mundane are not the only things common to South Asian nations. Another bizarre distinction they share is a history of assassinations of
leaders. It started with Mahatma Gandhi in January, 1948 and looks be on a brief ‘pause’ mode since December, 2007 when Benazir Bhutto was sacrificed at the altar of South Asian history. In between, in the late 1970s, her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was ‘judicially’ assassinated by a military strongman called General Zia-ul Haq who himself died mysteriously in a plane crash in 1988. No country has been spared the trauma; no ruling ‘family’ has been spared the agony and the despair. Even as you read this, India is paying tribute to yet another victim of assassination – Indira Gandhi whose grandson Rahul Gandhi is preparing himself to become Prime Minister in 2014.
It is too early for objective history to be written on the impact these assassinations had on the trajectories taken by these nations. But some of these assassinations clearly look as portents of tragic history set to be repeated again, and again. Back in the 1950s, Sri Lanka, like India, was a newly independent nation grappling with existential issues like identity politics and the treatment of minorities. Solomon Bandaranaike was the charismatic Prime Minister of the country. He is the one who first gave a voice and a direction to ‘Sinhala’ nationalism at the cost of minority Tamils. He was shot dead by a Buddhist Sinhala monk who was convinced Bandaranaike was sacrificing Sinhala interests and pampering the Tamils. The genie was unleashed and continues to torment and traumatise the island nation even 50 years after the assassination. The genesis of V. Prabhakaran, the now dead leader of LTTE, can surely be traced to that one act of madness by a ‘Buddhist’ monk in 1959 (Ironically, it was the LTTE, formed to fight against Sinhala majoritarianism, that assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in 1991). For the moment, civil war in Sri Lanka has paused after an orgy of killings, assassinations and violence. But the ghosts of Solomon Bandaranaike and the monk who shot him still torment Sri Lanka.
leaders. It started with Mahatma Gandhi in January, 1948 and looks be on a brief ‘pause’ mode since December, 2007 when Benazir Bhutto was sacrificed at the altar of South Asian history. In between, in the late 1970s, her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was ‘judicially’ assassinated by a military strongman called General Zia-ul Haq who himself died mysteriously in a plane crash in 1988. No country has been spared the trauma; no ruling ‘family’ has been spared the agony and the despair. Even as you read this, India is paying tribute to yet another victim of assassination – Indira Gandhi whose grandson Rahul Gandhi is preparing himself to become Prime Minister in 2014.It is too early for objective history to be written on the impact these assassinations had on the trajectories taken by these nations. But some of these assassinations clearly look as portents of tragic history set to be repeated again, and again. Back in the 1950s, Sri Lanka, like India, was a newly independent nation grappling with existential issues like identity politics and the treatment of minorities. Solomon Bandaranaike was the charismatic Prime Minister of the country. He is the one who first gave a voice and a direction to ‘Sinhala’ nationalism at the cost of minority Tamils. He was shot dead by a Buddhist Sinhala monk who was convinced Bandaranaike was sacrificing Sinhala interests and pampering the Tamils. The genie was unleashed and continues to torment and traumatise the island nation even 50 years after the assassination. The genesis of V. Prabhakaran, the now dead leader of LTTE, can surely be traced to that one act of madness by a ‘Buddhist’ monk in 1959 (Ironically, it was the LTTE, formed to fight against Sinhala majoritarianism, that assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in 1991). For the moment, civil war in Sri Lanka has paused after an orgy of killings, assassinations and violence. But the ghosts of Solomon Bandaranaike and the monk who shot him still torment Sri Lanka.
