Much talk has been going on about David Cameron’s return to being part of the current British government. A former prime minister, he has now been appointed foreign secretary in a cabinet reshuffle that saw Suella Braverman sacked by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
In political history, it is rare that men and women who have once wielded political authority come back to power, either in the position they held previously or in new offices. That said, there have indeed been political individuals in diverse regions of the world who, having gone out of government, have at some point made their way back in.
In our own South Asian subcontinent, Morarji Desai served as finance minister in Indira Gandhi’s first government. But when political differences between the two leaders cropped up, Desai found himself out of office. He returned, though, as prime minister in 1977 after Mrs Gandhi and her Congress were routed at the general election.
Inder Kumar Gujral, who could not continue in Indira Gandhi’s government owing to the brash display of authority by her son Sanjay, went off to Moscow as ambassador. In the later 1990s, he was back in political office, this time as India’s prime minister.
Olusegun Obasanjo led a coup and installed himself as Nigeria’s military leader. He left power at a point but subsequently returned to office as the country’s elected president. In the United States, we have Richard Nixon who, having served in the Eisenhower administration as vice president, lost the presidential race to John F Kennedy in 1960.
In 1962, he lost his bid to be governor of California, but in 1968 he won the White House by defeating Vice President Hubert Humphrey. For his part, Humphrey went back to the Senate, where he had served for a long time until he was picked by President Lyndon Johnson as his running mate in 1964.
In Bangladesh, Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury lost his job as minister for information in Bangabandhu’s government in 1973. Years later, he was appointed prime minister by President Hussein Muhammad Ershad. The military ruler also resurrected the career of Ataur Rahman Khan, whom he made prime minister in his government. Khan was in the 1950s chief minister of an Awami League-led provincial government in erstwhile East Pakistan.
In the early 1950s, Moulvi Tamizuddin Khan, as speaker of Pakistan’s constituent assembly, lost a legal battle on constitutional issues against Governor General Ghulam Mohammad. In 1962, he returned to office as speaker of the national assembly constituted under General Ayub Khan’s Basic Democracy-based constitution.
For that matter, Mohammad Ali Bogra, who under Ghulam Mohammad had been Pakistan’s prime minister in the early 1950s and in whose cabinet Ayub Khan served as defence minister, took over as foreign minister in the Ayub Khan regime in 1962.
History certainly acquires new colours when individuals make their way back into the political centre of things. Alexander Dubcek, whose Prague Spring was aborted in Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces in 1968, was banished to Ankara as ambassador and then deep in his country’s wooded regions as a forestry officer.
In 1992, upon the success of Vaclav Havel’s velvet revolution, Dubcek returned to politics, as speaker of the new national assembly in a communism-free Czechoslovakia. Dubcek’s life came to an end shortly afterward in a road crash.
There have been individuals who sought, often desperately, to get back into the corridors of power after having made their exit from them. Henry Kissinger’s career as US secretary of state ended with Jimmy Carter’s assumption of presidential office in 1977. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, Kissinger expected to be called back to office under him, again as secretary of state.
Reagan showed little interest in the idea. Kissinger’s hopes were dashed. In Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe served as prime minister till the advent of the Rajapaksa brothers to power. His career appeared to be at an end, until civil disturbances forced the Rajapaksas from office. Wickremesinghe was then installed as the country’s new president.
Following the liberation of France from the Nazis in 1944, General Charles de Gaulle took charge of the country. But when he ran into problems with the politicians, in fact the national assembly, he resigned and made his way back to his village but not before proclaiming that someday France would call him back.
France did call him back in 1958. As president, De Gaulle firmed up the country’s institutions through reinventing politics in the form of the Fifth Republic, which endures to this day. Charles de Gaulle left office in April 1969 when he lost a minor constitutional referendum.
Going back to Britain, A.J. Balfour (he of the Balfour Declaration of 1917) served as prime minister from 1902 to 1905. In 1916, he returned to office, much like David Cameron, as foreign secretary. Again, Sir Alec Douglas-Home served as prime minister for a year before leading his Tories to defeat at the 1964 election. He returned to political office, as foreign secretary, when the Tories regained power under Edward Heath in 1970.
In Mao’s China, Deng Xiao-ping was twice purged as a capitalist roader and twice he was rehabilitated. His second rehabilitation opened the path for his dominance of post-Mao China. His liberalisation of the economy paved the road to a new framework of politics that has been followed through by his successors.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, inducted into government once martial law was declared in Pakistan in October 1958, served as minister for commerce, industries and natural resources and foreign affairs, in that order, under President Ayub Khan. Forced to leave the cabinet in 1966, he formed his political party but remained out of office till December 1971, when he took over as Pakistan’s president following his country’s military defeat in Bangladesh.
Nurul Amin was chief minister of East Bengal following the creation of Pakistan in 1947. He went out of office when his Muslim League lost the provincial elections in 1954. In December 1971, stranded in Pakistan after the Bangladesh war, he was appointed Pakistan’s vice president in the Bhutto administration, an office he lost when the country went for a parliamentary form of government in 1973.
There are the stories of those individuals who reinvented themselves following periods in high office. One recalls the presidency of Mary Robinson in Ireland, and of Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Both women were successful presidents of their countries.
Both went on to serve as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights following their departure from power in Dublin and Santiago. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, served as Ethiopia’s minister of health and then as minister for foreign affairs before joining WHO in 2017.
Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has had a spectacular return to high office in Brazil. First elected president in 2002, he was in office till late 2010. Later arrested and tried on corruption charges, he was released by the judiciary on the ground that his imprisonment had been a result of biased judgment. Lula took part in the presidential election of 2022, defeating President Jair Bolsonaro.
And thus the tales of a return to high ground by those who once had walked away, seemingly, into the twilight.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Consultant Editor, Dhaka Tribune.