Indian voters like dynasties, if not Gandhi: Poll

46 percent of voters say they preferred politicians who hail from dynasties.

WASHINGTON: Indian voters are largely comfortable with electing dynastic candidates despite dire predictions in upcoming polls for Rahul Gandhi, scion of the country's most celebrated political family, a survey said Tuesday.

A poll released by the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace confirmed recent surveys pointing to a strong showing by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after a decade of rule by Gandhi's Congress Party.

Gandhi, 43, whose father, grandmother and great-grandfather were all prime ministers, is the candidate from the center-left Congress Party in elections starting on April 7, going against the BJP's Narendra Modi, the son of a tea-stall owner.

But the poll did not support suggestions that Indians have rejected hereditary candidates. Instead, 46 percent of voters said they preferred politicians who hail from dynasties.

"What we found was kind of shocking," said Milan Vaishnav, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment's South Asia program.

"Nearly one in two Indians say, if I had a choice, I would prefer to vote for a candidate who has a family background," he said.

The vast majority of voters who preferred dynasties said they thought such candidates would be more adept or likely to succeed, with only 15 percent saying that their main motivation was an expectation of patronage.

Twenty-nine percent of Indian lawmakers elected in the last election in 2009 succeeded family members or have relatives also serving in parliament, a figure that rose by nine percentage points from the previous vote in 2004, Vaishnav said.

The survey, conducted with the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Advanced Study of India, took opinions from 65,000 households as part of a project that will examine changing trends.

When asked about voting preferences in late 2013, 31 percent sided with the BJP-led alliance and 23 preferred the Congress-led coalition, in what would amount to a reversal of fortunes since the last election.

The survey showed the BJP gaining ground in the Hindi-speaking northern heartland of India and among rural voters, despite attempts by Congress to appeal to the poor.

The Congress-led coalition lost ground among a wide range of voters but retained a strong advantage among the Muslim minority.

Modi led the western state of Gujarat during 2002 religious riots in which more than 1,000 people were killed, mostly Muslims, although legal inquiries cleared him of personal wrongdoing.