One may have one’s differences, and rather serious ones too, with Narendra Modi and Imran Khan about their politics. But one must give them credit where credit is due. Both men have, through their political programs, sought to bring dynastic politics to an end in their countries.
Both have made clear attempts to bring politics back to where it should be, in the hands of politicians who have spent long years trying to uphold a political system geared to a promotion of democracy but who have over these past many decades been thwarted by families intent on imposing themselves on societies.
We cannot quite be sure that Modi and Imran have succeeded in restoring politics to its natural niche. The manner in which the chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was brought down by an opposition determined to have its way conveys the impression that the class of corrupt politicians who have long held sway in Pakistan may have made an ugly comeback.
The PTI government had its drawbacks, but corruption was not one of them. What Pakistanis now have is a government constituted of politicians against whom cases are in the courts, men and women who are out on bail. Be it Asif Ali Zardari or the Sharif clan, their reputations were sullied a long time ago.
With Modi, the threat of political dynasties chipping away at his heels remains strong. The rise of localized dynasties in a number of Indian states is proof, if proof were needed, that the danger is not yet over. But take a look at the damage that political dynasties can do to the normal course of politics through observing the predicament the Congress finds itself in today.
One certainly understands the backdrop to the rise of Indira Gandhi to high office in 1966, but when after her assassination in October 1984 President Zail Singh did not call upon Pranab Mukherjee to take over, a gross mistake was committed. Appointing Rajiv Gandhi as his mother’s successor was politically ill-advised. Today, with the Congress in the hands of the Gandhi family -- Sonia, Rahul, Priyanka -- the party has been reduced to being a dry shell of what it once used to be.
One could venture a similar suggestion about the Pakistan People’s Party. Benazir Bhutto braved the odds, by taking charge of the PPP in the aftermath of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s execution and waging a lonely but relentless battle against the Ziaul Haq dictatorship. Ironically, however, the slide in the PPP’s fortunes began under Benazir when charges of high corruption began to be levelled against her and her husband.
Asif Zardari’s reputation for corruption has stuck to him, despite his having served as Pakistan’s president. And when a callow Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was installed as PPP chairperson -- he was yet a student at Oxford -- the slide only gathered speed. Bilawal is today Pakistan’s foreign minister, which raises the natural question of whether he can do justice to an office in which his grandfather performed brilliantly in the 1960s.
Dynasties leave democracy wounded beyond measure. A promotion of family being an overriding goal of dynasties, politics cannot but be beaten into the bushes. Observe the economic chaos the Rajapaksa family has reduced Srilanka to. The brothers Gotabaya and Mahinda and all other members of their clan keeping the country in their grip today have done enormous damage to the social, economic, and political fibre of Sri Lanka.
It is a shame for men and women striving for democracy to have the likes of Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Mahinda Rajapaksa lording it over a country as president and prime minister. Mahinda has resigned, and Gotabaya should go as well. But will he? If Mahinda can have truckloads of his supporters ensconced in his official residence and then unleash them against people peacefully protesting Srin Lanka’s economic difficulties, it is the worst face of dynastic politics we are confronted with.
Dynasties have largely left political parties in a state of enervation. The Congress in India, the People’s Party in Pakistan, and the BNP and the Jatiya Party in Bangladesh have all run out of steam through all these brazen moves to have families keep them in their clutches.
The bigger truth is that dynasties are often peopled by children and grandchildren, of once influential politicians, who are manifestly mediocre and therefore ineffectual and certainly arrogant. Add to that the corruption, moral and financial, which have dynasties mutating into mafia, which leaves little or no room for democratic expansion in society.
In effect, dynasties nibble away at democratic structures, in the end leaving politics as no more than a hollow shell of what it used to be or should have been. If extra-constitutional rule or coups d’etat have undermined democratic experiments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the past many decades, political dynasties have often put the finishing touches to those experiments, by sending the idea of popularly sanctioned political processes to the woods.
Dynasties will not go extinct any time soon, which is a worry. And worries assume darker dimensions when Ferdinand (Bong-Bong) Marcos storms to electoral victory to become president of the Philippines, a nation his father ruled in autocratic fashion between 1965 and 1986.
Beside Marcos Junior as vice president is Sara Duterte, whose parent, outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte, remains guilty of gross human rights abuses committed in the last six years. The incoming president, in the course of the election campaign, only associated with media friendly to him, has promised nothing on rights issues. Fears therefore abound of a likelihood of Marcos Junior going after his family’s critics in vindictive fashion.
Political dynasties, for all their promises to people, do not see beyond themselves. They close off every venue to the expansion of democracy through giving birth to and nurturing a class of sycophants whose dark aim remains deriving as many advantages as possible by association with such dynasties. Dynasties give birth to cults of personality. Oleaginous ministers serve in office at the pleasure of ruling families.
Political parties led by dynasties prevent sunshine from coming into them. Nations governed by political dynasties are pushed into uncertainty about their future, for in such circumstances, nothing beyond bonsai democracy can be imagined.
Bonsais, by the way, do not grow and do not live in tune with the natural course of life.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
