India: a triumph for dynastic democracy?
If you've been worrying about Pakistan, perhaps you should spare a moment to contemplate the election in India, where the Congress party of Nehru and the Gandhis has defied predictions and won a handsome .
India is good at defying predictions, and it seems to have excelled itself this time. In the 60-plus years since independence, there have been countless forecasts that it was about to fall apart, under the pressure of religious, ethnic and caste differences. Yet time and again it has somehow survived - and over the past 20 or so years, it has prospered.
And I suspect that prosperity, coupled with education, may be why Congress did so well. In the cities, where millions of Indians now live in middle class comfort, and in the rural areas, where a farmers' income programme has provided a minimum standard of living for millions more people who previously lived in abject poverty, the party has delivered real benefits.
No one would claim that India is a perfect democracy. Corruption is rife, and serious tensions remain. Yet the avowedly secular and non-caste Congress party has triumphed, winning a rare second term for prime minister .
I first visited India in 1984, shortly before the assassination of the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, by two of her Sikh security guards. When I returned to the country after her death, I found Delhi in the midst of an anti-Sikh pogrom - as many as 3,000 may have been killed, and I still have vivid memories of visiting the city morgue where piles of bodies had been dumped in the courtyard.
I would not have predicted then that 25 years later one of the most admired politicians in the country, a man credited with guiding its economic miracle and steering it with a steady hand, would himself be a Sikh.
Yet behind Manmohan Singh are two powerful dynastic figures. The leader of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, Italian-born widow of Rajiv, son of Indira, who was himself assassinated by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber in 1991, plays a major role behind the scenes, as does her son Rahul, who is said to have been instrumental in the Congress party's successful campaign in the country's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh.
Manmohan Singh is now 76, and he may well hand over power during his next term of office. Who better to inherit than Rahul, son of Rajiv and Sonia, grandson of Indira, and great-grandson of Jawarhalal Nehru? He was just 14 when he stood beside his grandmother's funeral pyre, and even then he was being talked of as a future leader.
Can you have a dynastic democracy? Ask the Americans, who in their time have elected two Adams (John and and his son John Quincy), two Harrisons (William and his grandson Benjamin), two Roosevelts (Theodore and his cousin Franklin D), and two Bushes (George and his son George W). There are democratic dynasties elsewhere, of course - in Kenya, the sons of independence era leaders Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga are both major figures; in Bangladesh, the prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wased is the daughter of the country's first president, and her arch-rival Khaleda Zia is the widow of another ex-president; and in Argentina, wives have sometimes succeeded husbands into the presidential palace (Juan and Eva Peron, and Nestor and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner).
So maybe you can combine democracies and dynasties. And it may be, as the London-based economist Lord Desai , that Indian politics are heading for a sea-change after decades of weak and fractious government coalitions.
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