Editor's Pick

Two reviews from Syed Badrul Ahsan

Words behind the making of history

12 March 2010, 18:00 PM
BOOK REVIEWS

Oratory has since the beginning of civilised existence kept people in thrall. Shakespeare provided a clue to the riveting nature of speeches in his plays. You think here of Brutus and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, of the many ways in which they played with words to convince the audience of the justness of the causes they held dear. But that was literature. In life lived from day to day, through the vagaries of politics, oratory has often been raised to the level of art. In Bangladesh's case, the speeches of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were ammunition, over the years, in the defence of liberty. Gandhi was not a rousing speaker, but the calm religiosity he brought into his words drove the point home. And then there was Syed Badrudduja, whose command of Bengali, Urdu and English was demonstrated to huge effect in his speeches, particularly in pre-partition India. Now comes this admirable tome of a work. In Speeches That Changed The World, it is a lost age, or many lost ages that once were steeped in idealism that come alive. You could argue with the editors, though, about the speeches they did not include in the anthology. Even so, there are all those specimens of the mind that recreate the past. History buffs will not quarrel with the inclusion of orations rendered by men of divinity. Read here Moses, coming forth with the Ten Commandments ('Thou shalt have no other gods before me') as also Jesus with his 'Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven'. Muhammad too makes a desirable entry ('Turn your face towards the Sacred Mosque'), followed by the Sermon to the birds by St. Francis of Assisi ('My little sisters, the birds, much bounden are ye unto God'). A particular characteristic of speeches, good speeches (for there have also been millions of tedious ones), is the inspirational. That is how John F. Kennedy, otherwise a not very dynamic figure on the broad canvas of history, galvanised Americans through his inaugural address in January 1961. 'Ask not what your country can do for you', he declaimed, 'but ask what you can do for your country.' It is a speech much quoted by JFK fans around the world and yet it somehow loses its brilliance once there is mention of Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War-era American president was clearly a natural when it came to oratory. The concluding words in his first inaugural address ('With malice toward none, with charity for all . . .') were a pointer to what was to be. And, true enough, it was with the Gettysburg address in November 1863 that Lincoln demonstrated the heights he could scale. 'Four score and seven years ago', he said with quiet insistence, 'our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.' Great speeches come with a flavour of the literary; and Lincoln put literature in plenty into his speeches. Much a similar tenor was noted in Winston Churchill in his 13 May 1940 address in the House of Commons --- 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.' Words flowed, like a stream, from the wartime British leader. In August of the same year, it was again an interplay of words that fired the patriotism of the nation when Churchill spoke of the sacrifices being made in the war against Nazism, 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.' Oratory takes the collective imagination to new heights, as Jawaharlal Nehru demonstrated through his 'tryst with destiny' speech in the opening moments of a free India in 1947 ('At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom'). Blood was being spilled in the aftermath of partition, but that reality did not deter India's first prime minister from lighting the path to hope for his people. Speeches is fundamentally a journey through political experience straddling the globe. If there are the lofty perorations that find a place here, there are too the manifest lies that do not find an escape route. And thus, more than a year before he would get tangled in his venality, Richard Nixon tells Americans in April 1973 that 'there can be no whitewash at the White House.' It was, in truth, a contaminated world that Nixon created, and lived in. Morality did not matter to him, but it did for Vaclav Havel, who tells the people of Czechoslovakia in 1990, 'We live in a contaminated moral environment.' That takes you back to the moral superiority that General George S. Patton personified in his times. His speech, wherein he vows, 'I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging sonofabitch Hitler', is one of the items in this anthology. The same holds true for Nelson Mandela, who defiantly tells the court trying him in apartheid-driven South Africa in 1964, 'I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.' And so the caravan of history moves on. Along the way, Charles de Gaulle finds his own place in it. As France falls to Nazism, he takes flight to London, from where he sounds the clarion call that would rejuvenate his dispirited country: 'France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war!' Thoughts of war then give way to ruminations on peace, as in this placidity of a statement from Mother Teresa in 1979: 'Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do.' It is a moving kaleidoscope of the ages you have here. For sometime, you go beyond the mediocre, to recall a world once epitomised by sublimity, larger-than-life individuals. Remember Oliver Cromwell? As he dismisses the Rump Parliament in 1653, he rails against the lawmakers: 'It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice. . .' His voice rises to a crescendo, as he sends the legislators packing, 'Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!'

