Benazir to Asif, via Bilawal

It is that even after full allowance has been made for the astonishing durability of the dynastic dispensation across a large part of the world — that’s globalisation of sorts — what has come to pass in Pakistan, in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s brutal assassination is surely unusual, if not weird. In the first place, it is remarkable that however horrifying her murder may have been, it was not surprising — certainly the foreboding was not to her. Or else she would not have written her will and last testament two days before returning home after long years of self-exile. Secondly, in her will she had named her husband, Asif Zardari, her political successor. But he summarily announced that his late wife’s mantle as the chairperson of the Pakistan People’s Party would fall on the shoulders of their 19-year-old son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

Since young Bilawal has just started studying history at Oxford — the university to which Grandpa Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Zulfi to friends) and Mama Benazir also went — Asif Zardari proclaimed himself to be the regent of sorts to his teen-aged son evidently for the duration. Also, it was he who named Makhdoom Amin Fahim — a Sindhi and a Bhutto loyalist — the PPP’s prime ministerial candidate.

Some have already drawn a parallel between the most recent developments across the subcontinental divide and the events in this country several weeks ago. But a careful examination shows that the comparison cannot hold. For, technically speaking, Sonia Gandhi’s 37-year-old son, Rahul Gandhi MP, has been named only one of the many general secretaries of the All India Congress Committee, even if the writing on the wall is clear enough that he is the duly anointed heir apparent of the Gandhi dynasty, should the Congress manage to return to power in New Delhi in the next general election whenever it is held.

Similarly, unlike Makhdoom Fahim of Hala in Pakistan, Manmohan Singh was never declared the Congress party’s prime ministerial candidate. This outstanding man with a commendable record as P.V. Narasimha Rao’s finance minister and later as leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha was appointed prime minister by Sonia Gandhi who should rightfully have taken over the responsibility but chose not to, at least partly because of the controversy over her foreign origin. It is a different matter that senior Congress leaders, including cabinet ministers, have never been reconciled to this arrangement. Their clamour for prime-ministership reverting to a member of the Nehru-Gandhi clan is bound to become louder as the general election draws near.

However, far more important than these sideshows and technicalities is the reality that, except in Pakistan, the dynasties in other South Asian countries, and certainly in India, have abided by constitutional procedures and democratic norms even while unabashedly promoting and perpetuating dynastic interests. These decencies have been followed in Sri Lanka where the dynastic pattern began six years before Indira Gandhi’s ascension to the office of prime minister, and even in the highly volatile Bangladesh. In these countries, especially India, powerful dynasts like Indira Gandhi were thrown out of power and later staged a spectacular comeback.

Sure enough, Rajiv Gandhi did succeed his mother within hours of her assassination nearly a quarter of a century go. The wide world knew that she wanted her sole surviving son to be her successor. Yet in her eloquent will she hadn’t said a word on the subject. It was at the behest of the entire Congress leadership that the republic’s president, then not on the best of terms with the Gandhi family, swore him in. The mind-boggling mandate Rajiv received subsequently was due more to the nation’s grief for his slain mother than to the hopes aroused by a young man with a reputation of being Mr Clean. Significantly, Rajiv lost all the elections after 1984 in which he led the party, except the solitary one to the Nagaland assembly. Before he could be on the comeback trail, he, too, was assassinated.

If Rajiv was the first male beneficiary of the assassination of a towering leader, Bilawal is the second. This is a departure from the normal practice under which, in such circumstances, power has devolved, often unexpectedly, on South Asia’s “roaring tigresses” — Srimavo Bandarnaike in Sri Lanka after her husband was shot dead; Benazir in Pakistan after her father’s execution; and Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh, the first the orphaned daughter of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and the second the widow of the assassinated first military ruler of the country, General Ziaur Rahman.

The reason why Pakistan is out of step with the general trend is best underscored by quoting a prominent Pakistani analyst, Raja Anwar, a great devotee of Zulfi Bhutto at one time who got disillusioned rather fast. Writing shortly after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and drawing on “certain parallels” between the major dynasties of Pakistan and India, he pointed out that “republican democracy in the entire subcontinent is still at war with an older, feudal tradition”. But he is candid enough to admit that no South Asian society is more feudal than that of Pakistan where “there are families whose members have sat in every elected or nominated chamber since the British times by matter of unwritten right”. Let us not forget that Benazir was PPP’s “chairperson for life”.

The writer is a political commentator

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