A veteran politician was unambiguous about it the other day. Begum Khaleda Zia, he informed the country loudly and with a clearly perceptible sense of happiness, would provide leadership to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party for as long as she lived. He probably did not realise -- and neither did anyone else around him -- that it was just the sort of attitude that had made a casualty of democracy in this country over a long stretch of years.
There have been far too many people consistently and constantly ready to fawn over the men and women who have often presided over their lives to understand the damage they have done by their ingratiating behaviour. Of course, we are all quite relieved that Begum Zia has politely declined the offer of a life-long leadership role of her party for herself. But it is a move that ought to have come sooner, before all this public outcry that erupted when it appeared that she was quite happy to go along with the decision.
You are reminded of Julius Caesar. In the days prior to his assassination, indeed at a time when conspiracy against his authoritarianism was beginning to sprout, he was offered the crown thrice in the senate. And thrice did he put it by, seeming increasingly loath to do so every time it came his way.
In the end, though, he did decline the offer of the monarchy his sycophants had offered him on a platter. That was magnanimity of a kind, a gesture Begum Zia should have replicated when Tanvir Ahmed Siddiky and his friends proposed that she ensconce herself permanently at the top of the BNP organisational structure. But then again, we are all happy and relieved that she has turned down the offer.
For the future, we will hope that this gesture will open the door to the infusion of new blood in the party, that indeed the BNP will have other men and women ready to serve as its chairperson in the times to be.
Indeed, it remains our fond expectation that all political parties will break out of the mould of entrenched feudalism and truly go for democracy through liberalising their own modalities of internal party behaviour. That goes for the Awami League, the Jatiyo Party and any other organisation, which seriously believes in the idea that democracy is the national objective.
But, for now, go back to this malady we have known as sycophancy. Of course, you see it everywhere around you. In government offices, in business organisations, et al, it has turned out to be an ailment that continues to stultify our growth as a nation. It is a malaise that often has had its roots in politics. Go back to the year 1963, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, serving as both Pakistan's foreign minister and secretary general of the Convention Muslim League, proposed loudly and unabashedly that Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, then Pakistan's military ruler, be anointed the country's president for life.
It was a gesture Ayub must have appreciated. Nevertheless, Bhutto's objective did not come to pass, one reason being that within three years of making that grandiloquent gesture, he fell out with his mentor. He was asked to leave the government. The rest is, of course, history as we have known it.
The point here is that men like Bhutto have always been around. In 1958, when Bhutto was inducted into the cabinet by President Iskandar Mirza (and that was in the early days of the coup Mirza and Ayub had together brought about, to undermine the course of democracy), he was moved so much that he sent off a hugely fawning letter to Mirza. The immediate cause of that was, of course, to thank the president for giving him a chance to serve the country.
But then came the plainly outrageous. Iskandar Mirza, said Bhutto in that missive, would go down in history as a great man, indeed would scale heights greater than those reached by Pakistan's founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Those of us who remember what happened will now stay quiet. But suffice it for now to know that when years later, as an Ayub loyalist, Bhutto made all those trips to London, an exiled Mirza made a number of efforts for his former admirer to have him call on him. Bhutto, in his enlightened self-interest, chose not to respond to those gestures.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the nature of sycophancy. Think of the Ershad years. Those were times when a pretty large number of politicians, bureaucrats and journalists made a beeline to his office, the objective being an acquisition of power, or slices of it. General Ershad obliged a good number of them; and yet when he fell, many of these people deserted him in droves. Some of them even went to the extent of castigating him as an autocrat.
The surprising bit is that it had not dawned on them, while they served as Ershad's minions, that the master they were serving was indeed an autocrat in whose hands the future of democracy was a risky affair.
Sycophants thrive on flattery, which is why they have little need of principles. Not everyone can be a Justice Ibrahim, who joined Ayub Khan's military administration in the sincere belief that he could help steer the country back to democracy, but left when the dictator's intentions began to appear suspicious. Sabur Khan, Monem Khan, and all the Khans you can think of, did not for a single moment try to persuade themselves that they needed to be with the masses. Which is a very logical reason why they are today a forgotten lot.
When you observe the inexorable manner in which the Nehru-Gandhis have prevailed as a dynasty for years, you have that uncomfortable feeling somewhere inside you that sycophancy has not quite left the world's largest democracy untouched and untainted. It was Pranab Mukherjee who, as the most senior cabinet minister at the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination in October 1984, should have taken charge as acting prime minister.
That was the way the system had worked in 1964 and 1966, when after the deaths of Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri, Gulzarilal Nanda officiated as acting prime minister.
In 1984, President Zail Singh, an unmitigated Indira loyalist, saw little that was wrong when he bypassed procedure and convention and asked a young, patently politically naïve Rajiv Gandhi to return to Delhi from Calcutta and take over as prime minister. You notice the continuation of this disturbing trend, with Sonia Gandhi being the power behind Manmohan Singh and her son Rahul Gandhi meanwhile sending out all those feelers about being India's next leader.
Congress politicians all across India are tripping over themselves and one another, to project Rahul Gandhi as India's future. It all makes you wonder: to what extent do dynasties ensure the survival and success of democracies?
That question takes you all the way to Pakistan's wadera politics. With Benazir Bhutto dying at the hands of an assassin, it should have been for her Pakistan People's Party to have Makhdoom Fahim Amin (he had kept the party in one piece during Bhutto's long exile abroad) succeed her as its new leader. But then came a shock, a palpable sense of disbelief -- Benazir Bhutto had left a will stipulating that her husband and her son would take charge of the PPP after her demise.
The consequence has been as unnerving as it has been outrageous: Pakistan now has the not so very reputable Asif Ali Zardari as its president and a young Bilawal Bhutto away in Oxford and dreaming of the day when Pakistan will be his to lord over. No one protested Benazir Bhutto's will, if ever there was such a will. It only goes to show how sycophancy has percolated down to the grassroots, and not just in Pakistan.
Political sycophancy throws up all the quirks of history. There is the mechanical applause and the plastic smile, as on the countenances of those around North Korea's Kim Jong-il. And then there are the men who decide that their leader is a polli bondhu. Z.A. Bhutto encouraged his frenzied followers into equating him with Jinnah. They ended up calling him Quaid-e-Awam.

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