“Three Gandhis: And the prospect of a Congress version of double engine”, Open the magazine, February 27, 2026
“The three Gandhis—Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka—would make an interesting case study for Harvard Business School. Never before in India’s independent history have three members of a single nuclear family been concurrently members of Parliament. A nuclear family implies parents and their biological children. Indian politics has had multiple dynasts serving in Parliament at the same time: fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, nephews and nieces. But India has never had three members of a nuclear family (mother, son, and daughter) sitting in Parliament at the same time.
As the Harvard case study would discover, no other democracy has had such dynastic confluence in its principal national legislative body either. In India, the Yadavs of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the Abdullahs of J&K, and the Pawars of Maharashtra have populated state Assemblies with blood relatives—but never have Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha been host to a parent and two biological children. In this, the three Gandhis are unique.
Rahul was a late entrant into electoral politics. He was 34 when he inherited his father Rajiv’s Amethi seat in 2004. Rajiv himself was a reluctant politician. Mother Indira Gandhi persuaded him to take brother Sanjay Gandhi’s place in Amethi in 1981, a year after Sanjay’s death in a crash of the private plane he was piloting……”
Read full article at openthemagazine.com
