Remember Kishore Kumar’s song in 1971 film Kati Patang—“Shama kahe parwane se, pare chala jaa/meri tarah jal jayega, yahan nahin aa/woh nahin sunata, usko jal jaanaa hotaa hai….”?
Think of the Bharatiya Janata Party as shama, or a flame, and regional parties as parwanas, moths. Party’s chief strategist Amit Shah is not lyricist Anand Bakshi who would think of the flame scaring the moths away. That only happens in the world of romance. In Shah’s world, shama must entice the parwanas.
Jayant Chaudhary of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), an ally of the Samajwadi Party (SP), is ostensibly finding it difficult to resist the flame. “Dil jeet liya,” he posted on X after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Bharat Ratna for his grandfather and former PM Chaudhary Charan Singh. It doesn’t take much to win the heart of a leader whose party has been out of power for a decade.
Incidentally, in 1976, when the issue of ‘dual membership’ was being discussed in the context of the formation of the Janata Party and the affiliation of its members to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Charan Singh had said that Jan Sangh members should not be part of the Janata Party, as mentioned by union minister Bhupendra Yadav and Ila Patnaik in their book, The Rise of the BJP.
Like his grandfather, Chaudhary’s father Ajit Singh had dropped and made allies at the drop of a hat, much to their advantage. Charan Singh was part of every Congress-led government in Uttar Pradesh until he defected from the party to become the chief minister in the first non-Congress government in the state in 1967. Three years later, he became the CM again with the help of Indira Gandhi’s Congress (R). He took her help again in 1979 to become the Prime Minister.
In the meantime, he formed at least four parties—Bharatiya Kranti Dal, Janata Party, Janata Party (Secular), and Bharatiya Lok Dal. Ajit Singh served as a minister under four Prime Ministers—VP Singh, PV Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. Singh outdid his father when it came to forming new parties and alliances. He formed Lok dal (Ajit) in 1987 only to merge it with the Janata Party the next year. He joined the Janata Dal when it was formed through the merger of the Janata Party, HN Bahuguna faction of the Lok Dal, and the Jan Morcha. Singh then switched to the Congress and contested the 1996 Lok Sabha election. He quit the Congress the same year to form the Bharatiya Kisan Kamgar Party.
Three years later, in 1999, he formed the RLD that Chaudhary heads today. Look at the party’s alliance strategy since then: With BJP in the 2002 UP Assembly election, SP in 2004 Lok Sabha polls, BJP in 2009 Lok Sabha election, Congress in the 2012 UP Assembly and 2014 Lok Sabha polls, SP and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in 2019 Lok Sabha election, and SP in 2022 UP Assembly election.
If you feel dizzy trying to keep count of Charan Singh’s and Ajit Singh’s political somersaults, don’t blame yourself. It has always paid for the Chaudhary family of Uttar Pradesh.
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Family legacy & RLD’s challenges
Jayant Chaudhary’s grandfather was a mass leader who could oppose even Jawaharlal Nehru’s idea of Soviet-style cooperative joint farming. In 1959, during the Nagpur session of the All India Congress Committee, a resolution was passed recommending cooperative joint farming as future agrarian pattern. The produce was to be shared partly based on labour rendered and partly in proportion to the land pooled. Charan Singh gave a rousing speech against it.
In 1954, he wrote to Nehru suggesting that marrying outside one’s caste should be a qualification for gazetted jobs. He became a peasants’ icon for his role in the redemption of rural debts even before the Independence, zamindari abolition and land reforms, among many other things. An article in India Today’s January 1979 edition quoted a retired revenue officer who had heard Charan Singh warning the Jats: “If you vote for me because I am a Jat, go, dump your votes where you like.”
Ajit Singh obviously had big shoes to fill, but the legend of Charan Singh and the Mandal-Kamandal era in politics enabled him to stay afloat and make the best of it until the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. Every time I would meet him after that, two things always bothered him: the split in his Jat-Muslim vote bank and the increasingly transactional nature of voters. He would also rue the fact that no new leaders were emerging because of the high-command culture in parties and the personality cult, which made agitational politics on the ground—that propped up new leaders—outdated.
