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Could
Benazir defy the adverse rules governing martyrdom?
Jawed Naqvi
 Benazir
Bhutto courted death with amazing grace and courage. Unfortunately
in most parts of the planet, including our corner, political
martyrdom seems to have a very brief shelf life. The rules for
religious martyrs are quite different and many a sect of faithfuls
thrive by their leaders’ memory. Not so the political victims of
assassination. Rajiv Gandhi’s example comes to mind as a beneficiary
and victim of the callous world of politics. He came to power with a
three-fourth majority in parliament. Had Indira Gandhi not been
killed on Oct 31, 1984, as retaliation for the military assault
under her orders on Sikhism's holiest shrine, she would have almost
certainly run into heavy weather at the hustings a few months later.
Anyone with a three-fourth majority in India’s parliament should be
considered invincible for the next five years. Rajiv Gandhi looked
anything but secure. We won’t go into the reasons for his surprising
fall from unprecedented popularity. These factors could range from
corporate subterfuge (after an early speech in which he naively
threatened to discard politics of moneybags) to corruption charges
which were years later thrown out by law courts to intra-party
intrigue. Settle for the fact that he not only lost popularity
during his tenure but failed to win a simple majority in the
subsequent general elections in 1989. Indira's death also worked its
effect but only too briefly.
Rajiv Gandhi was himself killed by a suicide bomber, in a more or
less similar fashion as Benazir Bhutto, during an election rally.
When he died on the night of May 21, 1991, nearly half the states of
India had already cast their vote in the general elections that were
under way. His assassination did help improve the tally of the
Congress party’s seats in the Lok Sabha following a surge of
sympathy but only marginally. It was by no means an electoral
tsunami of the kind that was triggered by his mother’s death. In
fact, Rajiv’s successor Narasimha Rao landed well short of a
majority in that election and had to cheat the parliament and bribe
a bunch of freelance MPs in order to shore up a wafer-thin majority
in a crucial trust vote. The MPs were later found guilty by a court
and convicted, but not Rao. In any case the Congress couldn’t get a
simple majority despite Rajiv Gandhi’s death in an election rally.
Of course, the Congress party still leans on the slogan “Ma bete ka
ye balidaan, yaad karega Hindustan”. (India will always remain
indebted to the sacrifice of the mother and the son.) But this
mostly cuts no ice with the electorate. The Congress tally in the
Lok Sabha since Rajiv Gandhis’ death has hovered perilously close to
a lowly 140 plus. It is another matter that the state remembers both
on their respective anniversaries and both are still revered by
their Congress party supporters.
Another big time "political martyr" was Mahatma Gandhi. Today he has
been reduced to a caricature of himself. His pictures appear on
India’s currency notes. But ask any political party to go to the
electorate on a message of non-violence, which should ideally
include nuclear disarmament, or Gandhian economics, a kind of
socialism derived from the idea of self-sufficient village units
prescribed by early European economists, and you would be
disappointed. He is still preserved as an institution no doubt, but
requires a lot of formaldehyde.
Tariq Ali wrote a TV play on the judicial assassination of Zulfiqar
Ali Bhutto in which he refers to the tragic reality of
 how
the great martyr that he was, Bhutto’s followers could still not
curb the arrogance of his killers much less checkmate them with a
mass upheaval. In his obituary to Benazir Bhutto, Tariq Ali quotes
from her emails where she justified the new path she had chosen
because of the changed circumstances in the world as she described
it. It is a bit like the Congress party in India still using
Gandhi’s spinning wheel as a symbol of its appeal among the poor
masses but doing everything to make the ground fertile for a neo-con
takeover of the national polity. As martyrs go why should we forget
Liaquat Ali Khan or for that matter Nawab Akbar Bugti more recently.
Without meaning to belittle their respective causes, it is difficult
to conceive of their relevance in the present or future political
trajectory of Pakistan.
The
same holds true for the assassination of Mujibur Rehman and his
family members in Bangladesh, or for that matter Gen Zia ur Rehman
who overthrew the Bangabandhu only to be eliminated later by his own
army colleagues. How many votes can the memory of the socialist
Mujib fetch today? And if by a quirk of fate he is still considered
popular then what accounts for the electoral success of his
tormentor’s party. One of the great populist Sinhalese leaders of
Sri Lanka was Solomon Bandarnaike, Chandrika Kumaratunga’s father.
He was killed by a Buddhist Sinhalese monk. His memory is enshrined
in Horrogolla, the village mansion where he lived on the outskirts
of Colombo, and that’s that. President Premadasa had single-handedly
forced Indian troops to vacate Sri Lanka which made him extremely
popular with Sinhalese chauvinists. He was blown up by suspected a
Tamil rebel in a suicide attack. Does anyone remember him?
And
finally, it was the first anniversary on Sunday of President Saddam
Hussein’s execution by a coalition of American and Iraqi usurpers.
He was going to give a mother of all battles to the Americans. He is
still worshipped by his core followers. Even as defeat stared him in
the face in April 2003, said a report on Sunday to mark the
anniversary of his death, Saddam Hussein stood on a pick-up truck
outside Baghdad’s Abu Hanifa mosque and waved to the crowd of 200
people, promising them a glorious future.
“His last words to us were ‘I promise the people of Adhamiyah golden
monuments once we defeat the Americans’,” remembered Abu Rima one
year after the deposed dictator was hanged in the Iraqi capital.
“The image flashes in front of my eyes even now like a scene from a
film. It was April 9 and a Wednesday. That date is in my blood.
Saddam is in my blood,” Rima said, his voice choking with emotion.
However, in a separate report, a TV channel quoted the Iraqi
government as claiming that 75 per cent of the Sunni militants who
had doggedly opposed the American occupation since the fall of
Saddam had now agreed to join forces with the occupation army. Much
of this official claim sounds like desperate propaganda. On the
other, according to the rules governing the shelf life of the great
martyrs of our times, there could also be a grain of truth in the
claim.
2 January 2008
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