India, the world’s largest democracy, has at least 150 MPs who have inherited their seats from their parents.

A FEW days ago, M. Karunanidhi, president of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), anointed his third son M. K. Stalin as his successor - and immediately set off protests from M. K. Azhagiri, his second son who is also a minister in the Union Government.

Given his advancing years, Karunanidhi, 89, could be excused for wanting to settle the succession issue but Azhagiri appeared in no mood to oblige. He commented sarcastically that the DMK was not a mutt where the dying seer could name his successor.

Clearly, there was trouble ahead for DMK, a major Dravida group in Tamil Nadu, which has alternated in power with the rival All India Anna DMK of J. Jayalalithaa, currently chief minister of Tamil Nadu. Headstrong and pugnacious, Azhagiri seems determined to challenge his father’s wish to hand over the reins of the family-controlled DMK to Stalin. Even now, the party is divided between rival factions, with Azhagiri maintaining a firm grip on the party machine in Madurai, his parliamentary constituency, and other southern parts of the State.

On the other hand, Karunanidhi has been grooming Stalin as his political heir for decades. In his last stint as chief minister, he named Stalin as deputy chief minister in 2009. Stalin, as mayor of Chennai in 1996, had done a fairly decent job building flyovers, privatising garbage collection and revamping municipal schools, among others.

Unlike his elder brother, Stalin began his political journey when he was barely out of his teens. Born in 1953, the year Russian Communist czar Joseph Stalin died, he was named Stalin in keeping with the Tamil Nadu tradition of naming children after major political leaders. It also showed his father’s fondness for the Russian leader before his horrific misdeeds were revealed to the world. Though he went on to acquire a college degree, Stalin veered towards a political career after an indifferent stint as an actor in Tamil cinema and television.

What seemed to have firmed up his resolve to follow his father into politics was his detention during the Emergency in 1976 under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act. As a political detainee, he spent a year in prison. That launched him on a political career with the blessings of his father.

All this while, Azhagiri and his other two brothers stayed away from politics, one trying his hand at film acting but without much success and another became a businessman. It was in the mid-80s that Azhagiri started taking active interest in politics, forming his own group of loyal supporters.

As Stalin was being groomed by Karunanidhi to succeed him, he had a larger following among the DMK cadres. Cleverly, Karunanidhi had ousted anyone from the DMK who could be a potential challenger to Stalin. Most prominent among them was V. Gopalsamy, a fiery orator and a strong champion of the cause of the Sri Lankan Tamils. He was expelled in 1994, clearing the field for Stalin,

But Azhagiri wouldn’t accept his father’s wish. Following violent clashes between his and Stalin’s supporters, Karunanidhi banished him to Madurai, the temple town in southern Tamil Nadu, where he established a strong grip over the DMK organisation.

Anyone who challenged him was either expelled from the party or punished in different ways. Unlike Stalin, Azhagiri displayed a hot temper and brooked no opposition. He was feared while the party cadres seemed to respect Stalin.

Some years ago when a Tamil daily owned by Karunanidhi’s grand nephews, the Marans, published a survey indicating that 70% of the DMK cadres wanted Stalin to succeed his father against only two percent who wanted Azhagiri, the Madurai office of the newspaper was set on fire. Three newspaper employees died in that violent attack but Azhagiri escaped being indicted. Earlier, he had faced murder charges, but again nothing came of them.

How the succession battle within the Karunanidhi family will pan out remains to be seen, though most people believe that after the death of the patriarch, the DMK could split into rival groups, led by Stalin and Azhagiri respectively.

The succession battle is not peculiar to the DMK, of course. A few years ago, Shiv Sena, founded by Bal Thackeray in the 1960s in Mumbai to champion the cause of Maharashtrians, split into rival groups with the founder’s son, Uddhav, leading one and the latter’s cousin, Raj, another.

Ditto for the troubles of the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh a few years ago. Its founder, the late cinema star, N. T. Rama Rao, wanted to hand the party over to his newly-acquired wife, Lakshmiamma. However, his son-in-law, Chandrababu Naidu, grabbed control of the main faction, denying his stepmother-in-law a chance to exploit NTR’s political legacy. After NTR’s death, the faction led by his widow became defunct.

Similar troubles occur in almost all family-controlled groups. The Congress Party sanctified dynastic control with the fifth-generation of the Nehru-Gandhi family now at its helm. Barring the Bharatiya Janata Party and the two Communist parties, a majority of political groups are family-run.

Dynastic democracy sounds mutually contradictory but that is a South-Asian reality. The world’s largest democracy has at least 150 MPs who have inherited their seats from their parents. Likewise, in the State legislatures a large percentage of members belong to second and third generation political families. Maybe in time, the deepening of the democratic process would weaken the hold of political dynasties.

Until then, battles such as those between brothers Stalin and Azhagiri will continue to offer a soap opera-like political theatre to a bemused people.

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