"India's feudal mindset does not allow the people to break the dominance of the existing political parties. Families have hijacked the democracy that India had set out to be, and they have tried to establish monarchical dominion in the nation.
"The cognitive handicap has been fully exploited by the political families, which have made the political environment of India their private corporation. Independent India is a democracy where the people choose a government by the people, for the people and of the people. The makers of the constitution trusted the Indian citizens to vote for the right candidate who would, in turn, elect the appropriate prime minister. However, soon the political parties turned the public domain into a private battle with families vying for votes as market shares.
"The political parties were once constituted of statesmen and the elite who could think objectively for their country and run the government efficiently. However, soon the parties were taken over by one family member after another, and now it has become their private domain where no other deserving or undeserving candidate is allowed to step up as a candidate for heading the government at the level of a state or the nation. Democracy lies in shambles as the government has suddenly transformed into a government by the family. In the blind faith and trust that we put in the families (fiefdoms and kingdoms), India was prepared to accept the notion that son of a ruler is a ruler".
The opinion and conviction against feudalistic mindset has developed over a period of time though it peaked when we saw the destruction of our institutions in the past ten years. The most painful was that the Prime Minister's Office was relegated to being an information centre with limited ability to act or contribute. As The Economist has said in one famous article, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a Gandhi family retainer. People wouldn't have liked it because it was probably an abject reflection of the reality. To say the least, the family took away in many ways one's pride of being an Indian.
