| February 21, 2008 | Thursday | Safar 13, 1429 |
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After the euphoria
PPP leader Asif Zardari has been described as – or perhaps he sees himself as – Sonia Gandhi. The similarity of course ends with the fact that both became heads of their parties following the assassination of their spouses.
Ms Gandhi was extremely reticent, even wary, about the offer to head the Congress party after Rajiv Gandhi’s death. It took her party satraps seven or eight years to persuade her to accept the challenge. In Mr Zaradri’s case, his promptness in assuming the mantle of Benazir Bhutto sets him quite apart from the Congress party’s grudging leader.
If Mr Zardari does opt to become prime minister, as has been widely conjectured, he would be more deserving of comparison with Dr Manmohan Singh. The Indian prime minister remains the only one in the league to have never won a seat to the Lok Sabha. But Singh, to his credit, brought with him considerable experience as an administrator, not the least being his avatar as civil servant who became governor of India’s central bank, and then as the finance minister who ushered economic reforms.
Comparisons are odious but they are occasionally inevitable. The India-Pakistan paradigm has startling similarities and yawning differences that are often misunderstood or misquoted. Sonia Gandhi led the party to power single-handedly and then was forced to mysteriously make way for Dr Singh, a dark horse, by circumstances that have not yet been fully explained to the people of India.
The results of Monday’s polls in Pakistan have thrown up another surprising similarity between the fortunes of the PPP and the Congress. The so-called sympathy vote for Ms Bhutto could not get her party more than a mere one-third of the seats in the National
Assembly, way short of a command performance that was expected of the PPP given the sacrifices involved.
Rajiv Gandhi, as we all know, was also murdered in the middle of an election campaign in May 1991, but his death too could not get the Congress a clear majority in parliament. In fact, Mr P.V. Narasimha Rao, who succeeded him as Congress president and prime minister, soon found himself compelled to actually bribe a clutch of MPs from the tribal state of Jharkhand to cobble a wafer-thin majority. It helped him scrape through a make-or-break confidence vote. The MPs were convicted years later. For some reason Rao was spared the ignominy of joining them in prison.
Tuesday’s euphoria as election results swept away many a heavyweight from the so-called King’s party resembles the 1977 verdict on Mrs Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule. Mrs Gandhi lost her own seat in that election to Raj Narain, a portly politician known more for his merry one-liners than for anything substantive. Her powerful son Sanjay Gandhi was defeated in Amethi by a former bandit.
Everybody who was anybody in her ‘emergency cabinet’ was summarily trounced mostly by little known challengers. Mrs Gandhi of course was totally misinformed by the Intelligence Bureau about the arriving doom. It was only when the small clusters of political rivals assembled on a euphoric morning at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds, so called because it hosts the annual theatrical depiction of Lord Rama’s victory over the evil king Ravana that Mrs Gandhi sat up.
As the small disparate groups braced to merge themselves into the Janata Party as a truly palpable alternative to the Congress, Mrs Gandhi’s advisors decided to keep the crowds at home. They turned on the popular Hindi movie ‘Bobby’ on Doordarshan, which was a rare treat given the limited avenues of entertainment.
But hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic well-wishers of the Janata Party still poured into the sprawling grounds on that magical day. The defection by Mrs Gandhi’s closest aides, the former ministers Jagjivan Ram and Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, at that rally remains etched as a keystone of that revolt against authoritarian rule.
But this is where we have to pause with the hope that Pakistan’s story would be different from the denouement as it unravelled in India. Within weeks of its triumphant birth the Janata Party began to lose its sheen and direction. Caste squabbling, ideological differences and personality clashes took a toll on India’s greatest tryst with democracy.
Messrs Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Kishan Advani had merged their Jana Sangh with the Janata Party, but they had refused to part with their membership of the RSS, the Hindu revivalist and quasi fascist outfit that gained considerable political power from the 1977 experiment. Soon enough the RSS began to assert itself from behind the façade of its nominees. Mr Advani showed his tendencies as information minister by broadcasting insidiously communal propaganda on radio and TV.
Swayamsiddha, a proscribed feature film comes to mind. It showed the exploits of a fiery Hindu woman whose husband was deaf and mute. The village priest counsels her to throw out all the Christian missionaries from the region. It was their evil spirit that had caused the husband’s plight. She sets about following the prescription. The missionaries are thrown out and the husband gets back his power of speech.
Similarly the entire business of banning textbooks written by reputed liberal historians began during the Janata experiment. Books by Romila Thapar and R.S. Sharma among others were proscribed. What began as an experiment in ultimate democracy soon transformed into the first steps towards religious revivalism in India.
The defeat of President Pervez Musharraf at the hands of rivals whose ideological range is as varied if not more multi-layered than the Janata Party must be qualified by the caution that unlike the case in India there was no Pakistani Janata Party before Monday’s polls. What we are faced with is a hung parliament, which can produce a ragtag coalition but not a potentially stable one.
It is not easy to forget that Mr Nawaz Sharif’s religious zeal has similarities with the Advani-Vajpayee duo. That zeal had once prompted him to seek the sobriquet of Amir ul Momineen for himself not too different from the role model that Mullah Omar offered in Afghanistan. In contrast the PPP has mostly been seen as a secular party that touches a chord with the average Pakistani right across the country. This in spite of its puzzling dalliance with the Taliban regime during Ms Bhutto’s second innings in power.
It is curious that there are only two parties in Pakistan that have won seats in all four provinces and Nawaz Sharif’s party is not one of them. The revolt against Mrs Gandhi it must be remembered had cut India into unequal halves. All the southern states had stayed with her and the democratic revolt was mostly confined to the north. In this respect, the PPP by claiming some degree of political presence in all four provinces has done a better job on its own than the Janata Party could do with its assorted allies put together.
It should be a worrying lesson for all the pro-democracy advocates that Mrs Gandhi registered an emphatic victory very soon after her massive rout and was back in business in 1980 as prime minister of India. This time around it was not her political rivals but her own bodyguards-turned-assassins that laid her low.
