:: Farrukh Dhondy

A study of class, caste, dynasty in politics

Farrukh Dhondy

April.18 : "Let the dust of memory settle

— A woman lost —

Switch on the kettle!"

From All Our Yesterdays by Bachchoo

I wake up on a rainy London morning in April, smell the coffee, pick up the Times from the doormat and get back under the duvet to catch up with the world. Nothing on Page One. Just some more Pakistani terrorists arrested in Manchester and thereabouts and the police asking for more time to search their houses for bombs. A photograph of Shia women protesting in Kabul against a new law which allows their husbands sexual access to them without their consent. A just cause, I suppose. Why don’t Indian and Californian feminists, in a spirit of globalised sisterhood, form a sort of an international brigade, turn up in Kabul and parade through the countryside in Helmand to support them? After all Al Qaeda is an international movement and all sorts of jihadis turn up in Tora Bora to do the Beardies’ bidding.

But back to the Times and the lively foreign pages — and you could knock me down with a feather — metaphorically speaking, because at this point I am contentedly supine.

The headline says: "Santa Claus to Abolish Christmas". No, no, no, no. A hallucination of the cruellest month, surely? Or the editor of the Thunderer, through some completely unprecedented malfunction of his BlackBerry, has mistaken this late date in the month for April Fool’s Day? I look again. No mistake. Is Santa sincere? Will he resign his post immediately and take Donner, Blitzen, Rudolf and the rest of his crew into happy retirement in Greenland or maybe some nice spot with a few handy ATMs in Switzerland, Dubai or the Cayman Islands?

The coffee was not strong enough. I must still be in the half-asleep state between sleep and wake which I know opium brings on — but I haven’t touched the stuff for years! (OK, OK, weeks.)

I read the headline again. Yes, it distinctly says "Rahul Gandhi Demands an End to Dynastic Politics".

The article goes on to say that he has made the speech at a Congress rally in Punjab, introduced by his good friend Raninder Singh, the son of the former chief minister and grandson of the Maharaja of Patiala. After the speech, whose message is too vital to not repeat, he will, the Times says, fly out by helicopter to Kashmir to support chief minister Omar Abdullah.

Now as far as I recall, Omar is not the son of Jade Goody or some good shepherd of the Valley. He is, and correct me if my memory is faulty, the son of Farooq Abdullah and the grandson of Sheikh Abdullah who held the chief ministership for several years from the time Kashmir began to have chief ministers in the present Indian democratic dispensation.

Perhaps what the young and dashing Mr Gandhi meant was that apart from himself, Raninder Singhji and Omar Saheb and their sons, daughters, grandsons and so on, the system of hereditary dynastic succession should be abolished.

But can Santa Claus himself bring about the abolition of Christmas? If people want to believe in and celebrate the birth of Christ, then no amount of legislation will do away with it. He might as well pass a bill abolishing the demanding and gifting of dowries! (Or did his great grandfather Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru already do that?)

I would urge the youthful and dynamic Mr Gandhi to think again. After all Oliver Cromwell, having won the Civil War and declared himself "Protector", abolished Christmas and met with very deep-seated resistance. The people demanded the return of Christmas and after Cromwell, demanded the restitution of the dynastic monarchy too. Back came James and Charles the II etc.

For all his touting of democracy, is the handsome, go-getting and forceful (I recommend Roget’s Thesaurus, the columnist’s best friend) Mr Gandhi forgetting that George Bush Senior begat George Bush Junior and that Bill Clinton passed the baton on to Hillary and thence, perhaps, in the near future to Chelsea?

And those Kennedys? If it wasn’t for the curse of Marilyn, wouldn’t we have seen 17 Presidents from that family by now?

And who said that six decades is long enough for the Communist Party of Cuba to rise to the democratic challenge and not elect Raoul Castro in place of some jumped-up infidel to replace Fidel?

And before he repeats his rhetorical blunder shouldn’t the awesome and humongous (surely not from Roget’s Thesaurus?? -Ed.) Mr Gandhi consider the great contribution made to the Indian body politic (or bodies prolific) by committed dynasts such as Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Aurangzeb?

What’s more, doesn’t the suave and magnetic Mr Gandhi see that the only replacement for the perpetuation of the dynastic current is the pernicious democratic working of caste and votebank politics? What happens if the dynasts, educated at, or faking qualifications from, Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University, drop out of the picture and leave the masses to vote for the likes of Ms Mayawati, Master Lalu Prasad Yadav or Mr Paswan?

The sapient Mr Gandhi should also consider that it will take time and a great deal of altered consciousness for the Indian electorate to get away from voting for dynasties, voting for their own or related castes or on religious lines and begin to vote for ideas.

Electorates that don’t have castes have classes and there is such a thing in, say, Britain as a working-class Labour constituency and a middle-class Tory one. But no one votes for Prince Charles and for all her popularity, Princess Diana would never have been voted Prime Minister. Britain has gone beyond.

In presenting a phalanx of young Congress candidates, the plutocratic and still-coruscating Mr Gandhi is perhaps attempting to appeal to the 24 per cent of the electorate who are under 35.

It may be that, just as a youth vote emerged in US President Barack Obama’s run for office in the US, this section of the Indian electorate will conceive a loyalty to freshness and make up a youth votebank. The magnetism of youth will have to tempt them away from the pull of caste, religion, dynasty and even from the respect for experience and elders that may be part of their tradition. But it may not work.

After all, it was the children of the world who put the ageless Santa Claus where he is.