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The unwed neta: A top defining factor of polls

Given how closely Indian life is bound to family, the unrelenting pressure on young people to marry, and the industry that orchestrates 10 million weddings a year, it is remarkable that the 2019 election battle will be decided largely by single leaders.

This represents one of the most dramatic changes in India’s political landscape.

In the late 1980s, not one of India’s 20 largest states was governed by a single chief minister. By last year that number had risen to eight. Today six chief ministers and many more ex-chief ministers are single, and this loose axis of the unattached will play a decisive role in building the alliances that will determine whether Narendra Modi wins a second term.

Modi has of course built his career on ridiculing the rival Congress and its reigning dynasty, positioning himself as self-made and unattached – the polar opposite of the Gandhis. Yet the Gandhis are now headed by Rahul, who may have outgrown his reputation as a single man about town, but is still unmarried.

This battle of the unwed is not just happenstance. Single leaders are rising in part on disgust with money politics. Just to compete in a country that provides no public funding for election campaigns, candidates have little choice but to raise money from private sources. This often means tapping the large underground economy and turning the campaign into a family business, entrusting the cash to relatives who won’t rat them out.

The more cash flows under the table, the more gets diverted into private pockets, stoking public distrust. Respect for family empires now duels in the Indian mind with suspicion of what grasping relatives may be stealing. This opens the door to single politicians, who present themselves as free agents, committed only to public service, with no sons or daughters to empower or enrich.

The image of a public servant married only to the job seems to have an increasingly strong appeal to voters frustrated by politicians who promise but don’t deliver, and an overburdened, understaffed state bureaucracy. Single leaders are now a powerful countervailing force to the dynasties that run like veins not only through Congress but the BJP and every major party outside the communists.

The long dominance of married politicians was perfectly natural. Hinduism’s central gods are the perfect couple, husband and wife, Ram and Sita, and many people still deeply respect hereditary succession. But since the 1980s, with Congress losing ground to both the BJP and the regional parties, that grip has been easing.

The cult that once engulfed the Gandhis nationally is now largely confined to the Congress party, where high officers still orbit like loyal planets around the founding family. Beneath the Gandhis, Congress remains an island of married couples: not one of its current state chief ministers is single.

The BJP currently accounts for half of the unmarried chief ministers, including Manohar Lal Khattar of Haryana, Sarbananda Sonowal of Assam, and Yogi Adityanath of Uttar Pradesh. One of the BJP’s first single chief ministers was Modi, who in the 2012 Gujarat election was telling voters, “Your money is safe with me because I have no son, no daughter, no brother, no sister.” Distancing himself from the corruption associated with political families, he insisted that “my family is the six crore people of Gujarat.” Today, Modi pitches much the same point to all of India.

The idea that singlehood and purity are intimately linked springs at least in part from the RSS. Expected to devote themselves to spreading Hindutva, most high RSS officials and pracharaks are bachelors, and some take a lifetime oath of celibacy. On a 2009 visit to the austere Nagpur headquarters of the RSS, where the mood is monastic with militant accents, and cadres dress in regulation uniforms, one of the women in my election group of travellers asked RSS spokesman MG Vaidya, who was in his eighties, “How do so many of your people manage to stay single all their lives?” He blushed, then mumbled a hard-to-discern answer about “commitment to the cause.”

Many top BJP leaders started out as RSS pracharaks. And some of the more conservative ones consider abstention a badge of purity. Yogi Adityanath is not from the RSS but when I met with him at his Gorakhnath Mutt in 2017 he too spoke of his ascetic and celibate lifestyle as a guarantee that he poses no risk of dynastic corruption.

The BJP was not however the first to promote single leaders, regional parties were. One of the earliest was Jayalalithaa, the late chief minister of Tamil Nadu, who assumed office in 1991. As an ex-film star lifted to power in part by rabid Tamil movie fans, Jayalalithaa’s roots were far removed from the Hindu ascetism of the BJP. Yet she shared with leaders like Modi the image of the single ‘supremo’, an all-powerful party boss devoted completely to politics and to defending her constituents.

Many regional parties formed behind a strong personality like Jayalalithaa, and like her many have never been married. Several are critical players in the 2019 election: chief ministers Mamata Banerjee of Bengal, Naveen Patnaik of Odisha and former chief minister Mayawati of Uttar Pradesh.

Not all of them play up their singlehood, but their supporters know their personal stories. At a 2017 rally for Mayawati in Jaunpur, 50,000 supporters waited three hours for Mayawati in 38 degree heat, screaming her name when she landed, and speaking of her as a hero who had refused to marry so she could devote herself to championing fellow Dalits. None of these voters begrudged Mayawati her diamonds, even if her extravagances undermine the notion that singlehood is a sign of self-denial.

Some solo chief ministers come closer to fulfilling that promise. Nitish Kumar, who lost his wife shortly after taking over as chief minister of Bihar, has made his name by bringing law, order and development to impoverished Bihar. Unlike many Indian politicians he shows no sign of preparing to pass on his power to his offspring, indeed he never mentions his deceased wife or their son in public. Unlike Mayawati – who spent millions turning her chief ministerial compound into a pink sandstone palace, dotted with statues and wall carvings of herself – Kumar left his official residence much as he found it.

Another possible reason some leaders remain single is that Indian politics respects no distinction between office and home. I have often met with politicians not only inside their houses, with courtiers and children traipsing in and out, but in their bedrooms. With populations growing and media demands rising, it’s also increasingly difficult for anyone to juggle a political career and family.

No chief minister exudes an intense, no-time-for-kids political passion more than Banerjee. In 2016 I saw her begin a speech in Kolkata with a head on response to the chit fund scam allegations, saying her only income comes from royalties on her 65 books, with not “a single paisa” from the government. “I pay for my own tea,” she told the crowd.

Supporters lapped it up, convinced that this single woman, a published poet in a plain white sari and simple rubber slippers, could not be as corrupt as her accusers claimed. My companions and I were struck to find that she was still living in her ancestral home in the Kolkata neighbourhood of Kalighat, its dilapidated tile roof and rotting bamboo beams offering public testimony to the money not spent on renovations.

As the election approaches it has become increasingly clear that Modi’s fate depends in large part on how effectively Congress and regional parties ally to stop him, but the single versus married fault line has been overlooked. No one can match Modi’s reputation as a committed and can-do figure better than the single chief ministers. Add in Mayawati, who has already joined in an anti-Modi alliance in UP, and unattached leaders could be decisive in battles for more than a third of the Lok Sabha seats.

Further, when pollsters ask the question: who should be the next prime minister, Modi, Rahul, Mamata and Mayawati top the list, accounting for 85% of all the responses. It is hard to think of any other country where single leaders so dominate the political scene. Some day we may look back and remember the 2019 Lok Sabha poll as the election of the single supremos.

The writer is an author and global investor. Views expressed are personal.

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