When Charisma Confronts Fate

 

 

mundane are not the only things common to South Asian nations. Another bizarre distinction they share is a history of assassinations of leaders. It started with Mahatma Gandhi in January, 1948 and looks be on a brief ‘pause’ mode since December, 2007 when Benazir Bhutto was sacrificed at the altar of South Asian history. In between, in the late 1970s, her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was ‘judicially’ assassinated by a military strongman called General Zia-ul Haq who himself died mysteriously in a plane crash in 1988. No country has been spared the trauma; no ruling ‘family’ has been spared the agony and the despair. Even as you read this, India is paying tribute to yet another victim of assassination – Indira Gandhi whose grandson Rahul Gandhi is preparing himself to become Prime Minister in 2014.

It is too early for objective history to be written on the impact these assassinations had on the trajectories taken by these nations. But some of these assassinations clearly look as portents of tragic history set to be repeated again, and again. Back in the 1950s, Sri Lanka, like India, was a newly independent nation grappling with existential issues like identity politics and the treatment of minorities. Solomon Bandaranaike was the charismatic Prime Minister of the country. He is the one who first gave a voice and a direction to ‘Sinhala’ nationalism at the cost of minority Tamils. He was shot dead by a Buddhist Sinhala monk who was convinced Bandaranaike was sacrificing Sinhala interests and pampering the Tamils. The genie was unleashed and continues to torment and traumatise the island nation even 50 years after the assassination. The genesis of V. Prabhakaran, the now dead leader of LTTE, can surely be traced to that one act of madness by a ‘Buddhist’ monk in 1959 (Ironically, it was the LTTE, formed to fight against Sinhala majoritarianism, that assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in 1991). For the moment, civil war in Sri Lanka has paused after an orgy of killings, assassinations and violence. But the ghosts of Solomon Bandaranaike and the monk who shot him still torment Sri Lanka. Pakistan and Myanmar are classic case studies of how a single assassination can change the destiny of a nation. The pork eating Muhammad Ali Jinnah became an ‘Islamist’ in the later years of his life to successfully carve Pakistan out of India. In his first address to the new nation, Jinnah grandly announced that Pakistan will be a ‘secular’ state. He died before he could implement his ‘secular’ vision. After him, there was only one towering political personality – Liaquat Ali Khan – left to take Pakistan on a shaky journey. But he was assassinated and Pakistan’s brief flirtation with ‘secularism’ was forever condemned to a graveyard of blind hopes and lost opportunities. Into this vacuum stepped in the military; it is yet to step out even as the nation confronts an existential civil war. Something similar has happened in Myanmaar, formerly Burma. Aung San was the father figure and, unlike Mahatma Gandhi, a military strongman who won independence for Burma from the British in 1947. He was assassinated the same year and the military junta of the nation has never let go of the levers of power after that one tragedy. His daughter, Nobel Peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has been jailed by the military for the last 20 years. Even die hard optimists don’t think the military will quietly fade away into oblivion and history.

For most of its history as an independent country, Nepal had muddled along as a feudal society coming to terms with the democratic aspirations of its people. But just one single assassination has plunged the country into such a downward spiral that no one knows what the future holds for this Himalayan and only ‘Hindu’ Kingdom. In 2001, virtually the entire royal family of the country led by King Birendra was massacred in a bizarre and ghastly manner by his own son Prince Dipendra. It is almost ten years since then and it looks as if that assassination clawed through the glue that held the nation together.

India too has suffered through three devastating assassinations: Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. The killings have shaken up the nation and led many pundits to forecast that the nation will disintegrate. But grant this to India; it has somehow transcended the trauma of these assassinations and survived their horrible aftermaths. So let us pay tribute to Indira Gandhi on the 25th year of her assassination. But more importantly, let us pay tribute to the very idea of India that survives against all odds.