Catch 'em Young

Indian politics must find ways to remove the deadwood. From the country’s point of view, nothing could be worse than elderly politicians with runaway ambitions refusing to walk away into the sunset.

More than twenty-five years ago, a Delhi publisher had an odd but telling complaint to make against politicians. He could as well have extended it to other professions without losing any force in the complaint.

The publisher approached a national politician for permission for his biography. The politician is no more. His name has no particular relevance to this piece though he did serve as prime minister for a short while.

Rather than feel flattered at the opportunity to be immortalized in print, the politician was horrified. If anything, he was cross with the poor publisher.

The politician’s point was simple. An honest biography whilst hurting his circle of friends would also kill his political career. It would be his epitaph. He was in his early sixties and had a long way to go.

The crux of the matter was this. The politician’s ambitions for prime ministry remained unfulfilled. It would happen some years later. From his perspective, therefore, he was entirely justified to refuse an early memoir or biography.

From the country’s point of view, nothing could be worse than elderly politicians with runaway ambitions refusing to walk away into the sunset. The case of L. K. Advani is well known. Yashwant Sinha recently insinuated that Prime Minister Narendra Modi thought everyone over seventy was “brain dead”. You couldn’t help suspect that someone was angling for Arun Jaitley’s job.

This writer has nothing against the elderly, being himself on the wrong side of the fifties. There have been, to boot, some smashing good prime ministers who were far from young. Take P. V. Narasimha Rao. When Rajiv Gandhi asked him to contest the 1991 Lok Sabha election, he showed Rajiv’s emissary his health file. But he rapidly recovered from his maladies to become a pugnacious prime minister. A. B. Vajpayee was never in top health for all the time he occupied the corner room in South Block. But he was a fine prime minister.

Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee are exceptions in more ways than one. Narasimha Rao was the first full-term non-Nehru-Gandhi prime minister from the Congress. He got his due after a long and fruitful innings. Vajpayee, for his part, was the first non-Congress prime minister to last a full term. He conceivably waited longer than Narasimha Rao to become prime minister. Even so, he was not ambitious. He also had talent.

The problem happens when ambition outpaces talent, and the youth lose out. What special talent did Advani display as home minister to be considered for prime ministry? Or Mulayam Singh Yadav in defence and Laloo Prasad in railways? M. Karunanidhi is no longer a sprightly young man, but his ambition to replace J. Jayalalitha remains intact. Shouldn’t Parkash Singh Badal have retired long ago? Between the father and son, they have ruined Punjab.

The stranglehold of the elderly does not restrict to politics. They dominate in academics with no worthwhile contributions and overwhelm public discourse parroting the same discredited things. They want forever to control educational institutions and be in positions of authority and will shamelessly beg favours of the regime in power. When denied or removed from privileged positions, they will strike back with all the mendacious intellectuality they can summon.

I, me, myself. That is the dominant narrative.

The trouble though is that many of the young, especially in politics, are just not good enough. Of the dynasts, this writer has found no one who makes the grade.

Everyone knows how pitiable Rahul Gandhi is. But Omar Abdullah and Akhilesh Yadav do no better. Udhav Thackeray sank his father’s legacy in Maharashtra. M. Stalin can never leave Karunanidhi’s long shadow. The late Madhavrao Scindia and his son are worlds apart.

Before long, India will have to resolve this conundrum: where the old don’t want to leave, and the young, especially in the political profession, are not talented to assume their mantle. As in everything, there are exceptions. But a way has to be found to promote the exceptional.

India is unlikely to have a prime minister as young as the late Rajiv Gandhi who was forty when he assumed office. Given his record, that is not such a loss. Youth can wait. India would have to settle for middle-aged prime ministers for the moment and someone as energetic as Narendra Modi quite blows away the age factor.

But in the long term, youth and talent have to be concurrently nurtured in the political and other fields, and politics is as good a place as any to start with, and perhaps altogether better. This process will, however, go nowhere in dynastic parties like the Congress, the Samajwadi Party, the Akali Dal, the Shiv Sena, the DMK, and so forth.

Only non-dynastic parties can aspire to the Western phenomenon and experience where the median age for political leadership has dropped. President Barack Obama scarcely is a dynast nor are several of the recent British prime ministers but they are all young and, within limits, talented. India has to remove the shackles of a geriatric polity and only parties like the BJP can show the way. Once politics grows younger, it will compel changes in other walks of life.