SOMETHING is notably common in the politics of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Narendra Modi, Nawaz Sharif, Imran Khan, Sheikh Hasina and even Asif Zardari. Several others qualify, naturally, but this little sample explains the way democracy has turned into a zero-sum game between political leaders at the expense of the masses. In other words, all the eminences listed above are either riding the tiger of power or rode one to face its fateful consequences. A zero-sum game is a competitive situation in game theory where one participant’s gain is exactly balanced by another’s loss, meaning the total benefits and losses sum to zero. The total amount of resources is fixed, so one player can only win at the expense of another. The masses can only stare in disbelief. Abraham Lincoln and Immanuel Kant would be horrified by the hollowing out of democracy into a fossil of itself.

All the above leaders would likely be in jail should they get off the tiger’s back, assuming they are not already there or living in exile. The fear of reprisal grips Trump and Netanyahu most starkly. They may be the most powerful men today, going about wrecking the world at will and threatening Armageddon. Trump faces impeachment the moment he leaves office, having revelled in the fear and anguish of his foes during his stay at the helm. The revenge could come earlier, in November, should the mid-term polls give Democrats a majority in both Houses.

Desperately, Trump’s supporters have floated the idea of a perpetual presidency or at least a third term even if it is done without legal sanction. Why do politicians turn to crime to get even with the opponent? Supporters see another remote route to Trump’s reprieve. They saw Gerald Ford granting Richard Nixon the presidential pardon. Trump may be hoping for similar reprieve from J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, should one of them muscle their way to the next presidency. A Hillary Clinton-supported Democratic presidency, on the other hand, remains Trump’s biggest nightmare come November 2028.

Likewise for Netanyahu, who has been pleading for support from Trump and through him with various power brokers in Israel. He needs their help to dodge serious corruption charges that look set to send him and possibly his wife to prison if and when he dismounts from drunken power. The war with Iran among its other uses has kept the law from catching Netanyahu by the neck. Nawaz Sharif and Pervez Musharraf had a bruising tit-for-tat that left both physically impaired and sent them both to live in exile, by turn. Imran took on Zardari and Sharif, and Zardari’s party joined hands with arch-foe Sharif’s group to ensure that Imran gets his comeuppance. Hasina was fortunate not to be devoured by the Bengal tiger after a timely helicopter ride ferried her to Delhi. The beast on its part had shovelled her off its back with a very mean intent.

Modi is going about wrecking the opposition as a man possessed. The tricks he has used can be regarded as his own patented innovations.

Narendra Modi’s circumstances seem indulgent, for now. But he shares the fraught playbook with Trump, Netanyahu et al. As luck would have it, the Indian opposition is crawling with individual ambitions and calculations stalking a range of diverse regional interest groups, some with links to enticing sources of lucre. Modi blatantly bulldozed his way to scalp another state for his party in West Bengal, recently. The election commission was widely seen as a member of Modi’s team. Voters’ names were removed by the millions, offices of the ruling Trinamool Congress raided, its strategists arrested only to be released after the elections. Aparna Bhattacharya argued in The Wire that “in 150 seats, more than half of West Bengal’s 294, total deletions were greater than victory margins, and BJP won 99. In 2021, it won just 19 of these”.

The strategy was not dissimilar to the ones BJP used in Delhi where the chief minister and his cabinet colleagues were jailed before the elections and freed when the BJP had won. Earlier, Haryana and Maharashtra saw the election commission helping fulfil Modi’s agenda. In Maharashtra, the Supreme Court stepped in to bail out Modi’s coalition by arguing strangely that the wronged chief minister should not have resigned as that had weakened his case. Now Mamata Banerjee has refused to submit her resignation in West Bengal even as a new BJP government has come to power. Let’s see what the apex court says.

A crucial problem for the opposition is Modi’s near total control over the media. Israeli and the American media by contrast display a handy critique of the government despite the ongoing war. Their leaders have faced strident opposition too. Rival TV channels work for and against the Trump establishment, which allows everyone access to different views. Modi’s monopoly of the entire media in northern India has been enabled by the business tycoons who he supports for mutual benefit. Whatever resistance he gets comes from alternative space such as YouTube channels and online media portals like The Wire, Scroll etc.

Modi is going about wrecking the opposition as a man possessed. The tricks he has used can be regarded as his own patented innovations. His stated objective in 2014 was to establish a Congress-free nation, reference to the behemoth once led by Gandhi and Nehru, and which has governed the country through much of its existence. Congress has fallen on bad times since the assassination of two of its charismatic prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. The Congress, sans a Gandhi at the helm, has never attained a majority on its own. Rajiv Gandhi’s 400-plus seats in 1984 remains an Indian record. Rahul Gandhi has the charisma but not many reliable Congress colleagues. The BJP chief ministers of Assam and West Bengal, for example, were Congress members before they were slapped with corruption charges by the BJP. Modi bailed them out, a ploy that works entirely at the mercy of the tiger he rides.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 12th, 2026