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, a feat his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s most revered prime minister, could only dream of. It is not an insurmountable “if” of history to understand. Had Indira Gandhi not been killed by her Sikh bodyguards on Oct 31, 1984, in apparent retaliation for the military assault under her orders on Sikhdom’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. So much for the martyrdom of a towering leader like Indira Gandhi: her magic worked 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.

Perhaps the greatest political martyr that India has produced 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. Foreign dignitaries are required to visit his mausoleum as a mark of respect to their hosts. Gandhi’s affinity with the masses forced even the rightwing Hindu groups who were named in the conspiracy to assassinate him to embrace his memory, at least publicly. But Gandhi’s own state, Gujarat, practises communal frenzy as state policy, something he had staunchly opposed even if he were to be killed for taking that position.

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. For years they have nursed their wounds but Bhutto’s followers ironically enough were eventually forced to accept a Faustian bargain. They pawned away his populist ideals of roti kapda aur makaan for a radically new cult of market economy.

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.

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