Dynastic Wealth and Democracy

 

Democracy and Indian Political Parties

 

A Quick History of the BJP

 

The 3 Gandhis Must Immediately Retire from Politics for the Good of their Party & Country

 

Six Issues in Indian History Writing

 

Nepotistic privilege should be a matter of social shame

Woke young millennials should start looking down upon friends who take the easy route of following up on their parents’ careers writes SHIVAM VIJ in The Print 

We don’t know for sure the reason why Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput took his own life, but the resulting debate on nepotism is a turning point in Indian society. Rajput was not only an outsider to the joint family called Bollywood, but an outsider from Patna. As a result, nepotism has now become a Hindi word found in Hindi papers.

Before Rajput’s suicide, it was Kangana Ranaut who took up the matter. Outside of Bollywood, India’s public discourse often discusses ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic privilege’ in Indian politics.

This is an opportunity for Indian society to broaden the discussion. Given a chance, we are all nepotistic. There is nobody who won’t promote their children’s careers in the same field as theirs. This is part of our tradition of caste and kinship. To bring down the edifice of nepotism in Bollywood and politics, we have to question nepotism in society at large.

A drain on the GDP

This is a serious issue with implications not only for equality of opportunity but also for India’s economic progress. Nepotism promotes mediocrity, and thus low productivity.

The Congress party insists on being led by Indira Gandhi’s grandchildren, regardless of whether they are the best people suited for the role. The result is for all to see: a most ineffective opposition. Similarly, the Bollywood marketing machine will force you to watch an Arjun Kapoor movie, even if he has the same face and same expression throughout the movie. He can’t act, but the movie will still make a profit thanks to the marketing machine. And even if it flops, he will still get another role. The result is that India has a lot of terrible cinema.

India’s legal profession is said to be controlled by some 500 families. If you are a young lawyer, you have to struggle for years at a pittance of a salary with senior lawyers before the profession will let you stand on your feet. Meanwhile, the fraternity is full of third-rate lawyers who keep getting cases and corporate retainerships only because their fathers or mothers are famous advocates. 

When an internship is a phone call away

In much the same way, nepotistic privilege affects the overall quality of many parts of the Indian economy. Our newsrooms are full of children of journalists and even politicians. A well-known journalist’s son or daughter gets an internship with a phone call whereas those without such access keep emailing their CVs with no one bothering to even open their emails.

The unfairness does not stop there. The other day, I saw a prominent academic promote a senior journalist’s daughter on Twitter, praising her with superlatives for an ordinary cub reporter’s work. Nepotistic privilege is thus a life-long privilege. You get a free pass because you are the son or daughter or relative of XYZ. It’s bad enough that she has the advantage of getting story ideas, leads and contacts at home while an ‘outsider’ in the same newsroom will have to struggle much harder to be at the same level. But for your father’s powerful friends to be promoting you on Twitter blindly is absolutely distasteful.

We are all complicit

It is time for all of us to look within. Do we take someone more seriously because their father or mother is successful in the same field? We do, we often do. This is part of our ethos as a caste society. There is, for example, a huge amount of curiosity among the public about star kids. We reward nepotism. Someone with nepotistic privilege may be competent, but you haven’t even tried an ‘outsider’.

We need to flip this formula, not just to provide equality of opportunity but also because every job should have the most competent person doing it. That is why nepotism is an economic issue.

Copy-paste woke culture

To flip it, we need to start seeing nepotistic privilege as a matter of shame. India’s woke millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to learn political correctness from American shores. But nepotism is not such a big social issue in the US. We need some originality in our woke politics to start shaming nepotistic privilege. When woke millennials say ‘check your privilege’, they don’t include nepotism because American news sites haven’t yet written about it yet.

In the way that woke people go around ‘cancelling’ those who are misogynistic or homophobic or fatphobic or those who think skin colour defines beauty… yeah, riding pillion on your dad’s career should be seen like that.

