Three out of 10 new Lok Sabha MPs are dynasts

If you believe dynasty is dead, you’ve been fooled.

Sample this:

• Anurag Thakur, the four-time winner from the Hamirpur Lok Sabha seat, is the son of former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal.
• Poonam Mahajan, who retained her Mumbai North Central seat, is the daughter of late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan.
• Varun Gandhi, who won from Pilibhit, is the son of Maneka Gandhi—the Women and Child Development minister in the 16th Lok Sabha.
• Former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje’s son Dushyant Singh won the election from Jhalawar-Baran.
• Pritam Munde, daughter of late BJP leader Gopinath Munde, won from Beed.

These are just five of the newly-elected 162 MPs who belong to political families; and they account for a record 30 per cent of the total strength of the Lower House, a Trivedi Centre for Political Data (Ashoka University) and CERI study found.

Out of the 2,189 candidates who contested the election, 389 were dynastic candidates. And guess what, there was a 12 percentage point difference between the contesting and the winning candidates.

Sure, some famous dynasts from the Congress and the other regional parties have bitten the dust, but the dynastic factor hasn’t really been done away with. If anything, this figure has increased.

Turns out the national parties fielded more dynastic candidates—277 in 856—than that chosen by several states parties. The difference was of 15 percentage points.

Among the large states, Punjab has the highest number of dynastic parliamentarians—twice the national average, or 62 per cent. 

It is followed by Bihar (43 per cent), Maharashtra (42 per cent), Karnataka (39 per cent), Tamil Nadu (37 per cent), Andhra Pradesh (36 per cent), Telangana (35 per cent), Odisha (33 per cent), and Rajasthan (32 per cent).

Also Read: End of dynastic politics in Bihar? Not really

Despite their president Rahul Gandhi’s loss from Amethi, Congress remains the most dynastic party—31 per cent of its candidates belong to a political family—among the national parties.

BJP is fast catching up with 22 per cent of dynast candidates. Now this might seem a bit odd given the saffron party’s relentless attack against other parties for giving seats to their relatives.

Data suggests that the CPI and the CPI (M) are the only parties that don’t bat for their relatives—less than 5 per cent of the candidates belonged to a political family. That they lie at the rock bottom, well, that’s another story.

Also, women candidates are more “dynastic” than male candidates.

It’s a good thing that parties are now giving tickets to more and more women. The problem, however, is that they still seem to believe that fielding a woman candidate constitutes risk—though they have a better strike rate than their male counterparts.

All women candidates fielded by the SP, the TDP, the DMK and the TRS belong to political families. In smaller parties, they also tend to be directly related to the party leader. RJD went a step further: all the three women candidates are wives of jailed party members.