Surely, it is the result that matters?

Is the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty responsible for poverty in India? An article seeks to explore the damage this one family has done to India. Nehru may perhaps be forgiven because he became prime minister just after World War II, before which the world was completely different. India had been under occupation for nigh on 1000 years, first by the Moguls and then by the British. The October Revolution in Russia had established the first communist state in the world, with the lofty vision of economic equality for everyone. The Great Depression of 1929 may have reduced confidence in the capitalist model of the US. Gandhi's glorification of poverty has been used as an example for us, though not for politicians and civil servants, who enjoy luxuries that even Americans might envy. But by the time Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1966 it would have been apparent that the Soviet model was not working, especially since we had to borrow $5 billion from the IMF in 1982. Certainly, by the time Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister in 1984 he would have seen the Soviet Union was not prospering, the East Asian economies of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea were booming and China was embarking on aggressive capitalism, under the guise of 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics'. On 21 May 1991, the day Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, a chartered plane carried the first tranche of gold to London, which was in lieu of $2.2 billion from the IMF to avoid bankruptcy. The economy spurted when PV Narasimha Rao and then Atal Bihari Vajpayee opened parts of the economy to foreign competition. But the Congress gained power in 2004 and again proceeded on a policy of handouts, prescribed by the National Advisory Council, presided over by Ms Sonia Gandhi, who has no knowledge of economics, and consisting of a collection of activists, who prosper from NGOs, and retired bureaucrats, glad for a sinecure. The article says," In the fever swamps of the far right, many people believe that the Nehru-Gandhis deliberately kept India backward in order to nurture a poor and ignorant vote bank. But you need not buy into crackpot theories to make a more prosaic point. Between them, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, who ruled India for 37 of its first 42 years of Independence, presided over one of Asia's great economic flops." Sonia Gandhi took us back a decade. It is not just policies. The Family rules by patronage, which encourages the most servile sycophancy, which leads to poisonous crony capitalism. Thus Ms Sonia Gandhi appointed an unelected Prime Minister who shamelessly observed a destruction of the economy and massive scams, despite boasting of a D Phil in Economics from Oxford. The claim to power by inheritance of this Family has created other clones who follow their example of entitlements, mostly through criminal means. They may not desire poverty, but create it anyhow.