THOSE Pakistanis who think beyond the caricature of India as a scheming bully out to swallow us whole will have keenly followed the recently concluded elections in five states of that country, including the huge and extremely influential Uttar Pradesh (UP).

The elections were touted as Rahul Gandhi’s christening as the next leader of the Congress Party. That the party and its new star have emerged from the exercise battered, bruised and comprehensively defeated signals the latest mini-crisis for both the powerful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the party with which it is so closely identified.

Congress ceased to occupy a truly dominant role in the Indian polity as long ago as the 1970s when Rahul’s grandmother Indira was the party’s undisputed leader. It was Nehru’s ambitious daughter who imposed the infamous emergency that transformed India’s political landscape and definitively banished Congress hegemony.

Congress remains India’s most visible political force, with the Nehru-Gandhi clan still its heart and soul. Yet Indian political life has changed, and will continue to do so in the years and decades to come. It is no longer enough to simply invoke the proud Nehruvian legacy and expect that an adoring public will keep voting grandsons and granddaughters back into office.

This is an important, if banal, fact. It also raises questions about one of the most enduring themes in scholarship on South Asian societies, namely that dynasties dominate politics. Nehru-Gandhi in India, Bhutto in Pakistan, and Mujib-Hasina in Bangladesh are only the most prominent names that come to mind. A detailed investigation into who holds public office in many of the region’s states confirms that many a son, daughter, brother, sister, husband or wife has assumed a position of power and influence immediately or soon after their kin has vacated the proverbial throne.

So what is the more accurate depiction of reality? Are hereditary sources of power still as enduring as they ever were or have the rules of the game changed definitively? The short answer is that historical change is not to be measured in terms of discrete breaks from one system or pattern to the next. Yes, clans and kinship groups with a history of power and influence will not just disappear one day to be displaced by impersonal representatives of the public interest, but it is also becoming increasingly clear that the stereotype of ordinary citizen-subjects remaining perennially subservient to certain individuals or families is also very misleading.

The trajectory of change in each polity is, of course, unique. So it would appear reasonable to argue that Indians — including those who are victims of generations of systematic exploitation — are more likely to be able to exercise political choice than Pakistanis, on account of the fact that an uninterrupted democratic process has ensured more political freedoms.

Having said this, meaningful political choice remains a pipe dream as long as class, caste, gender and other structures remain intact. In other words, India’s poor are able to exercise only limited political choice in the face of deeply rooted social hierarchies. They are still likely to vote a powerful patron into office not on the basis of the latter’s policy commitments but because a patron will mediate with the thana, the katcheri and the vagaries of the capitalist market.

In this sense all South Asian polities are similar, and will continue to remain so until the structures that frame the wider practice of politics are overhauled. The point I want to assert, however, is that the Indian political experience is instructive for those armchair analysts in Pakistan who lament the dynastic trends in our political life. As already noted, such trends remain pronounced in Indian political life, but our neighbours are much further along in terms of reducing the influence of clans and dynasties in the political sphere, because the sustained exercise of political choice has been privileged as a key value within the polity.

If politics in Pakistan is to move beyond larger-than-life personalities, then it is necessary to recognise that change takes time and, arguably more importantly, continuity in the political process. The centrality of the Bhutto clan and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to Pakistani political life is not only to be explained as a cult of personality or the enduring ideology of roti, kapra aur makan. Just as important, if not more so, has been the military establishment’s refusal to tolerate an uninterrupted political process. Since the PPP has, more often than not, been perceived to suffer grievously at the establishment’s hands, the notion that the Bhutto clan and the PPP is the only genuinely anti-establishment political force in Pakistan has been reinforced.

In recent times the relatively pro-establishment historical posture of other parties has appeared to undergo some measure of change, and this has already had an impact on the practice and perception of politics in Pakistan, even if the trends are not irreversible. If even a couple of elected governments complete their terms — PPP-majority or otherwise — the change in practice and perception of politics might actually be institutionalised.

In particular dynasties and personalities will become less important, even if not entirely irrelevant. In any case, generations of families have played and will continue to play significant roles in the political life of many countries, which reflects the resilience of the ruling class rather than a society’s cultural proclivity. The most obvious and recent example is that of George W. Bush becoming the president of the US only eight years after his father vacated the White House.

It is important to flag another important point here, one that is almost always underspecified. Many positions of state power in Pakistan, India, or any other society for that matter, are not adjudicated upon by ordinary people. The permanent state apparatus — which includes the civil service, police, judiciary and the military — exercises more power, in this country at least, than elected governments have historically exercised.

Surely we should pay more attention to the highly exclusive and personalised manner in which power is concentrated within these unelected institutions of the state. The general, judge and secretary remains hard at work trying to maintain that their powerful dynasties remain unchecked. It is these dynasties of rule — amongst the most egregious legacies of colonialism — that remain the primary impediment to the exercise of real political choice.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.