Of dynasties, pretension and snobbery

FATIMA Bhutto has just unleashed her book and with it her clan once more on the people of what was once known as the Indian subcontinent. There is nothing wrong with writing a book, really. Besides, when you talk of this granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, you have got to admit she has class where employing the English language is concerned.
Compare Benazir Bhutto's Daughter of the East with her Songs of Blood and Sword. The Fatima work comes out far more readable where a detailed account of Pakistan's tortuous political history is concerned. As for the way she presents facts, well, that's a different proposition altogether.
But, of course, we are not talking about books today. Our preoccupation, yet once again, is the political dynasties, which have so often in our lifetime pushed our collective aspirations into the woods, beyond the precipice. When you think of the Bhuttos, and you need to do that in calm fashion, you recall the many ways in which they have stultified the process of democracy in Pakistan. Populism is no guarantee of purposeful governance. The Bhuttos have regularly gone before the masses with their pseudo-socialist terms of endearment for Pakistan. It has not helped Pakistanis any.
But then, the dynastic factor is not limited to Pakistan alone. Notice Sri Lanka, the very first country in these parts to have set dynastic politics into motion with the rise of Sirimavo Bandaranaike in 1960. That was a bad move. Sympathising with a political widow is all right, but when sympathy leads to things bizarre (and Sirimavo's rise was bizarre), you know the fate of a nation is sealed.
Watch Mahinda Rajapakse. He has won a war; he has been maltreating the Tamils; he has decided that the army chief who helped him defeat the LTTE must henceforth stay in prison; and now he has chanced upon the shoddy idea that his brothers and his children must give shape to a new political dynasty. That can lead to but one clear conclusion: pluralistic government in Sri Lanka will soon be a misnomer.
And it will be a misnomer inasmuch as democracy is essentially a wild goose chase in Bangladesh. Sit back and reflect on how governance has turned into a stagnant pool since the early 1980s, when Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia came into prominence as torchbearers for their clans in the national political realm.
A whole world has changed before us, the Cold War is long gone, new leaders have arisen and departed in tune with the norms of politics and the immutable laws of nature. But our dynasties have stayed on. These days, they seek to have the lengthening shadows of their electorally-driven dynasties overshadow our lives in all their totality.
Sajeeb Wazed Joy has made his entry on to the national stage; and the acolytes of the Begum have insistently been singing paeans to her exiled elder child. If you are young, if you have yet not passed from the stage of innocence to that of experience, you might feel thrilled that in the hands of these political sons is embedded our future. But youth is no substitute for wisdom. And dynastic politics can never be cause for thrill.
And it will not because of the barriers it puts on the road to democracy. The tragedy of our lives is but a simple, short narrative of pain; in Bangladesh, indeed elsewhere in South Asia, we have often mistaken dynastic glamour for democratic brilliance. And we have paid the price.
Indian democracy would be a much more riveting, enthralling affair had the Nehru-Gandhis not gone beyond Indira. But there was Sanjay and then there was Rajiv. Now there is Sonia and there is her son Rahul. You see all those veteran, respectable politicians make a beeline for Rahul Gandhi and you realise, with that nervous pounding of the heart in you, that pluralism in India will not go beyond the door and into the courtyard as long as this penchant for Jawaharlal Nehru's heirs remains.
Dynasties keep enlightenment at bay. They undermine the self-esteem of nations. Worse, they carry with them the probability of mediocrity at its worst being foisted on societies. The son of Kim Il-Sung has only succeeded in pushing North Korea further into the dark. The darkness promises to elongate itself into the future once the child of Kim Jong-Il takes charge of what has already turned into the world's only communist monarchy.
Forty one years ago a young colonel threw out the monarchy in Libya. Today, Muammar Gaddafi conspires to have his son Saif replace him as the standard bearer of a new dynasty. Much a similar act is being enacted in Egypt, with Hosni Mubarak grooming son Gamal for the succession.
Elected dynasties are the new elite. And like any elite inhabiting an unreal world of pretension and snobbery, they preside over a slide of human endeavour into unmitigated political marshland. Fatima Bhutto does not say that, of course. Nor does any other dynast. But that happens to be the unqualified truth.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
E-mail: [email protected].