1984

Birds Of A Feather: Ghaddafi and India's Mass Murderers

by T. SHER SINGH

“How does it end? The dictator dies, shrivelled and demented, in his bed; he flees the rebels in a private plane; he is caught hiding in a mountain outpost, a drainage pipe, a spider hole. He is tried. He is not tried. He is dragged, bloody and dazed, through the streets, then executed. The humbling comes in myriad forms, but what is revealed is always the same: the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear, the vaults, the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures. “  [John Lee Anderson, The New Yorker]

Recent weeks have brought home to us, literally, terrifying images from Libya … first of the brutal massacre of innocent civilians at the hands of a “mad-dog” dictator, and then of the rabid tyrant himself in captivity, in the hands of the very citizens he had brutalized and tormented for four decades.

I am one who abhors violence and can see no good in it for any reason. No justification, in my mind, can adequately condone violence.

I am appalled by the behaviour of the punishers who have wreaked their summary vengeance on Ghaddafi, and denied themselves and the world the satisfaction of having risen above the fray by granting to the scoundrel a public and fair trial.

But I am also fully cognizant of the enormity of what Ghaddafi and his ilk do, the mountains of human suffering they cause, leaving behind a landscape littered with tragedy and trauma.

So, before I hasten to judge those who have acted too hastily and in frenzied madness, albeit to wield the sword of justice, I linger to pour my heart out for those who have paid a horrendous price with their very lives to satiate the greed and gluttony of evil men and women.         

Ghaddafi’s final hours will remain seared in our minds for ever because of the macabre images that were so graphically captured and broadcast on our TV screens ad nauseam - two words which have never had better application than in this situation!

We had barely recovered from the euphoria - yes, euphoria! we might as well be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that it has become a gladiatorial sport which keeps on demanding more blood and gore with each new showing - of the Osama bin Laden take-down by the Americans In Pakistan earlier this year.

And that great spectacle had come on the heels of the emergence of Saddam Hussein from his rat-hole, to be publicly paraded and prodded, tried and kangarooed, and then drawn and quartered, albeit in a beastly, Mid-Eastern manner - not the neat and ‘civilized’ way (Marquess of Queensberry Rules, no less!) in which the Europeans and Americans treated their prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.  

Contrary to the usual media tongue-wagging that accompanies such events, neither the meting out of street justice on Ghaddafi, nor the collective goings-on in the Middle-East in recent years, represents anything new in the annals of human history, or even in modern times.

With the perfect sense of timing and irony that only Dame History has the ability to deliver, yesterday - Halloween, Witches‘ Night - marked the anniversary of the summary execution of Indira Gandhi for her crimes 27 years ago.  

Though she met a more humane fate at the hands of her own body guards who dispatched her swiftly and then, in Gandhian fashion - yes, Mahatma Gandhian, because that is what the old man had taught: you must break the law if it is evil, but once you have done so, you must embarrass the upholders of that very law by surrendering to it for the punishment due! - threw down their weapons, honourably declaring that they had done what was necessary, now let the law take its course!

Indira Gandhi was spared the brutality that has usually been meted out to those of her feather - Massa Ranghar, also of Amritsar notoriety; Adolph Hitler; Mussolini; and, of course, Saddam, bin Laden, Ghaddafi …  (feel free to add your own favourites to this illustrious list of the dregs of human society.)

But she was spared being dragged through the streets, not because she did not deserve such a fate, or because she warranted a fate better than her fellow power-grabbers and chair-clingers, but because she found herself being judged by honourable people who, lucky for her, had some values.

After all, her body-guards were no ordinary persons picked off the street or from the ranks. Like the members of any other presidential or palace guard, they were the elite of the elite, hand-picked to guard the leader of the land. They were there for their demonstrated skills, integrity and moral stamina, even though the person they were asked to guard was there through the mere weight of being a previous prime minister’s daughter, and for having weaseled her way thereafter through a bazaar of equally corrupt comrades and minions.

Indira Gandhi was no less a dictator and tyrant than the mad-dogs that have plagued equally unfortunate societies.

She shocked the world in 1976 by her reaction when the Supreme Court of India found her guilty of a number of crimes and sentenced her to a jail term. While holding elected office as prime minister of the newly-minted country, she willy nilly suspended the judges, suspended parliament, suspended democracy, and then proceeded to plague the country thereafter as a dictator.

And, just like Ghaddafi’s scoundrel sons, her son Sanjay became her personal goonda and unleashed terror on the land.

But she had two opponents who simply refused to kowtow to her tyranny: the saintly Jai Prakash Narayan. And the Sikh community.

Both refused to condone her excesses and hounded her until she surrendered and did time in jail, albeit not enough.

However, she would emerge again, snake-like, to wrest back the office and then to continue the rape and pillage of the land, for the sole purpose of hanging on to  power and to fatten the  secret bank accounts (not so secret anymore!) hidden away in a distant and secure Switzerland.

Her opponents would feel her ire.

An aging Jai Prakash Narayan was denied, upon her intervention, proper and timely treatment at a hospital and died a premature death. He was the only honest national leader the country would produce after Lal Bahadur Shastri and before Manmohan Singh.  

The Sikh community would be paid back via the terror unleashed by Indira Gandhi’s government against it in Punjab, leading up to the ignominious attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and dozens of other Sikh centres across the length and breadth of the land.     

The rest is history.

While I do not condone the acts of her executioners, even though Lord knows she deserved her fate, I have as much time for her as I have for Ghaddafi or Saddam or bin Laden or Hitler or Mussolini.

Just as poetic justice caught up with the latest lot, so did it catch up with Indira Gandhi.

To borrow a phrase from Punjabi itself, “Iss aurat da naao nishaan nahi rayhaa!” - History has wiped off every trace of this silly woman!   

As if in answer to Macbeth’s famous plea to his murderous wife,“Bring forth men children only!“ Indira had borne two sons.

The first - Sanjay Gandhi, who had never held elected office but still let loose havoc on the land when his mother gave him free reign in 1976 - quickly found that those he had trampled over would not forgive him easily. He was killed in a plane crash; the facts did not point to an accident.

The second was Rajiv Gandhi who too, like his mother, found himself anointed Prime Minister of the country with the sole qualification, no other, that he was a corrupt politician’s son.

Upon his mother’s public execution at the hands of her own bodyguards, he was inexplicably made Prime Minister. His having no experience in politics or public life did not deter a nation of lemmings from declaring him the latest god in their firmament!

Within hours of taking over, he personally unleashed an unprecedented pogrom against the entire Sikh community - state terror which, after gaining traction in the initial massacres in the nation’s capital and 40 other cities around the country, would last a decade. Tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children - but mostly young men - would be murdered with direct or indirect state complicity. Mass graves are still being discovered more than two decades later - the last few only a few months ago.

Like his mother and brother, Rajiv Gandhi too thought he was immune from justice.

One sunny day, his co-religionist - a Hindu woman from South India, a Brahmin named Gayatri - blew herself up with a suicide bomb. And took Indira’s only surviving progeny along with her.

While paying for his crimes, Rajiv Gandhi too fared better than Ghaddafi.

Rajiv died instantly. But they couldn’t find much of him to give him a decent funeral.

That is not good, I’m told, if you claim to be a Brahmin. Without the proper rites, his soul, they say, is doomed to roam in the nether regions for ever.

Just like his mother.

Hmm-mm-m!

Pity.         

November 1, 2011

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