Politics in our times has inexorably been turning into a source of delight. There are all the issues we debate day after day, within the parameters of democracy as also beyond them. Our preoccupation with democracy remains strong, so deep-rooted that we are happy seeing it mesh in often with dynastic rule.
Perhaps we live in an age where democracy and dynasty have become intertwined. Perhaps democracy has lost itself in the bottomless pit of dynastic politics. Who knows?
You only have to observe the manner in which politics in Sri Lanka has passed into the eager hands of the Rajapaksa family. It was not very long ago -- was it? -- that with Mahinda Rajapaksa getting trounced by Maithripala Sirisena at the presidential elections, we believed that yet one more dynasty was biting the dust.
Not so, for our arithmetic began to go wrong when Sirisena, unhappy with Ranil Wickremesinghe, attempted to replace him with Mahinda Rajapaksa as prime minister. The move backfired. But observe! Rajapaksa is back as prime minister, courtesy of his younger sibling Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The younger Rajapaksa has been elected president, which is a sign that the dynasty is back in Colombo.
It is not that political dynasties are new to Sri Lanka. There have been the three Bandaranaikes earlier -- SDRD, Sirimavo, and Chandrika Kumaratunga. The difference between them and the Rajapaksas is the insatiable appetite for power which has always driven the latter clan. Add human rights, or denial of it, to the Rajapaksa siblings and what you have is a toxic mixture.
Dynasties of course are often not as brazen as it is in Colombo today, but yes, there is the tale of Benazir Bhutto and her spouse Asif Ali Zardari in Pakistan. In Bhutto’s first government, Zardari was neatly installed as minister for investment. And what he did in that job was not so neat after all.
He came to be known as Mr Ten Per Cent. When Benazir Bhutto ascended to power a second time, it was again the spouse who tagged along, again as a minister. His ratings went up. He was now Mr Forty Per Cent. And then, wonder of wonders, Zardari ended up being Pakistan’s president after his wife’s assassination. Let it not be forgotten, though, that the mediocre among us are forever ready to spot royalty, or create it, in order to celebrate it in politics. For long years, Americans remained glued to the image of the Kennedys as their claim to modern history.
With the passage of time, that obsession has diminished somewhat. But do not forget that there used to be an era when Kennedy was president and his brother was attorney general in his administration. Prior to announcing his younger sibling’s appointment, President Kennedy told him: “Don’t smile too much, or they’ll think we are happy.”
Complications certainly arose when Indira Gandhi invested her younger son Sanjay Gandhi with powers that were outside the purview of the constitution and because they were they were soon to damage her career. Sanjay Gandhi’s exercise of extra-judicial authority pushed mother and son into the political wilderness at the elections in 1977, and it was only by dint of determination and the squabbles of the old men who had replaced her that Gandhi returned to office three years later.
The damage that she and her son did to Indian democracy between 1975 and 1977 has not been forgotten. It is perhaps quite telling that the dynasty that Khaleda Zia and her elder son tried to give shape to in Bangladesh came apart through the brazen exercise of parallel authority by Tarique Rahman.
The young man was joint secretary general of the family organization called the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and yet did not flinch from considering the country as his fiefdom. The consequences were predictable. They lost power, their legacy being one of a mother-son team overseeing the rapid shrinking of a party.
Political shrinkage has also been the fate of the dynastic combination of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi in India’s Congress party. The party which guided India to independence and is properly credited with shaping its politics and economy and foreign policy across the decades is today a mere shadow of its former self.
The truth is cruel: Once mediocrity seeps into dynastic politics, things begin to fall apart. When Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos began to believe, seriously, that they were the destiny of the Philippines, politics took a bad mauling in Manila.
He was president. She was mayor of the capital. And together they ran a corrupt dynasty which edged out pluralist politics. The earliest sign of the coming disintegration of the Marcos dynasty came with the assassination of the opposition politician Benigno Aquino Jr, as he stepped off an aircraft in Manila on his return from exile.
Here’s the irony: Benigno’s widow ran the Marcoses out of town and then served as president. Not long ago, the Benignos’ son, Benigno the third, finished his own term in the presidency.
In Cuba, the brothers Fidel and Raul Castro served in government together, with the later taking over as president when the former fell too ill to administer. In Argentina, during his final stint in power, President Juan Peron had his vice president by his side, none other than his wife Isabel Peron. The spouse took over when Peron died.
It all sounds pretty quixotic, this demonstration of how democratic politics sometimes grows new feathers, even sharp claws, and operates in forms and shapes previously unknown. Nawaz Sharif, in office as Pakistan’s prime minister, went into maneouvres to have his brother Shahbaz Sharif installed as chief minister of Punjab. Today both men are out of office.
And that is quite a bit of a problem. When siblings or spouses or parents and children rise to power, all glory shines over them, creating a halo that seemingly will not fade.
And yet it ends.
It is the whole family which slips, often badly. That hurts … because these clans bring whole nations down with them as they fall.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.