If you are a young adult planning your career, and you are planning to take up the same career as your parents, you should feel some shame about it. And your friends should judge you for it.

And you should definitely stop your mom and dad from making the phone call that gets you the free pass. Name dropping shouldn’t get you a job — your CV and work should.

Of all the professions in the world, your inner calling turns out to be the same as your parent’s? Where’s the originality, the rebellion, where’s your individualism?

Similarly, parents successful in a profession should encourage their children to find a different profession. In a country where the caste system is literally about profession, this is key to social democratisation.

It will be your turn next

Maybe you really, really want to follow the same profession as your parent. Here’s the challenge. Can you do it on a different turf? If you are a Bollywood star kid, can you ‘launch’ your career in a country other than India or with a less-known, less-glitzy banner? If your father is prominent in national politics but inactive in state politics, can you build your own mass popularity in state politics? If your mother is a criminal lawyer, can you at least go work in a corporate law firm?

If you are literally doing what your dad does, just taking on his clients, just running his business, you should, yes, be a little ashamed of yourself. You are occupying a seat that could be occupied by someone more competent than you, no matter how good you think you are at your work.

You should know that the world judges you for it but doesn’t say it yet. Just like the silence about nepotistic privilege has been broken in politics and Bollywood, one day it will be broken in your profession too.

Sonia Gandhi - A Blot on the Nation

(Editor's Note: This article was received by email and unable to verify journal of publication. But the points raised are important.)
by Mark Tully

Sir William "Mark" Tully, OBE. He worked for BBC for a period of 30
years before resigning in July 1994. He held the position of Chief of
Bureau, BBC, Delhi for 20 years Padma Shree, KBE, Padma Bhushan, one
of the most respected journalists in the world, writes on Indian
Politics: An eye opener account, not known to most of the Indians.

"I can say without the shadow of a doubt that when history will be
written, the period over which she (Sonia Gandhi) presided, both over
the Congress and India, will be seen as an era of darkness, of immense
corruption and of a democracy verging towards autocracy, if not
disguised dictatorship, in the hands of a single person, a non-Indian
 and a Christian like me. Truth will also come out about her being the
main recipient for kickbacks from Bofors to 2G, which she uses to buy
votes."

The sun has already set; darkness is just about to start. Do you blame
it on bankruptcy/blindness of Congress or country's misfortune. It is
both. Now read the complete analysis, which follows. THE TRUTH & THE
HIDDEN FACTS. I was surprised when the Congress party gave me a Padma
Shri – I am the   only foreign journalist to ever get it. For, in my
forty years of political reporting in India, I have always been a
vocal critic of the Nehru dynasty. Someone even called me recently: “a
vitriolic British journalist, who in his old age chose to live back in
the land he never approved”.

It started with Operation Blue Star. I was one of the few western
correspondents who criticized Indira. As I have said since then
numerous times, the attack on the Golden Temple and the atrocities
that followed the army operations, produced in all sections of the
Sikhs a sense of outrage that is hard today to alleviate. I believed
then that the large majority of Hindu India, even if politically
hostile to Indira Gandhi, openly identified with – and exulted in –
her will to overwhelmingly humble a recalcitrant minority.

As everybody knows, Indira Gandhi helped my fame grow even more, by
wanting to imprison me during the Emergency she clamped and finally
throwing me out of India for a short while. But the result was that
the whole of India tuned in, then and thereafter, to my radio’s
broadcasts, ‘The Voice of India’, to hear what they thought was
‘accurate’ coverage of events.

When Rajiv Gandhi came to power, I first believed that he was
sincerely trying to change the political system, but he quickly
gave-up when the old guard would not budge. I criticized him for his
foolish adventure in Sri Lanka, although I felt sorry for him when he
was blown to pieces by Dhanu, the Tamil Tiger.

