The Princelings of India

Harish Tyagi/European Pressphoto Agency Congress Party general secretary Rahul Gandhi (left), Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India and Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi (right) waved to supporters during a public rally on Nov. 4 in Delhi.

DELHI - In July, Rahul Gandhi, general secretary of the Congress Party, announced: “I will play a more proactive role in the party and the government. The decision has been taken, the timing is up to my two bosses: the Congress president and the prime minister.” He is expected to be anointed as No. 2, just below Sonia Gandhi, his mother and the party's president, who is said to be ill, and lead the Congress Party in parliamentary elections in 2014.

Rahul hasn't yet been officially designated as party heir and he has not taken on any direct responsibility in the government. Still, all important decisions related to the Congress are now widely believed to bear his stamp. That his name wasn't on the list of new ministers announced in a cabinet reshuffle on Oct. 28 isn't a setback for him. Rather, it suggests that he preferred to avoid being too closely identified with a government that is suffering a serious credibility crisis.

On the day of the new ministers' swearing-in ceremony, the Mail Today newspaper reported, “When reporters told him that the reshuffle had his imprint, Rahul, who was chatting with Milind Deora, Sachin Pilot, RPN Singh, Jitendra Singh and Jyotiraditya Scindia, quipped: ‘I am talki ng with my imprints.'”

Rahul Gandhi has chosen to surround himself with loyal followers from a few powerful families. So much for the hype that has accompanied his rise to power since 2004 or the promise that he might usher in a new kind of politics. In the Congress Party, democracy is a dynastic affair.

Sachin Pilot, who will run the Corporate Affairs Ministry, is the son of Rajesh Pilot, a minister in the Congress government in the 1990s who was brought into politics by Rahul Gandhi's father, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Milind Deora, a junior minister of communications and information technology since 2011, is the son of Murli Deora, a minister for petroleum and natural gas until recently and a confidant of Rajiv Gandhi. Jyotiradtiya Scindia, who now holds the energy portfolio, is the son of Madhavrao Scindia, another confidant of Rajiv Gandhi and one of the most powerful members of the Congress Party until his death in an air crash in 2001.Scindia al so is heir to the Scindia dynasty, which once ruled a large swath of central India. Although royal titles and privileges have been abolished in India, members of such families enjoy residual prestige. The other two men with Rahul Gandhi at the swearing in were Jitendra Singh, from the royal family of Alwar in Rajasthan, and R.P.N. Singh, from the royal family of a small principality in Uttar Pradesh.

The lineage of Rahul Gandhi's entourage - as well as that of several other young beneficiaries in last week's reshuffle - suggests that nepotism still dominates the Congress Party despite a recent popular upsurge against corruption. In his book “India: A Portrait,” Patrick French observed that all members of the 15th Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament elected in 2009) under the age of 30, as well as more than two-thirds of the 66 members of Parliament under 40, had in effect inherited their seats. And 33 of the 38 youngest members got there “with the help of mu mmy-daddy.”

Even in his elective cabinet appointments, Rahul opted for the same dynastic approach. His own schedule, engagements and even much of his politics are devised by a team of young professionals headed by Kanishka Singh, his handpicked adviser - and the son of S.K. Singh, a foreign secretary under Rajiv Gandhi.

Hartosh Singh Bal is political editor of Open Magazine and co-author of “A Certain Ambiguity.''