The actor John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. More than a hundred years later, another actor, Ronald Reagan, was elected president of the United States.
And in these past many years, it has been rather intriguing seeing artistes troop down to political corridors and especially in our part of the world. Mithun Chakraborty has just made his entry into the Bharatiya Janata Party, weeks before the state of West Bengal goes to the polls. At the other end, Debasree Roy, who has been a member of the Bengal Legislative Assembly for two terms, has said farewell to the Trinamool Congress.
Her pique has been aroused by the fact that the TMC did not give her the party nomination this time around. But, of course, there are all the suspicions in the TMC that Roy could be joining the BJP soon. Indeed, since 2019, as news reports would have it, she has been seen to be getting close to the BJP leadership. One will not be surprised if one of these days she ends up joining the party of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.
All these images of artistes, of even superannuated civil servants and military officers, is a broad sign of the poverty into which politics has descended in the South Asian region. To be sure, every individual in every profession holds the right to participate in politics. But when political parties make it a point to offer electoral nominations to such individuals and in the process leave professional, hard-working political activists out in the cold, it becomes a depressing state of affairs.
Back in the 1980s, Amitabh Bachchan obtained the nomination of the Congress. His rival was the veteran politician Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna. By all measurements of politics, the experienced Bahuguna should have won. He did not. Bachchan went on to serve a lacklustre term in the Lok Sabha, in the same way that his wife, the actor Jaya Bhaduri, was to do later in the Rajya Sabha.
Given the enormous popular appeal of actors and other artistes in South Asia, it is not hard to understand that people will vote them to office against the more accomplished men and women in politics. But such elected actor-politicians have more often than not disappointed the very people who have elected them to parliament. Jaya Prada, who too has been in the Indian parliament, is one more instance of actors not quite being able to comprehend the serious calling of politics.
In Pakistan, the actor Mohammad Ali, whose roles in films always turned him into an acclaimed box office personality, joined the Pakistan People’s Party in the times when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was prime minister.
Ali was not given any political office, but following Bhutto’s execution by the Zia regime in 1979, he came under a good deal of persecution by the military authorities. But then a time came when he switched parties, linked up with Nawaz Sharif, and held office as Pakistan’s culture minister. A few years ago his widow, the leading lady in yesteryear movies, Zeba, was seen to welcome Nawaz Sharif at her home in Lahore. Speculation was rife about a forthcoming role for her in the Muslim League.
Here in Bangladesh, we have not been far behind our friends in India and Pakistan. The actor Faruk has been a respected member of the Awami League for a good number of years now. And there is Kabori Sarwar, who has served a term as an elected Awami League MP from Narayanganj. Many years ago, Anwar Hussain, he of Nawab Sirajuddoulah fame, joined the Bangladesh Muslim League, though later one did not hear much about any contribution he made or was making to the party. The singer Asif has been associated with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party for a good length of time.
In Britain, Glenda Jackson was elected an MP at the elections in 1992 and would later serve in the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. And if we go back to India, a very successful politician has been the late Jayalalithaa. Her dominance of politics in Tamil Nadu was unchallenged. After all, she had followed in the footsteps of her celluloid mentor, the actor MG Ramachandran, whose own influence on Tamil Nadu politics has always been acknowledged.
And then we have the story of another actor-politician, NT Rama Rao. For a very long time, NTR governed politics and minds in Andhra Pradesh, until it was his own son-in-law Chandrababu Naidu who showed him the door.
The actress Melina Mercouri’s stint in politics was remarkable. She served as a vibrant and purposeful minister of culture in the Greek government. In Bangladesh, we have had the influential actor Asaduzzaman Noor holding office as minister of culture. Another theatre personality to hold political office in the country was Tarana Halim. The Italian Ilona Staller, the porn actor known as Cicciolina, was a member of parliament in the 1980s, at one point offering sex to Saddam Hussein in the interest of peace in the region. Clint Eastwood has served as mayor of the magical little town called Carmel-by-the-Sea in California.
The Broadway actor Helen Gahagan Douglas served in the US House of Representatives before losing a race for the Senate to Richard Nixon in 1950. The Ugandan artiste Bobi Wine has of late been much persecuted by the government of President Yoweri Museveni because of his campaign to unseat the country’s long-serving leader.
The list goes on. And you can be quite certain that in the months and years ahead, with professional politicians declining in number and with politics running out of ideas, seats in power and benches in parliament worldwide will increasingly be claimed by actors, for they are an easy means for political parties to make their presence felt in the public consciousness.
Whether that will lift politics to new heights or push it deeper into the abyss is a question to which we do not have any answer yet. The actor Nargis, if you recall, caused quite a stir in India’s Rajya Sabha when she castigated Satyajit Ray for projecting poverty in his films and disseminating it abroad. It did her little good.
Kamal Haasan is of course in a different category, with his dedication to politics. But what difference can he make, given that he operates at state level? Sunil Dutt was able to make some mark in Bombay, as it used to be known. But the others? We have had Raj Babbar, Shatrughan Sinha, Rajesh Khanna, Moon Moon Sen, and Tapas Pal, with their minimal contributions to politics. Ronald Reagan was a B-grade actor and ended up, as his first wife Jane Wyman had predicted when he was elected to the White House, as a B-grade president.
Artistes may help parties win elections. But politics is not showbiz. Briefly, the induction of artistes in politics is a reminder of the depths to which politics has fallen and of what requires to be done to lift it out of the morass. When men and women, with politics ingrained in their hearts and souls and minds, fill seats in parliament, nations are enlightened by the discourse and debate they initiate in that hallowed chamber.
That enlightenment, as recent experience informs us, is conspicuous by its absence when politicians decline in number and their places are taken by actors, businessmen, and superannuated civil-military bureaucrats.
Glamour is no substitute for grassroots.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