It is in Kashmir, though that I fought most viciously against his Govt
and subsequent Congress ones for its human right abuses on theKashmiri Muslims of the Valley. The Congress Governments tried indeed
several times to censor me and the army even took prisoner my Kashmiri
stringer, whom I had to rescue by the skin of his teeth. I am also
proud that I was the first one to point out then, that the Indian
Government had at that time no proof of the Pakistani involvement in
the freedom movement in Kashmir.

Thus I always made it a point to start my broadcasts by proclaiming
that the Indian Government accuses Pakistan of fostering terrorism»,
or that “elections are being held in Indian-controlled Kashmir”…As I
was so popular, all the other foreign journalists used the same
parlance to cover Kashmir and they always spoke of the plight of the
Muslims, never of the 400.000 Hindus, who after all were chased out of
their ancestral land by sheer terror (I also kept mum about it).

As for Sonia Gandhi, I did not mind her, when she was Rajiv Gandhi’s
wife, but after his death, I watched with dismay as she started
stamping her authority on the Congress, which made me say in a series
of broadcasts on the Nehru Dynasty: “It’s sad that the Indian National
Congress should be completely dependent on one family; the total
surrender of a national party to one person is deplorable. You have to
ask the question: what claims does Sonia Gandhi have to justify her
candidature for prime-ministership? Running a country is far more
complicated than running a company. Apprenticeship is required in any
profession — more so in politics”.

I heard that Sonia Gandhi was unhappy about this broadcast. Then,
after President APJ Abdul Kalam called her to the Raj Bhavan and told
her what some of us already knew, namely that for a long time, she had
kept both her Italian and Indian passports, which disqualified her to
become the Prime Minister of India, she nevertheless became the
Supreme leader of India behind the scenes. It is then that I
exclaimed: “the moribund and leaderless Congress party has latched
onto Sonia Gandhi, who is Italian by birth and Roman Catholic by
baptism”.

She never forgave me for that. Yet, today I can say without the shadow
of a doubt that when history will be written, the period over which
she presided, both over the Congress and India, will be seen as an era
of darkness, of immense corruption and of a democracy verging towards
autocracy, if not disguised dictatorship, in the hands of a single
person, a non Indian and a Christian like me.Truth will also come out
about her being the main recipient for kickbacks from Bofors to 2G,
which she uses to buy votes, as the Wikileaks have just shown.

Finally, I am sometimes flabbergasted at the fact that Indians –
Hindus, sorry, as most of this country’s intelligentsia is Hindu –
seem to love me so much, considering the fact that in my heydays, I
considerably ran down the 850 million Hindus of this country, one
billion worldwide. I have repented today: I do profoundly believe that
India needs to be able to say with pride, “Yes, our civilization has a
Hindu base to it.” The genius of Hinduism, the very reason it has
survived so long, is that it does not stand up and fight. It changes
and adapts and modernizes and absorbs – that is the scientific and
proper way of going about it.

I believe that Hinduism may actually prove to be the religion of this
millennium, because it can adapt itself to change. Hindus are still
slaves to MUSLIMS and CHRISTIANS On the name of secularism, lots of
facilities and cash incentives are given to Muslims and Christians.
Haj subsidy is given to Muslims for Haj yatra, wages of Muslim
teachers and Imams are given to Muslims are given by looting the Hindu
temples. No such subsidy is given to Hindus for going to Hindu
religious places or any wages to Hindu religious priests or Hindu
teachers. In fact congress secular government creates many obstacles
for Hindus for going to Amarnath Yatra.

Even after 65 years of independence reservation is given on religious
grounds while it should have been abolished by this time. If at all
reservation or subsidy is needed, then it should be purely on economic
grounds rather on the grounds of minorities. Such reservations affect
the quality of work. Congress party giving various kinds of
allurements to minorities to buy their votes with Hindu money. In the
government, many people are with Hindu names but in fact many are
Muslims and Christians with Hindu names  to fool Hindus and to
show in the government, majority   people are Hindus.