6 min readFeb 15, 2026 06:27 AM IST
First published on: Feb 15, 2026 at 06:27 AM IST
When I read in this newspaper last week that the dictator of North Korea has decided to make his teenage daughter his official heir, it made me laugh. And cry a little for our beloved Bharat Mata. As someone who has campaigned relentlessly and aggressively against dynastic succession, I wondered if Indian politicians who have turned their constituencies and their parties into private estates were embarrassed when they read this news. Some of the shenanigans we have seen from Rahul Gandhi is a consequence of his having been brought up to believe ruling India was his birthright. Fear not, I have no wish to repeat what I said last week.
North Korea is widely considered the worst country in the world. It has been led by the Kim dynasty since it was created, and this family has presided over an evil empire. While the ill-fated citizens of North Korea are often starved of food to the point of living in famine conditions from time to time, the Kim dynasty has squandered what they believe to be their personal wealth on modern weapons, including the nuclear kind. If Kim Jong Un goes ahead with his succession plan and some courageous North Korean citizen tries to challenge him, he will die a terrible death in some unseen dungeon. Foreigners spend years in jail simply for travelling to the wrong country.
Remember the story of that 21-year-old American student Otto Warmbier? He was sentenced to fifteen years hard labour for removing a propaganda banner from a hotel wall. He hoped to take this home as a souvenir. A year after sentencing, when pressure from the United States government and public opinion caused his release, he was found in a coma caused by brain damage and died when he got home.
We should be happy that this sort of thing would never happen in our shining ‘mother of democracy’ but this does not mean that ‘aal is well’. We are led by a powerful prime minister who is seen by millions of Indians as a gift from God and someone who has made them ‘proud to be Hindu.’ So, they forgive him when he takes his own tips from the Kim dynasty and pastes his face on lampposts, bus stops, petrol pumps and newspapers. Often because they do not know that this exaltation of the ‘dear leader’ is a North Korean import. This imitation of the Kim family does Modi no good. But who dare tell him in his own party and the opposition leaders he faces are products of dynastic succession.
They might not have been teenagers when they were handed charge of a country as is happening now to Kim Jong Un’s daughter but mostly they remained jobless and waiting in the shadows till Daddy or Mummy decided it was time for them to enter politics. The damage this has done to Indian democracy is incalculable no matter what these princelings may say in their defence. Their main defence is that it is an Indian custom to take up your parents’ trade. True. But what is right for commerce is very wrong for public life.
A passion for public service is not something that comes down in the genes so, except for a handful, these heirs are unable to do more than manage the constituencies and political parties they inherit. Sometimes political inheritance comes from marriage as happened in Maharashtra some weeks ago when Ajit Pawar’s wife took his job as Deputy Chief Minister within forty-eight hours of her husband’s death in an air crash. We of the media are accustomed to this kind of thing and reported this succession as if it were normal. But when I listened to whispers on the ground, I discovered that ordinary Marathi voters did not approve. In the words of one man I spoke to, ‘They didn’t even wait for the thirteen days of mourning to end.’
What troubles me about electoral feudalism or feudal socialism as it was when the Gandhi dynasty reigned supreme under the guise of socialism is that it weakens the roots of democracy almost irreparably. This could be one reason why the Congress Party has proved so incapable of taking on Narendra Modi despite the many mistakes he has made. We are coming up for an election in West Bengal, and this brings back horrific memories for me of the last election in that state when the worst chapter of Covid unfolded while the Prime Minister and most of his senior ministers were trying to win Bengal.
When Modi came back and saw that hospitals had run out of oxygen, ventilators and medicine and there were long queues outside cremation grounds, he had the grace to apologise. And, then changed the subject by carrying out what he called the largest vaccination drive in history. The Congress Party complained that he had put his picture on vaccination certificates and on the boxes of vaccine that we donated to poorer countries but seemed unable to do more than complain.
Last week when there were attempts to throw Rahul Gandhi out of the Lok Sabha, I came upon more than one comment on ‘X’ that warned the BJP that this would go against them because he would be replaced by his sister who is a better parliamentarian. She is also cleverer. She defends dynastic succession by calling it ‘service.’ Self-service is more appropriate.
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