Jayant’s father was a leader seeking solutions to these new complexities in politics when he succumbed to covid in 2021. Where does it leave Jayant? He is caught between a rock and a hard place. Like his father, he has been trying to revive his party’s Jat-Muslim vote bank. If he goes with the BJP, he runs the risk of losing the Muslim vote for good. A large section of the Jats is already aligned with the BJP. The BJP would love to align with the RLD and gradually win over the Jats who currently support Jayant Chaudhary.
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Three generations rule
Jayant Chaudhary’s predicament may seem to conform with the corporate sector’s ‘three-generation rule’—something, as per the Harvard Business Review, that came from the 1980s study of manufacturing companies in Illinois. The study found that family businesses don’t survive beyond three generations. Only a third of family businesses made it through the second generation and only 13 per cent through the third.
With a master’s degree in accounting and finance from the London School of Economics, Chaudhary would know about the three-generation rule – shirtsleeves -to-shirtsleeves curse or as the Brazilian saying goes “rich father, noble son, poor grandson”. It may seem to apply to many other political dynasties in India—from the Nehru-Gandhi family to Thackerays, Pawars, Gowdas, Chautalas and Udayanidhis. It would worry many second-generation dynasts—Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, Chirag Paswan, Hemant Soren, Nara Lokesh, and Anupriya Patel, among many others.
Politicians such as Naveen Patnaik, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy and Conrad Sangma would console themselves with the fact that their fathers were in a different party, and so they should come in the category of first-generation political entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, leaders such as Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal, EK Palaniswami and Eknath Shinde would feel more secure and emboldened. So, are these second or third-generation dynasts and their parties/companies/businesses doomed to fail? Is that a good enough reason for leaders like Jayant Chaudhary to make the best of what’s on offer?
One doesn’t know. The BJP, however, seems to be convinced. In the past decade or so, we have seen the BJP attempting hostile takeovers of dynast-ruled parties’ by trying to buy out (or appropriate) their public shares (vote bank)—for instance, Jats from the RLD, extremely backward classes from the Janata Dal (United), Dalits from the BSP (though it’s not dynast-controlled yet), Vokkaligas from the JD(S), or even Yadavs from the SP and the Rashtriya Janata Dal. In some cases, the BJP has sought to buy out minority shareholders—like the Eknath Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena or the Ajit Pawar faction of the Nationalist Congress Party. These aggressive strategies are forcing many promoters to reach an agreement with the BJP to survive in the short term.
So, what are the options for second or third-generation political dynasts like Chaudhary? Many, suggest the 2021 Harvard Business Review article. “That perception (three-generation rule) could not be farther from the truth. On average the data suggest that family businesses last far longer than typical companies do,” it says.
Indian political dynasts may want to read the HBR article carefully: “Rather than being obsessed with hitting quarterly earnings targets, as public companies are, family businesses tend to think in terms of generations, which allows them to take actions that put them in a better position to endure the tough times.”
“At the heart of their success is a way of doing business that puts long-term survival above short-term profits…. Family ownership brings a competitive advantage in situations that demand resiliency rather than rapid growth,” it adds.
The problem with political dynasts in India is their desperation for short-term gratification—unlike the leaders of the BJP or RSS, who keep slogging for decades without fixing a timeframe for dividends. It’s this resilience that dynasts seem to lack.
DK Singh is ThePrint’s Political Editor. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
Yes, many dynastic regional partues are like parwana to shama BJP. But I feel that, this author is also a parwana to shama BJP or a fanboy of BJP, like a heroine completely enamoured towards the hero BJP.
whether the business of the family last longer or the the fact that same family doing some business. I mean business involved changed with generations but remained under the the same family name. I think every one in business or politics (family or public) think short term. Long term thinking is actually a retrospective fallacy. Public companies have multiple ownerships so as business involved changes most of the time company identity (Existence) changes. But The larger shareholders’ families of the public companies still remain rich (doing some other business) for generations just like family businesses.
The time has come for the end of cast identities with weakening villages and rapid urbanisation.