Oh, dear!
You do have a happy habit of accidentally bumping into me with your elbow and getting me into the swimming pool.
I really would have liked to have avoided this question, as it is itself worth a PhD thesis. But perhaps it will make sense if I leave out all adjectives and adverbs and stick to the point. Let me try - meanwhile, don't hold your breath!
There are lots of people who wish that the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty should be got rid of. You find yourself in the company of Ram Manohar Lohia, a socialist and an iconoclast, who spent much of his political career pointing out the defects of the Nehru-Gandhis, to the point where he seemed like an bore to most people perusing their daily papers. For me, it is a matter for the voter, not for the chatterati, the chattering classes, as our brand of middle-class, westernised intellectuals tend to be grouped with, along with others who are far more affluent than middle-class, not westernised at all, and not intellectual, unless reading the papers and listening to the ubiquitous news programmes is a sign of intellect; many would disagree sharply. As long as the voter continues to believe in them as being, in some way, above the contempt that all Indians have for politicians.
Before going further, a reality check: you are aware that these 'Gandhis' have nothing to do with Mohandas Karamchand 'Mahatma' Gandhi, of course. That Gandhi was a Gujarati born to the minister of a tiny principality in the extreme west; these Gandhis are Gandhis because their mother-in-law/ grandmother married a handsome young Gujarati Congressman against her father's wishes. The political history starts with an Allahabad barrister named Motilal Nehru (= Precious as a pearl + lives on the banks of a canal, originally a Kashmiri brahmin), whose father was a less-than-distinguished police kotwal, or chief of a police station. Motilal rose from this origin to become a wealthy man, sent his son to Harrow, then to Trinity College, Cambridge, on to the bar and back to India, complete with an affinity for left wing politics of the Bloomsbury Set sort, and an accent which clearly informed those who mattered that he mattered. Jawaharlal was important because the common people saw him as the approachable, not even partially insane, welcome successor specially chosen by Gandhi (the other, older one) to be Gandhi's successor. Gandhi himself could seem unapproachable especially when he was doing his thing, some of them quite eccentric things. So Jawaharlal was the chosen son, and Indians treated him like that, in spite of being irritated by him, and finally fed up with him, especially after the mess he made of Chinese relations and of the military. When he died, a proper Congressman took over. Lal Bahadur Shastri (Beloved Brave One, the Brahmin) had nothing to do with the family. Under him, and his self-effacing ways, the powerful hierarchy of the Congress became very strong. Too strong to think straight, these 'bosses' picked on Nehru's shy, equally unassuming daughter, Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, someone, they thought, who could be manipulated and told what to do. Probably the dumbest assessment of the century. When she was killed by her own disaffected security guard, after the clean-up of the Sikh Golden Temple of terrorists sheltering inside, Congressmen panicked, and put her son in. That is when a succession started, and it was going to happen, because Indira herself had been grooming not that son, but the younger one, for succession. And then, of course, the precedent was there; when this initially unwilling young man had himself been assassinated by one of the earliest suicide bombers recorded, it was natural to turn to the widow, who knew nothing about politics and who seems to have regressed since then. She naturally faces a lot of resentment because of her foreign origin and her sentimental attachment to a very sleazy italian businessman.
My personal views? I would like to finish this note this afternoon, another seven hours from now, if it isn't too inconvenient.
Warm regards,
I saw that by my own eyes.
