Politics within families often keeps their members glued to some ideas, even some ideological beliefs. Togetherness is the cementing factor. But then there are those moments when families are split right down the middle as disagreements creep into the relationships of their members.
Observe the embarrassment into which the family of Bihar’s Lalu Prasad Yadav finds itself. Lalu’s party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), has had a good drubbing at the recent state elections. That is part of democracy. A party wins or loses, depending on public perceptions of it. That is natural.
But what is not so natural is the manner in which Lalu’s daughter Rohini Acharya, a young woman who followed her father and brothers into politics, publicly accused the family of subjecting her to ill-treatment, of course over politics. She then made the announcement that she was quitting politics and disowning her family.
That was quite a family spat reverberating across India. Rohini Acharya even suggestedthat she was beaten with slippers at the family home in Patna. Her parents, Lalu and Rabri Devi, apparently took no step to come to her defense. And, yes, the issue had to do with Rohini’s helping her father with one of her kidneys when he was in a bad state of health. Her brother Tejaswi alleged that she had been using that kidney donation to flaunt herself and stamp her own importance in politics. Rohini lost the election. Now she has volunteered to lose her family.
The episode is a reminder of some stories we have all lived through in the recent past. Maneka Gandhi, widow of Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay, did not quite have a comfortable relationship with her mother-in-law. Indeed, after Sanjay Gandhi perished in a plane crash -- he was doing stunts in a light aircraft over Delhi when things went beyond his control -- bitterness made its entry into the Gandhi household.
Maneka eventually made her exit from the residence but made sure that she stayed in politics. She linked up many years after Indira Gandhi’s assassination with the Bharatiya Janata Party and became a minister in the Modi government. Her son Varun too made his way to the BJP.
Of late, though Sonia Gandhi and her children Rahul and Priyanka have remained in the public eye as leading figures of the Congress, Maneka and Varun have quite been sidelined in politics. It has been a sad story for a family which has had its share of tragedy. Sanjay Gandhi’s death in 1980 was followed by Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and Rajiv Gandhi was murdered by an LTTE militant while campaigning for the 1991 general election. And in the years in which Narendra Modi’s BJP has dominated politics, the Gandhi family has struggled to keep its head above water.
In the United States, the Kennedys were once a political dynasty no one thought would recede into the backwaters of moving time. But all glory being fleeting, the magic of the Kennedy name was to fade through a number of unnatural deaths and unusual behaviour of the generation that came after John, Robert, and Edward. Of course, Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President Kennedy, has served as ambassador to Japan and Australia. But the rest of the clan retains only the bright memories of the past.
And then came the moment when Robert F Kennedy Jr, the son of Senator Robert F Kennedy (who was assassinated while campaigning for the Democratic party presidential nomination in 1968), began to spout strange ideas about Covid and vaccines which did not endear him to the other Kennedys. When President Trump nominated him for Secretary of Health and Human Resources, the other Kennedys did not appreciate the move. As a matter of fact, Caroline Kennedy appealed in vain to the Senate not to confirm her cousin as a member of the Trump administration.
Closer to home, the tragedy of the Bhutto family in Pakistan has affected the links between its members. Following Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s execution in 1979, relations between his wife Nusrat and daughter Benazir were to turn frosty, with both women trying to assert their leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party. At one point, Nusrat Bhutto was pushed aside by her ambitious daughter. But that was not all.
The Bhutto children began to develop differences after their father’s death, with Murtaza Bhutto, the elder of the Bhuttos’ two sons, leading his own breakaway faction of the People’s Party. Benazir and Murtaza turned into bitter rivals, both eager to claim the Bhutto legacy. Murtaza was murdered outside his home in Karachi in the mid-1990s, when Benazir was Pakistan’s PM.
Sibling rivalry was once the story in Sri Lanka, where Chandrika Kumaratunga and Anura Bandaranaike, children of SDRD and Sirimavo Bandaranaike, found themselves in different political parties. Chandrika has served as Sri Lanka’s President while Anura, despite holding significant positions in government, was quite unable to make his way to the top.
Turn your gaze on France, where Marine Le Pen, the formidable far-right politician, still expects to be president. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in his own right a powerful far-right politician, was soon upstaged by his daughter. When he made certain controversial comments, he was expelled by Marine Le Pen in 2015 from the National Front he had formed in 1972. The daughter was in the process of liberalizing, just a little, the party. She was not willing to have her plans derailed by her father.
Thus the tales of families coming apart by disputes over politics. It is all a reminder of old times when monarchies were riven by internal strife and eventually collapsed. In an era where royalty has been receding, certain families, ambitious individuals all, have not baulked at creating circumstances which have imperilled the future of their politics-driven clans.