Politics is a search for grandeur
IN 1961, only months into his presidency, John Fitzgerald Kennedy saw his plans over the Bay of Pigs crumble in a heap all around him. The mercenaries sent to oust Fidel Castro from power were swiftly cut down by Cuban forces. Kennedy was unnerved enough not to provide the Cuban exiles with air cover and simply folded up the operation. Depressed, he asked Richard Nixon, his rival at the November 1960 election, to come over to the White House for a conversation. The two men talked. Nixon gave Kennedy some sage advice on policy making and implementation. The president was grateful.
It was politics operating at the bipartisan level. And politics comes best when its practitioners realise that national interests, sometimes global priorities, are served well when they rise above party, when they decide to talk between and among themselves in order to reach common ground on what needs to be done and how it can be done.
In the days before Bangladesh's liberation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman spotted the opportunities offered by cooperation with those of his political peers who saw little reason to agree with him. He kept in touch with them and they with him. They met over tea, at dinner; they laughed, they bantered even as they held on to their positions and explained to one another why they needed to do that.
In the 1960s, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Nurul Amin, Mohan Mia, Hamidul Haq Chowdhury and Moulvi Farid Ahmed cultivated politics on the heights. They did not allow it to dwindle to the petty and the personally antagonistic.
There are swathes of people in the Bangladesh political class who will today remind you that it took as many as three hundred years for political tolerance and accommodation to become the norm in the West. No one questions that fact, but to suggest that we in Bangladesh need the same quantum of time before we can build a proper democratic society for ourselves is absurd. We need no excuses for our shortcomings. But we do need to learn from the sophistication which politics in countries such as Britain has evolved into.
Britain is regular witness to its prime minister and its opposition leader engage in serious debate in the House of Commons on national issues. The two men stand side by side to listen to the Queen's address to Parliament. At Prime Minister's Question time (PMQs), seriousness of debate is often punctuated by refreshing doses of humour. And it all reminds citizens that these politicians and their parties do care about the country's future, that politics for them remains above individual enmity.
It was the petty and the personal that Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsangvirai needed to cast away in their search for political compromise in Zimbabwe. After years of confrontational, often violent, politics the two men went ahead into the business of reaching a deal, however tenuous, on how the country should be governed. Today, Mugabe is president (he has been since 1980) and Tsangvirai operates as prime minister.
Back in the early 1990s, it was a rainbow coalition Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk forged in South Africa. The goal was simple and noble; the past had to be left behind and the future needed to be seized. In the 1990s, India's Congress-led government despatched opposition leader Atal Behari Vajpayee to Geneva to speak for the country on issues that mattered to the whole nation. It was an enlightening instance of purposeful politics at work.
Politics is never about politicians hurling terrible epithets at one another. It is not about ruling circles smelling things rotten about the opposition. It is never about the opposition being assailed by thoughts of the country being put up for auction by the powers that be. It is, indeed, always about a demonstration of the best and the beautiful about men and women who go to power or dream of going to power.
Politics assumes grandeur when Barack Obama, flanked by Bill Clinton and George Bush, announces a recovery program for Haiti. Politics makes men of divergent views come together, over tea or at funerals. In 1981, Ronald Reagan asked his predecessors to speak for America at the last rites for Egypt's Anwar Sadat. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter turned up in Cairo.
Months before her assassination in Rawalpindi, Benazir Bhutto signed a Charter of Democracy with her implacable foe Nawaz Sharif in London. These days, for all their differences, Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari do not fail to keep in touch. In the national assembly, Yusuf Raza Gilani goes beyond his party and reaches out to all Pakistanis. Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak are men of dissimilar temperament and yet they are part of one and the same government in Israel today.
Politics eschews the petty. It has no room for squabbles. It is not a place for thievery. It throws up men like Charles de Gaulle, who then proceed to rediscover their nations in order to remould them in the brilliance of historical greatness. And they do that through searching for -- and finding -- living symbols of wisdom their countries are in need of. Think here of Andre Malraux.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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