...Of a man of great hubris

WHEN he lived, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a complex figure for those who observed his rise and fall. Thirty years after his execution by a military regime, he remains that way. There are his fans, largely within Pakistan, who have consistently believed that he is a shaheed, a martyr, in the defence of democracy. And then there are those who remain convinced that having ridden to power on the slogan of democracy, he did everything he could to bury it under his civilian dictatorship. A fairly large number of books on Bhutto's life and career have appeared across the years, with the promise of more to appear in the times ahead. And especially since the assassination of his daughter Benazir in December 2007, the Bhutto myth has taken on a new and expanded dimension. And do remember that we are speaking of the man who almost behaved like a maniac when he spoke to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in the early 1970s. Megalomaniac he surely was before her, but the extent to which certain streaks of madness manifested themselves in him left even the shock-proof journalist surprised. Bhutto's aspersions on Indira Gandhi, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and nearly everyone else were too outrageous for polite ears. And even he realized that, subsequently, which is when he sent Pakistan's diplomats in Italy scouring for Fallaci, to ask her to withdraw the interview or to 'admit' that she had made it all up! What appears in the Fallaci interview is what the essential Bhutto was. And that is the point which comes through in Stanley Wolpert's Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan. Wolpert, the American academic celebrated for such seminal works as Gandhi and Jinnah of Pakistan, was provided with all manner of facilities, including access to Bhutto's library and papers, by the Bhutto family. That being the basis of the study, it follows that Wolpert's analysis of the Bhutto character is by and large a sympathetic study of a man who could have done much better as a politician than what he actually did. The author traces the rise of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, essentially after his return to Pakistan following higher studies abroad, and the many factors that went into facilitating it. He was a bright young law professor in the early 1950s. By 1958, he was a cabinet minister, happy to be under the tutelage of General Iskandar Mirza, a man not too well-disposed toward democracy. And yet, when only days later, Mirza was sent packing by General Ayub Khan, Bhutto swiftly transferred his loyalties to the new big man in town. It is a picture that you come by in the excellent biography of Mirza by his son Humayun Mirza a few years ago. Bhutto, recalls the young Mirza, earned General Mirza's admiration at the very first meeting he had with the president, so much so that Mirza found a spot for the young lawyer in Pakistan's central cabinet. And Bhutto was keen to demonstrate his gratitude to Mirza in return. He fired off a fawning missive to the president, informing him in unabashed fashion that history would record that Iskandar Mirza was the greatest man Pakistan had produced, greater than the founder of the state, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. By late October 1958, with Mirza and his wife Naheed on their way to unending exile in Britain, Bhutto made sure that Ayub Khan kept him on. For the subsequent eight years, he was never to look back. He was minister for commerce, for industries and natural resources. In 1960, he worked out a deal on energy with the Soviet Union, impressing almost everyone in Pakistan and outside. By early 1963, upon the death of Mohammad Ali Bogra, he was foreign minister in the Ayub regime. Added to that position was the job of general secretary of the Convention Muslim League, the clutch of pro-Ayub politicians propping up the dictatorship. It was Bhutto's finest hour, from the point of view of genuflection. He proposed that Ayub Khan, already in occupancy of the presidency, remain in power for the rest of his life. It was thus also a moment that made others mock him. And yet, as the Wolpert book makes clear, a moment would come when Bhutto, grown ambitious and decidedly hubristic, would begin to mock Ayub himself. Informed by foreign secretary Aziz Ahmed late on a January 1966 night in Tashkent that 'the bastard is dead', Bhutto asked, 'Which one?' That was one of the many indications of the disdain, even hate, in which he viewed not just his mentor but Indian politicians as well. But Wolpert notes too the confidence Bhutto brought back to a post-1971 Pakistan, a time when the emergence of Bangladesh and the surrender of 93,000 Pakistani soldiers had left his people traumatized. He understood the grave nature of the situation, of the realities that stared him in the face. One needed little persuasion to understand that he had been one of the principal elements responsible for the disaster that had befallen Pakistan, but it was one thought Bhutto was unwilling to accept. He blamed everyone else, including Mujib, for the country's break-up, but he would not bring himself to acknowledge his own guilt in the genocide that led to the Bengali armed struggle for freedom. But he did eat humble pie in the end. He freed the incarcerated Mujib and saw him off at Chaklala airport. As the Bengali leader flew off into the night sky, Bhutto murmured, to no one in particular, 'The nightingale has flown.'
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star .

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