Mumbai: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has had a similar number of ‘dynasts’ amongst its elected parliamentarians over the past two decades as the Indian National Congress (Congress), shows our analysis of a new dataset containing the biographical profiles of all 4,807 parliamentarians since India’s first parliament in 1952.
Since 1999, the Congress has had 36 dynastic MPs elected to the Lok Sabha, with the BJP not far behind with 31. In 1999, the beginning of the 13th Lok Sabha, 8% of Congress members of parliament (MPs) were either descended from or married to former MPs, only slightly ahead of the 6% among the BJP. The most similar density of dynastic politicians was in 2009 when the Congress and BJP had 11% and 12% dynasts elected, respectively.
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