it was then.