Friendly fire: How family feuds shape India’s ‘dynastic’ political parties

Political dynasties are omnipresent in Indian politics. “Dynasts” turn up in parties across the ideological spectrum, at every level of political contestation and in practically every state. Yet, despite their ubiquity, the critique of dynastic politics has become a potent rhetorical weapon used by some parties against others.

During the campaign for the Bihar assembly elections, the ruling BJP-Janata Dal United alliance, its allies, and Prashant Kishor’s Jan Swaraj left no stone unturned in dismissing their principal challenger, the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Tejashwi Yadav, as representing a “monarchist mindset” and running a “family company.” These attacks came despite the presence of Chirag Paswan – a political “dynast” himself – in the BJP’s alliance.

Conventional wisdom about Indian politics tends to lump all dynastic politicians in the same bucket, and to assume that the heirs of prominent leaders are simply placed on the throne without internal contestation. A closer examination, however, turns up two separate elements of dynastic politics – elected representatives and party leaders who belong to established political families, and parties that are led and controlled by one political family – each of which are driven by different factors.

While the latter are often critiqued as moribund political units beholden to a single family with selfish interests that are less responsive to the electorate’s needs, a number of these dynasty-led parties – MK Stalin’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, and Tejashwi Yadav’s RJD – have achieved success in recent years. Understanding why requires going beyond the simplistic narrative of dynastic politics to examine the context in which these parties function and, in some cases, the political resilience of the dynasts involved when faced with intra-dynastic competition.

Popularity of dynastic politics

The structural persistence of dynastic leaders and elected representatives across Indian political parties, whether national or regional, has been put down to a number of key factors: name recognition, economic and socio-cultural resources, and deep-rooted political networks that are perceived as advantages for dynastic candidates to fight elections more successfully than non-dynastic candidates.

As Gilles Verniers and Christophe Jaffrelot observed, “parties are also risk-averse and seek to mitigate electoral risk by picking candidates among tried and tested families”. Moreover, dynastic candidates with established and long-term associations with the party leadership find it easier to get party nominations to win elections. Such leaders ensure “self-perpetuation of power” within the party and use their proximity to party leadership to seek party nominations for their family members. On the other side of the ballot, voters have regularly rewarded dynastic politicians, and at least one survey revealed a voter belief that such candidates are “better at politics because it is their family profession”.

However, the phenomenon of dynasty-led parties is quite different. There are several political parties in India whose most prominent leadership face comes from a single political family across generations, ranging from the Congress led by the Nehru-Gandhis, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam previously led by former chief minister M Karunanidhi and now his son, MK Stalin, the National Conference led by the Abdullah family over three generations, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha led by the Soren family, the Nationalist Congress Party led by the Pawars amongst many other family-based parties.

In a paper for the Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, I propose two different categories for dynasty-led parties: those that are “dynastic-by-practice”, meaning they were not founded as vehicles for a political family but have ended up that way, such as the Congress and the DMK; and those that are “dynastic-by-design,” which are structured for dynastic control from their inception, like the RJD, Samajwadi Party and the National Conference, among others.

While the conditions that lead to “dynasticism” in each of these categories are distinct, once they have become “dynastic,” these parties tend to exhibit a few oft-criticised characteristics: limited accountability, a lack of inner-party democracy, the absence of an ideological lynchpin, and inadequate or denuded institutional counter-weights.

While all Indian political parties have extremely centralised decision-making structures, especially with regard to leadership choices, once dynasticism has set in, it results in a historical path dependence that makes it extremely difficult for the party to deviate from its reliance on the “first family”. Due, in part, to the lack of an ideological lynchpin or institutional checks and balances, support to the family is seen as the best way to protect the party against intense factional fights – entrenching dynastic succession. As the family comes to personify the party name, its resources, and its political capital, it becomes inextricably linked to the fate of the party.

Intra-dynastic competition

Under what circumstances might leaders in a dynasty-led party face competition and accountability challenges? Most political parties led by a single political dynasty seldom see leadership challenges from outside the “first family,” even following poor electoral results or in the face of political decline. The Shiv Sena in Maharashtra is the rare exception in recent times of a party in which dynastic control was successfully challenged by a leader – in this case Eknath Shinde – from outside the political dynasty.

Competition, however, may come from within the family. Over the last two decades, many leaders in dynasty-led parties have faced challenges to their leadership position from other members of the family, triggering intra-dynastic competition. Given that each of the competitors in these cases hails from the same political family, they often have equally compelling claims to leadership.

For example, Stalin has faced a challenge from his brother MK Alagiri for leadership of the party; Tejashwi Yadav had to withstand resistance from his brother Tej Pratap Yadav; internal competition within the Pawar family saw the Nationalist Congress Party split into two; and the Samajwadi Party saw a succession battle between Akhilesh Yadav and his uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav.

Such intra-dynastic competition for party leadership positions acts as pressure on the incumbent dynastic leadership to perform electorally and legitimise their leadership position over other rebel relatives in the party. There is a possibility that in the face of such intra-dynastic resistance, dynasts who cannot perform well in keeping the party together or making it win elections might lose the pole position to another assertive family member within the party.

The example of the Paswan family feud between Lok Janshakti Party founder Ram Vilas Paswan’s brother Pashupati Kumar and Paswan’s son Chirag is a case in point. In 2021, sensing Chirag Paswan’s political vulnerability after Ram Vilas Paswan’s death, Pashupati staged a coup ousting Chirag Paswan from all key party positions and claiming a cabinet berth in the Union government.

Chirag Paswan was caught off-guard and found himself “left in a political wilderness” with only a faction of the original party. But in the 2024 national elections, it was Chirag Paswan’s faction that won all five seats it contested from Bihar, cementing his effort to be seen as the real heir to Ram Vilas Paswan’s political legacy.

It would, therefore, be erroneous to make the absolutist claim that dynastic parties in India do not face any credible leadership challenges, as a number of leaders from political families have had to confront strong intra-dynastic competition. Numerous instances show that the dynastic successors who received support from the founding or supreme leader, were able to take control of the party resources and win the trust of the party cadres and functionaries, allowing them to fend off rebel relatives, often elders, to assert leadership positions within the party. Other examples include Akhilesh Yadav and Tejashwi Yadav.

Intra-dynastic competition offers no guarantee that the leader who emerges on the other end will be electorally successful. Nor is it the only path for dynastic parties to develop the resources to succeed electorally. Other dynasty-led parties like the National Conference, which have not faced such intra-dynastic competition, have managed to win electoral contests in recent years. However, intra-dynastic competition in some dynastic parties reveals that their leadership are not always immune to internal challenges, rebellions, and accountability demands.

As discussed above, the differences between dynastic representation and parties led by a single political family, the distinct contexts of dynastic-by-practice and dynastic-by-design parties, and the potential for intra-dynastic leadership challenges all complicate the simplistic understanding of India’s dynastic politics. At a time when a number of family-led parties in India are at or have crossed the threshold of generational change, it is worth unpacking these elements to better understand the context and circumstances of dynastic politics in India.

Ambar Kumar Ghosh is a political analyst based in Kolkata working on political leadership, dynastic politics and political and governance institutions in India. He is a Non-resident Young Researchers’ Network (YRN) Fellow with European Partnership for Democracy, Brussels.

The article was first published in India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.