[vinnomot] Hereditary politics, democracy, and assassination in South Asia

SAN-Feature Service

SOUTH ASIAN NEWS-FEATURE SERVICE

January 4,2008

 

Hereditary politics, democracy, and assassination in South Asia

 

Ripan Kumar Biswas

 

Assassination as a strategy to rid the World of a tyrant hasn't proven all that successful a tactic, instead bringing down a wave of militarism and increased tyranny.

 

 

SAN-Feature Service : Assassinations are motivated by many factors including issues involving politics, religions, and differing ideologies. Groups, who have power, assassinate individuals threatening their way of life or the status quo, and groups who do not have power, assassinate individuals in positions of power to provoke immediate change for the betterment of their life circumstances or to establish their own ideology.

 

Threatened and accomplished assassination of political leaders has become increasingly frequent in public life these days throughout the world. Assassinations of hereditary politicians are designed to illustrate the vulnerability of the regime and inspire the public to believe individuals ideology and overthrow the state. Nations part of South Asia, are now in political turmoil, such a phenomenon has occurred earlier too, but, this time around its profound and no nation have political stability.  

 

Assassination as a strategy to rid the World of a tyrant hasn't proven all that successful a tactic, instead bringing down a wave of militarism and increased tyranny. The historical response to hereditary assassinations in South Asia , were not popular uprisings not even to demolish monarchy, dictatorship or imperialism, but draconian measures. According to her mother Benazir Bhutto's will, Bilawal Bhutto, 19-year-old student of the Oxford University is going to follow the same footsteps of many other politicians in South Asia .

 

"It was not the life I planned, but it is the life I have. My husband and children accept and understand that my political responsibilities to the people of Pakistan come first, as painful as that personally is to all of us. I didn't choose this life. It chose me," Benazir Bhutto expressed these poignant words in the New York based The Huffingtonpost. com on September 1, 2007. But death chose her, in a violent burst on December 27, 2007, as it has done in the past for so many others thrust into political prominence in South Asia .

 

Historically, the political and government culture in South Asia is a strong product of its past that links to the pre-partition British Rule.  What Pakistan's leaders or the leaders of other South Asian nations knew best from this inheritance was the so-called vice regal system that made little or no provision for popular awareness or involvement. In fact, what the British bequeathed was often a contradiction between theories of governance and their practices.  Ideals of representative government and equality before the law were incomplete transformations.

 

In an immediate press conference after becoming the chairman of the Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Bilawal Bhutto quoted one of his mother comments that democracy is the best revenge to any political turmoil. But the most dangerous manifestation of this retreat from democracy has been a growing sense of hopelessness of the people of Pakistan , and a total disillusionment with the political system's ability to address their daily problems. And as people's sense of disillusionment has grown, there has been a corresponding growth in the spread of religious and political extremism.

 

Rioting subsided so far in Pakistan after destruction that left at least 44 dead and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage, but bitterness remained over the government's response to the gun and suicide attack that killed Benazir Bhutto.

 

Two months before her death, Bhutto sent an e-mail to her U.S. adviser Mark Siegel, saying that if she were killed, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would bear some of the blame as because she had been made to feel insecure by his minions. Although according to the Pakistan's present ambassador to the U.S., Mahmud Ali Durrani, both Musharraf and Benazir were being targeted by the terrorists and extremists, Benazir had been given unprecedented security whereas she was two time elected prime minister.

 

It is now widely believed that al-Qaida or other religious extremist groups who don't believe in democracy were behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. But this is what is so sad and demoralizing. For all the talk of democracy and economic boom, assassination, the medieval means of settling political differences is repeatedly chosen over other political discourse.

Whether done for a specific political end, because of a general political difference, or because of a politically realized more personal discontent, what's so demoralizing about this kind of violence is its endless effectiveness at silencing more moderate voices and derailing political processes. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal have experienced more political and dynastic killings and attempted assassinations of national leaders (and their family members) than the rest of the world combined. Violence is at last cease to be an easy and common currency of political dialogue in South Asia .

The bloody saga of assassinations in South Asia has been started since the end of British rule six decades ago while Mahatma Gandhi, who believed in non violence, had been killed. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by two of her Sikh body guards at her official residence in New Delhi on October 30, 1984 while her successor Rajiv Gandhi died when a LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) woman suicide bomber blew up at an election rally he was about to address near Chennai May 21, 1991.

 

Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, was shot twice in the chest while attending a public meeting in Rawalpindi - the same city where Bhutto was killed. Zulifkar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father, was hanged to death April 4, 1979 on the orders of President Zia-ul-haq died in a plane crash on Aug 17, 1988 whose cause still a mystery today. Sri Lanka witnessed its first major political assassination when a Buddhist monk shot dead President S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike on September 26, 1959 in Colombo while a May Day rally in 1993, President Ranasinghe Premadasa was killed by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber.

 

There is no denying that things in Bangladesh today are not the way they ought to be, let alone what they promised to be. After the bloody war of independence which secured an independent state from West Pakistan , the nation's first top two executives — Sheikh Mujibur Rahman along with his most family members and Ziaur Rahman were assassinated on August 15, 1975 and May 29, 1981 respectively. Nepal 's King Birendra, his wife, and several family members were killed in a controversial killing on June 1, 2001 when Crown Prince Dipendra opened fire at them during a family get-together before killing himself.

 

These assassinations were not opportunities for fair governance, true democracy or vibrant civil society rather than encouraging non-democratic elements including the army or political or religious extremism. Even after half a century, nation in South Asia could not get cleaned from the feudal, tribal or non-democratic systems and sectarian segregations and the public has been left untutored in the kind of vigilance usually needed to hold political leaders accountable. The repeated dismissal or overthrow of elected regimes, alterations in the constitutions that suit to existing ruler, leaves no positive memory and little chance for institutions to adapt and supportive values to root.

 

Assaulting political parties, manipulating judicial systems, forcing political leaders into exile or arresting them, ignoring democratic values or women's rights, suspending freedom of speeches or press, or promoting political or religious extremism is the reminder of common dangers in this region. The recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto is nothing but a process to collapse all natural activities of a democratic country.--SAN-Feature Service

 

Ripan Kumar Biswas is a freelance writer based in New York

 

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