One failed, the other won't take off:Jaitley on Gandhis

Projecting the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as a battle between dynasty and democracy, senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley debunked Priyanka Gandhi's entry into the politics.

Referring to her brother and Congress chief Rahul Gandhi's political career and her debut, the finance minister said: "One failed. The other won't take-off".

Without naming either of them, Jaitley, in a blog, talked at length about the internal fight in political dynasties in Haryana, Bihar and Tamil Nadu and noted that the Congress believes that two owners are better than one.

"Will Confucius be proved right and history record that one eventually prevailed over the other or will it be otherwise? One failed. The other won’t take-off," the Union Minister said in the blog, in which he asked where power-sharing between successor dynasts takes place. Who is the ultimate emperor, he asked.

To buttress his point, he said state like Haryana, with the Indian National Lok Dal; Bihar, with the RJD; or Tamil Nadu, with the DMK have all witnessed the battle of brothers, while in Uttar Pradesh, with the Samajwadi Party, the fight was between father and son.

He said Andhra Pradesh is witnessing a battle of sons-in-law, referring to the TDP, while in Karnataka, there is an experiment of sons sharing the state.

He also alluded to the family fight within NCP, between Sharad Pawar’s nephew Ajit Pawar and daughter Supriya Sule, saying initial ripples are being formed in Maharashtra.

The finance minister said all these parties have ganged up against BJP in the Lok Sabha polls.

The Congress, however, was the prime target of the blog, and he slammed former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru for "sowing the seeds" to convert India into a dynastic democracy by propping up his daughter Indira Gandhi as his successor.

This tradition, he said, was imbibed by many regional parties that spring from specific families.

Talking about how power moved in the Nehru-Gandhi clan from Jawaharlal to Indira to Sanjay to Rajiv to Sonia to Rahul, Jaitley said, "generation after generation, the Congress Party’s leadership berth is reserved for a member of the preferred family. When the Party is now in doldrums, another member of the family has entered the scene."

Referring to the stint of former prime minister Narasimha Rao, who had a run-in with Sonia Gandhi, he said, "Congress tried to remove itself from the shackles of a dynasty for a brief period after the unfortunate assassination of Rajiv Gandhi but could not get out of its clutches for long," he said.

The Union minister said the impact of this on politics, policy and governance is indeed adverse, as many of these parties are ill-equipped at governance.

Jaitley argued that in 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the acceptance of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister was also on account of a "popular desire to get rid of dynasties”, a trend he believes will continue in the 2019 elections as "Prime Minister Modi and aspirational India will together demolish the concept of families."