By Kumkum Chadha
It is a story of two aunts and their nephews: an interesting tale of their rise and fall. It is about waking up one morning and being bereft of what had been bestowed; it is about the whim and fancy of their respective benefactor. It is about being symbolically crowned and then being dethroned; it is about a smile and a frown; it is about losing favour and the package deal that came with it: the entitlement, the legacy and trappings of political power.
It is also a story about the two M’s and the two A’s, so to speak: the commonality is an interesting coincidence. It is about aunts Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee and their nephews Akash and Abhishek, respectively.
Mayawati, former chief minister and Bahujan Samaj Party, or BSP chief, is kind of a fading star. Her party is losing ground. Its dismal electoral performance apart, Mayawati seems to have lost the will to galvanize the party.
To give credit where it is due, Mayawati served as chief minister four times. The party expanded its footprint, but gradually lost ground. Its vote base of backward castes moved over to the BJP. By 2017, Mayawati had lost the plot.
Add to this Mayawati’s flip flop over appointing her successor. Enter her nephew Akash Anand whose rise and fall has been a subject of intense debate within the party. Once labelled as Mayawati’s political heir, he fell from grace earlier this month after she axed him for the second time in one year. The BSP has officially stated that Akash was removed from all party posts. Mayawati also made it clear that there will not be a successor in her lifetime.
It was in 2019 that Akash emerged on the political scene. By 2023, he was appointed the national coordinator: seen as a number two kind of a position. However, his meteoric rise was cut short when ahead of the Lok Sabha polls last year, Mayawati axed him.
In June last year, she reappointed him as national coordinator, only to show him the door in less than a year. Mayawai’s angst: Akash is selfish, arrogant and under the influence of his father-in-law. Out in the cold, Akash is now faced with a what next dilemma.
Pitch this against another aunt-nephew saga: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her nephew Abhishek Banerjee. It was in 2011 that Abhishek tested the waters. In 2014, he took the plunge and contested and won his first election as a Trinamool Congress candidate. Abhishek’s entry and projection as the youth face of the party caused enough heartburn. Even though it is not clearly spelt out, the youth wing is seen as a springboard for successors. Remember Congress’ Sanjay Gandhi who too made his debut through the Indian Youth Congress and later rose to be a de facto Prime Minister.
While Abhishek could not emulate Sanjay’s heft and style, he sure did his political rise. After Suvendu Adhikari quit the TMC, he had remarked that he “climbed the stairs” to reach where he was politically and had “not taken a lift”. The obvious reference: Abhishek Banerjee.
For record, Mamata Banerjee created a new platform for her nephew: All India Trinamool Yuva, thus undermining Adhikari as TMC youth wing chief. Abhishek is Mamata Banerjee’s brother Amit’s son.
An MBA, from the controversial IIPM headed by Arindam Chaudhary, Abhishek’s lavish wedding was in stark contrast to his aunt’s hawai chappal austerity. For the record, IIPM is defunct amid allegations of fraud. As for Mamata Banerjee, her personal style is characterized by a jhola, cotton bag and trademark hawai or rubber chappals.
In 2015, when Mamata Banerjee shifted all her belongings, including her treadmill, to her nephew’s residence in New Delhi, it signalled that her bloodline will carry forward her political legacy. That perhaps heralded the advent of Abhishek being a clear number two in the party.
For someone who was labelled as “tolabaaz bahipo”, or extortionist nephew, Abhishek is in the eye of a storm for tainting his aunt’s clean image. His name has figured in a money laundering case linked to a coal scam and rackets that smuggled cow and sand. Last year Abhishek announced that he would take a “short hiatus” from the party’s politics. On her part, Mamata Banerjee inducted her loyalists to key posts after the Lok Sabha elections, completely ignoring Abhishek’s recommendations. The distancing was kind of complete. That Mamata Banerjee had to remind her party cadres about her authority substantiates this. It was in December last year that Mamata took the unprecedented step of saying: “I am still there. I am the final word”.
Irrespective of the fate of the likes of Akash and Abhishek or the whims of Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee, there is a larger issue of nepotism: one that has spread its tentacles across political parties, including national parties like the Congress and the ruling BJP.
The Congress, it is well known, is gripped by the son syndrome, so to speak. Party patriarch Sonia Gandhi would do what it takes to push ahead Rahul Gandhi, irrespective of his capability or lack of it to steer either the party or the INDIA grouping. The mess that he has made of both is out there for everyone to see. Had it not been for Rahul Gandhi and his idiosyncrasies, the alliance would not have lost the advantage it had accrued in the Lok Sabha elections last year.
For the record, the INDIA coalition bagged 234 seats: six short of BJP’s individual tally of 240 seats. It was no mean feat, yet one that the alliance failed to cash in on, thanks to Congress’ flip flop on partnerships in the state elections that followed. The protagonist: Rahul Gandhi.
As for the BJP, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi has no family or nephews to push, there are many within the BJP who are guilty of nepotism. For starters, Union Minister Amit Shah’s son Jay’s meteoric rise from a businessman to Chairman of the International Cricket Council is there for everyone to see.
In other parties too, including the Samajwadi Party, its chief Akhilesh is a product of nepotism. Or Tejashwi Yadav, who served two terms as Bihar’s deputy chief minister.
Akhilesh Yadav is party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav’s son. His wife Dimple is an MP. Tejashwi Yadav is Lalu Prasad Yadav’s son. The Yadav senior has served as MLA, MP, Union Minister and Bihar’s chief minister. He was later convicted in a fodder scam and put behind bars.
Down south, the list is equally revealing. If the DMK is a family-run party in Tamil Nadu, in Andhra Pradesh, it is Chandrababu Naidu’s family that rules the roost. His son Nara Lokesh is a serving minister in the state ruled by his father.
So, what does this say about India’s politics and politicians? What does it say about nephews and aunts? Or about parents and their children? And more importantly what does it say about the quality of our politicians? Equally, is nepotism justified? Is it fair to deny the deserving and allow parachuting of those who boast of a bloodline? Should privilege outdo merit?
The answers are difficult to find: they are not written in black and white but shrouded in different shades of grey. Till that changes, if at all it does, we will have to learn to live with those who “take the lift” against those who have “climbed the stairs”, so to speak.
—The writer is an author, journalist and political commentator